What Digby Said

Digby:

I don’t know if McCain is crooked. But you have to wonder, after his close call with the Keating Five and public association with campaign finance reform, how anyone could be so arrogant as to think he could get away with this stuff if he actually became the Republican nominee? After all we’ve seen of pages and blue dresses and wide stances, it’s nearly impossible to believe that candidates can think they’ll get away with hiding anything like this in this environment.

But apparently, he did. He has bought so fully into his media love that he seems to have believed that he wouldn’t be held to the same standards as other politicians. I guess he thought that nobody could ever believe he’d do anything dishonest. But now that another woman has been injected into this (by GOP operatives, I might add), his whole facade is in danger of crumbling. The press might have been willing to overlook the corruption angle, but the sex angle is just impossible for them to resist. [Emphasis added]

I think this is a spot-on analysis of McCain’s likely thought process, though I’d also add that there was a clear effort on his part to muscle this story out of printing press last year. The initial Times story included this line:

He made the statements in a call to Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, to complain about the paper’s inquiries.

So I think Digby’s right – he thought he could get away with it, but he was working to kill this story at the highest levels of the New York Times. As Digby says, he thought no one, including Bill Keller, would believe he would do anything dishonest. I suppose the inclusion of the section on the Keating Five scandal in the Times expose puts that lie to bed, separate from anything included in the Iseman scandal.

Shorter McCain Campaign

McCain spokesmodel Jill Hazelbaker responds to reports of McCain involved in a likely sexual relationship with a telecom lobbyist that lead to favoritism and indulgences. The statement does not make any explicit reference to or denial of an affair between McCain and Vicki Iseman.

What I’m sure an intrepid journalist would want to find out is why the lobbying firm that McCain’s sweetie was a partner of scrubbed her from their website. Here’s what Vicki Iseman’s bio page used to look like on Alcade & Fay’s website. Now it’s blank. Likewise, their staff listing used to include Vicki Iseman’s name. Now Iseman’s name, which linked to her bio, is absent from their staff list.

It seems that the McCain campaign, through hatchet man Bob Bennett, is out in force to try to kill this story in the press. Shame on the press if this story doesn’t get full and detailed coverage. The Times buried it until McCain had secured the nomination – a fact reminiscent of the suppression of the Tims’ Risen and Lichtblau’s story on warrantless wiretapping of Americans in advance of the 2004 presidential election. Hopefully the press can do a better job delving into McCain’s corrupt past as we move forward this story. I predict that there is a great deal of corruption yet to come out.

Update:

Now Iseman’s bio is back on the Alcade & Fay website and staff list, with some contact information removed. Iseman’s bio is now at a different URL than before.

McCain’s Lobbyist

The big story which broke last night was a New York Times article, reported by a raft of top flight reporters, on John McCain’s relationship with a telecommunications lobbyist, Vicki Iseman. Though the article covers other subjects related to ethics, there isn’t much original reporting in the Times’ piece outside of his relationship with Iseman. It covers his involvement in the Keating Five scandal and his efforts to pass campaign finance reform, but that is all public knowledge already. That accounts for roughly half of the article. The rest is solely about his relationship with Vicki Iseman and work he did for her clients.

I’ve put the Iseman-focused parts of the story below the fold, removing the passages rehashing the Keating Five scandal and McCain’s work on campaign finance reform. Read in whole, his relationship with Iseman seems to have clearly lead to repeated efforts on his part to favor her clients. It is also clear that his relationship with Iseman was problematic from a social standpoint to an extent that required his staff to intervene:

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, in his offices and aboard a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s clients, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.

Now my guess is that McCain isn’t trying to kill a story because there’s the appearance of impropriety between him and companies lobbying him. My guess is that it is because this thing is a sex scandal that has some bad government aspects added in for good measure.

The Washington Post added more details to the McCain staff’s intervention in his relationship with Iseman. Of note:

The aide said the message to Iseman that day at Union Station in 1999 was clear: “She should get lost.” The aide said Iseman stood up and left angrily….

Concern about Iseman’s presence around McCain at one point led to her being banned from his Senate office, according to sources close to McCain.

Again, it strikes me as unlikely that someone would be banned from a Senator’s office merely because they effectively lobbied a US Senator on behalf their clients. This is about sex and corruption.

Continue reading “McCain’s Lobbyist” →

A Reason Not to Be Scared of John McCain

His campaign isn’t that competent – it failed to gather enough signature to be on the ballot in one of the most conservative districts in Indiana. Thomas at Blue Indiana reports:

To my surprise, I noticed that John McCain — the presumptive front-runner for the GOP nomination — was just a little short in a few districts, including my precious 4th, despite the fact that Attorney General Steve Carter had already turned in their petitions. I made a few phone calls, and one by one I found out that the McCain camp had got the job done across the state.

Except in the 4th District.

In the 4th District, they are short.

By my latest count, they turned in 496 signatures for the 4th, and the latest IED report for this morning shows them with only 491.

So this afternoon, I filed a challenge with the Secretary of State’s office to keep John McCain off of the ballot. You can check it out here. (I’ll have a .pdf version up when I get back to Bloomington this evening.)

Let’s be clear here: This is one of the most Republican-friendly districts in one of the most Republican-friendly presidential states. John McCain has been endorsed by Governor Mitch Daniels, Attorney General Steve Carter, state GOP chair Murray Clark, and Secretary of State Todd Rokita.

And despite all of this high-level help, these guys managed to screw up one of the most basic steps that any candidate can take in the state.

Not getting on the ballot can mean different things. For example, New York state has very high requirements to be on the ballot statewide (something like 5,000 signatures statewide to be on, plus 500 per congressional district to win actual delegates). The Dodd campaign, having limited resources and facing small prospects for winning Hillary Clinton’s home state, made the choice to not go after a spot on the ballot. But then again, we were a second tier campaign that had very limited resources to work with.  McCain is the Republican nominee, though, and has attempted to get on the ballot in the IN 4th…and failed to get the support he needed.

I think this says more about the state of McCain’s campaign now than what we can expect, say, five months from now. But it certainly doesn’t make me scared about his capacity to organize now, particularly compared to the success we’ve seen the Obama campaign generate through their grassroots machine.

Hat tip to Joh Padgett for the link.

No Chance for Acquitals in Guantanamo

I wonder what it would be like to live in a country that abides by the rule of law. The Nation:

When asked if he thought the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial, [Col. Morris] Davis provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes–the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department. “[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.'”

It read the first portion of this article earlier today. Reading the paragraphs above made me disgusted by the state of the rule of law in America. It simply no longer exists and any evidence to the contrary is more likely an untouched vestige that clings to existence because no one in the Bush administration has gotten around to tearing it down than any signifier of our nation’s commitment to the principles that have defined our country for over 230 years.

Then I read the remainder of the article and realized how much worse what our government is doing in Guantanamo is, how far this goes beyond show trials reminiscent of what Stalin wanted to do in Nuremberg.

The terrible irony is that even if acquittals were possible, the government has declared that it can continue to detain anyone deemed an “enemy combatant” for the duration of hostilities–no matter the outcome of a trial. And most of the 275 men held at Guantánamo are classified as “enemy combatants” while the hostilities in the “war on terror” could be never-ending.

Says ACLU staff attorney Ben Wizner, “The trial doesn’t make a difference. They can hold you there forever until they decide to let you out.” The one person to be released from Guantánamo through the judicial process, Australian David Hicks, pleaded guilty. As Wizner wrote in the Los Angeles Times in April 2007, “In an ordinary justice system, the accused must be acquitted to be released. In Guantánamo, the accused must plead guilty to be released.”

This is solely about proving the Republican Party and the Bush administration right. Nothing that is done in the name of national security is about being right or diminishing future threats. Nothing that has the trappings of the rule of law exists with the autonomy necessary to validate the process as a symbol of our judiciousness. This presidency and the outlets it has provided for the anti-Constitution Republican Party to take hold are a blight on our country. I don’t even know how to adjudicate the chances for our country to survive as we know it when it has already been changed to such a profound degree.

Yesterday I had a conversation with two progressive activists. In talking with my work around stopping retroactive immunity, they remarked that it was great that I had such passion for this issue and had found outlets – through the Dodd campaign and CREDO Action – to work against warrantless wiretapping. While I agreed that I was very lucky to find platforms that give me opportunities to organize on an issue I care deeply about, how profoundly depressing is that I, as a millenial American activists, have to work full time to defend the Constitution? To stand up for the rule of law? To remind our elected officials that it is their duty to maintain a system of checks and balances established by our Founders? I think I’d be much happier living in a country where the pillars of civil justice were not being deliberately removed by the ruling party than working passionately to stop them from succeeding.

More on that CT GOP FISA Release

Gabe at CT Local Politics goes into far greater detail rebutting the lies and distortions of CT GOP chair Chris Healy on the Protect America Act and retroactive immunity that I covered yesterday. Gabe takes about a dozen separate hits on Healy while breaking down the release step by step. I liked this part:

If I was meaner, and more willing to get into the spirit of the CT GOP’s press release, I would insinuate that their opposition to the the rule of law was not due to a (false) concern about safety, but due to the campaign contributions Republicans receive from telecom companies ($61.5+ Million to Republicans since 1990 – 56% of their total). After all, “[t]he entire issue here is liability protection for the carriers.”

Gabe doesn’t quite go there, but he succeeds in making Healy and the CT GOP look even more foolish than previously imagined.

Battle of the Bad Surrogates

The last 24 hours have brought an example of god-awful surrogate work for both Democratic campaigns. Of note are Lanny Davis for the Clinton campaign and Texas state senator Kirk Watson for the Obama campaign. I’ll let you decide which is worse.First, here’s Watson.

That’s about as unprepared as I’ve ever seen an official surrogate be for a TV interview. If I’m the Obama campaign, I draw up a one page sheet of legislative accomplishments (with senate ethics legislation at the top) and make sure everyone you’d ever even remotely consider putting on TV knows it forwards and backwards. The easiest way to stop the legislative record line of attack from the Clinton campaign (peddled here by Matthews) is to quickly answer the question.

Next, here’s Clinton surrogate Lanny Davis, who compares Hillary’s position in the campaign to Joe Lieberman’s after his primary defeat to Ned Lamont.

http://media.redlasso.com/xdrive/WEB/vidplayer_1b/redlasso_player_b1b_deploy.swf?swfv=02110803

Christopher Orr of The Plank writes:

(Unofficial) Clinton flack Lanny Davis just explained on Fox News that Barack Obama is like Ned Lamont (who, whatever you think of him, won that Democratic Senate primary), and Hillary Clinton is like Joe Lieberman (who, whatever you think of him, refused to abide by the primary result, ran and won as an independent with massive GOP support, and has subsequently endorsed John McCain). Lest anyone miss his meaning, Davis noted that he had been a devout Lieberman booster.

Now, I don’t know that there’s any scenario outside of Davis’s Lieberman-addled mind where Hillary Clinton loses the nomination and runs as an independent. The argument Davis is trying to make, I think, is that Clinton has general election appeal to Republicans and independents that Obama doesn’t have. Of course, based on what we’ve seen in open primaries, the opposite is true.

These surrogates are bad for different reasons. I doubt I would have posted either, but the combined weight of surrogate badness here just demanded attention. So – which do you think is worse?

The GOP’s Plan of Attack

One of the things that has made the Republican Party successful for much of the last twenty-five years or so was their willingness to take a politically unpopular position and stand by it, wedging people between their attacks and their principles. It’s a strategy that created the electoral mentality where a voter might say, “I don’t always agree with him, but at least I know where he stands.” George W. Bush, John McCain, Joe Lieberman (who is functionally a Republican), and many others have done well when they took positions and stood by them in the face of popular support for better positions. On the flip side, we saw Paul Wellstone win two elections by standing firm on his principles and not taking politically expedient stands. I shudder to compare the two, but the similarity is worth pointing out. Voters like knowing where politicians stand and what they stand for, and Wellstone is a prime example of how principled stances can be rewarded.

The Republican Party has been crafting a narrative for the general election around two very unpopular positions: the prolonging of the war in Iraq into the infinite future and granting retroactive immunity to telecom companies who helped the Bush administration break the law and spy on Americans without warrant. They are attacking Democrats on these issues and attempting to brand the Democrats’ contrary positions as one that arises from weakness. While we’ve seen Republicans head down this path with repeated accusations of Democrats stabbing the troops in the back or pushing for a surrender in Iraq, The Hill reports on the growth of these talking points into their national election strategy.

Republican lawmakers, candidates and party officials have launched a nationwide campaign this week to portray Democrats as  weak on national security.

Their starting point is a dispute over the administration’s counter-terrorism surveillance policy, but the end point is the election in November.
…

But a nuanced policy debate outside of Washington could be a risky move for Democrats, who are competing with slogans that proved effective in campaigns since the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks.

Republicans appeared to be going back to that playbook this week in various parts of the country, trying to link vulnerable lawmakers with the bitter dispute in Washington.

Leaving aside the trite “this is bad for Democrats” assumption,  this is worrying to the extent that it shows the Republicans willing to go to the mat on issues that they’re just not popular for. This will inevitably lead to the sort of concern trolling journalism provided by The Hill’s Alexander Bolton. Combined with the inevitable (and already existent) fawning admiration for John McCain in the Beltway press, and you can see a scenario where every insane attack by the Republicans on Democrats on Iraq or FISA is met by back slapping enthusiasm from the press. “Boy are these Republicans principled and manly!” “Why would Democrats dare to talk about policy now?” “There’s no way challenging Bush will play well for Democrats!” And so on…

As I’ve said before, the Republicans are going to hinge their election strategy on convincing America that Democratic candidates want the terrorists to win, want to stab the troops in the back and run home as fast as can be.  We know this is coming and the Republicans are confirming it. They are banking on their ability to stand firm on unpopular positions while slandering Democrats. I won’t make any predictions about their likelihood of success, but it is certain that they will succeed in creating a truly toxic environment – which is yet another reason anyone who thinks we can solve this country’s problems by working with these people on issues like Iraq, health care, and the economy is just not paying attention to what the Republican Party is all about.

The ability for Democrats to succeed under this kind of rancid attack is going to be determined by the ability for Democrats to, like Wellstone, stand up for what they believe in and make sure that voters know exactly what their principles are. It’s time for Democrats to show some spine and be prepared to push back hard against the coming Republican smear attacks.