So you have a senator that has been in office for 25 years. He built up support and financing for his initial senate campaign by leaving his first wife and marrying the heiress to the local beer fortune. Once in office, he became heavily influenced by an unscrupulous banker, who, while engaging in some illegal dealings, encouraged said senator to loosen regulatory strictures that directly affected his business. About a decade later, he was in some sort of unspecified but close-enough-to-creep-out-his staff relationship with a lobbyist who, even if she didn’t sleep with him, was able to “wag the dog” well enough to get him to endorse legislation in exchange for various favors including campaign contributions and riding around in corporate jets.
Fast forward eight years, the same senator is running for president and, having been in dire financial straits and applied for public financing, is now the front runner and wants to spend more money before the general election actually starts. The FEC, however, tells him that rules still apply to front runners that the press loves and that he can’t just bail on public financing. Also, the FEC doesn’t have a quorum, so they can’t officially address the matter, meaning that the senator could be contemplating just forging on ahead on breaking the spending limit despite that, “Knowingly violating the spending limit is a criminal offense that could put **** at risk of stiff fines and up to five years in prison.”
So, this senator sounds pretty sleazy, don’t you think? Especially sleazy because he had pushed through campaign finance reform and has made his own purity a central issue in every campaign. Also, the press adores him because of his supposed good government bona fides. Of course, by now, you know the senator’s name. It’s none other than John McCain!
Let’s assume, for the sake of having a little fun, that John McCain really did have some sort of affair with Vicki Iseman. From one persepctive, the one that Phoebe Maltz noticed, there’s really good evidence that they did. That evidence is that Iseman looks like a younger version of McCain’s current (and second) wife Cindy. Here’s the photographic evidence:
I”ll let Maltz take it away, “So, under the heading of Major Questions of Our Age, when an older male head-of-state or would-be head-of-state decides to chase after (or allow himself to be caught by) a younger woman, is it a sign of integrity if the YW in question is a younger version of his wife? Or is it just a sign of not knowing how to exploit one’s situation of power to the fullest?”
Clearly, the discussion of the McCain Lobbyist-not-affair-but-maybe story is going to focus on all the internal machinations that went into publishing it rather than its inconclusive substance. For a little preview of what is likely to expounded upon soon, Jonathan Martin’s Politico story is a good place to start. The real important piece in the puzzle is going to be Gabe Sherman’s TNR piece detailing the supposed conflict in the Times newsroom; we don’t know what went into it, but apparently Sherman’s calling around is what forced the Times‘ hands.
But lets get back to the piece in question. The central revelation is that aides and advisors to McCain were concerned that there was a possible romantic relationship between him and telecom lobbyist Vicki Iseman sometime before his 2000 presidential run. They told Iseman to distance herself and cut off her access to McCain, fearing that the story could break. The rest of the story just details small, typical, slightly unethical but none to shocking slip ups and connections to lobbyists and moneyed interests that are really only noteworthy because it’s McCain, the self declared scourge of lobbyists engaging in them.
The other useful thing the story does is go over how McCain wasn’t always some paragon of ethics and anti-corruption. As the Times reminds us, McCain became prominent as a politician because of his connection to corrupt banker Charles Keating and his lobbying to loosen regulatory strictures because Keating was doing some fishy banking:
Mr. Keating had taken over the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association and used its federally insured deposits to gamble on risky real estate and other investments. He pressed Mr. McCain and other lawmakers to help hold back federal banking regulators.For years, Mr. McCain complied. At Mr. Keating’s request, he wrote several letters to regulators, introduced legislation and helped secure the nomination of a Keating associate to a banking regulatory board.By early 1987, though, the thrift was careering toward disaster. Mr. McCain agreed to join several senators, eventually known as the Keating Five, for two private meetings with regulators to urge them to ease up. “Why didn’t I fully grasp the unusual appearance of such a meeting?” Mr. McCain later lamented in his memoir.When Lincoln went bankrupt in 1989 — one of the biggest collapses of the savings and loan crisis, costing taxpayers $3.4 billion — the Keating Five became infamous. The scandal sent Mr. Keating to prison and ended the careers of three senators, who were censured in 1991 for intervening. Mr. McCain, who had been a less aggressive advocate for Mr. Keating than the others, was reprimanded for “poor judgment” but was re-elected the next year.
This certainly isn’t news, every profile or biography of McCain always addressed Keating. But it’s still very relevant and because of the media’s general reluctance to criticize McCain and to take him at as word as incorruptible, the full scope of McCain’s perfidy isn’t discussed enough, especially considering his mid-career conversion to the cause of ethics reform.
But let’s get back to what the Times really wanted to talk about - the bimbo erupting. The closest we get is in the final third, when McCain, according to annoymous sources, admitted that he behaved inappropriately:
In interviews, the two former associates said they joined in a series of confrontations with Mr. McCain, warning him that he was risking his campaign and career. Both said Mr. McCain acknowledged behaving inappropriately and pledged to keep his distance from Ms. Iseman. The two associates, who said they had become disillusioned with the senator, spoke independently of each other and provided details that were corroborated by others.
This is where things get weird. Clearly, “acknowledged behaving inappropriately” is redacted lawyer-speak that they had to put in after Robert Bennett McCain’s high profile attorney, got to the Times and probably washed the piece. When the Times started writing this story, they probably thought they had a sex story on their hands. And not just any sex story, America’s Hero, Mr. Ethics, John McCain in a sex scandal. Now, if there was someone out there who told the Times that McCain did indeed had an affair or someone in the Times who’s unhappy that they’re sitting on that detail, or at least being so opaque about it, how come Drudge or TMZ or Huff Post someone doesn’t know it. With so many blogs and what not, how can any prominent politician hope to keep an affair under wraps? As they always say, developing…
Outsourced to Mike Meginnis. It really is distressing that a man who was tortured for years would be so open to letting the CIA continue a practice is recognized historically as torture, was practice in the inquisition and the military - McCain’s favorite institution - has decided is illegal. At least this should burst the bubble among liberal columnists that he’s somehow substantively different from Bush on executive power and hawkish foreign policy.
The similarities are striking. They both are enthralled with the military, support a hawkish, confrontational foreign policy, both view the military model of society as desirable and have tried to cement their support around the war on terrorism. So I guess it was no surprise that in the midst of the Bhutto assassination and Musharaff’s virtual coup, McCain stood by the dictator:
McCain was outspoken in his defense of Musharraf, who has had to contend with criticisms today from others on the campaign trail, such as Bill Richardson’s call for a curtailing of U.S. aid to Pakistan. “I continue to believe Musharraf has done a pretty good job, done a lot of the things that we wanted him to do,” McCain said, citing Musharraf’s decision to relinquish his military post, to call elections, and to end martial law. He added, “I would remind some of my fellow Americans that Benazir Bhutto and [former prime minister Nawaz] Sharif presided over failed states, there was corruption, there was a failed state in Pakistan when Musharraf took charge…I would like to give Musharraf some credit for taking the measures that we asked him to do.”
Interestingly, after pursuing McCain’s campaign press releases, I couldn’t find anything relating to the Pakistani elections Does McCain think that Musharraf is still doing a “pretty good job” or that his successor will preside over “failed states”? He should at least say something about his wannabe puppet being so firmly rebuked by his own people.
It’s also interesting that in this McCain quote, he basically says that despite Nawaz Sharif and Bhutto being elected democratically and Musharraf seizing power from Sharif in a straight-up military coup, it’s OK because Sharif and Bhutto had “presided over failed states.” While this may appear to be unimportant rhetoric, a desire to deal with “failed” or “rogue” states is really at the center of McCain’s foreign policy. In the 2000 campaign, the main foreign policy difference between Bush and McCain was that Bush supported a “humble” foreign policy and disdained nation building while McCain was able to win the support of neoconservatives and the Weekly Standard by supporting a policy of “rogue-state rollback” Simply, his desire for unilateral military intervention and his sanguine view of Musharraf’s rule are really just part of an eternal golden braid of militarism.
Reihan Salam suggests that McCain pick Fred Smith as his vice presidential nominee. Who is Fred Smith, you ask? He’s the founder, chairman, president, and CEO of FedEx. Not only is he an amazingly sucessful executive and a conservative, he “also killed VC. No, not venture capitalists. Viet Cong.” He’s like some scary hybrid between Mitt Romney and McCain - the CEO who killed commies - who could shore up McCain’s weaknesses on economic and fiscal issues. But this is all just a segue into a deeper question, was Mitt Romney ever the CEO candidate?
Romney was a successful businessman as a founder and president of Bain Capital, the priavte equity firm. And before that, he worked at Bain Management, the management consulting firm. At Bain Capital, he did what most heads of private equity firms did, raised large amounts of money, bought companies and then sold them for a huge profit. But did he do what CEOs do? When you think of “CEO” you think of a head of a large, sprawling company with thousands of employees all over the world, managing production of products, developing new ones, selling a bunch of stuff, raising money and getting the best people to work with him. He’s a combination of general, guru and administrator. It’s obvious why, in theory, a CEO would make a good president. The executive branch has a large number of employees and overlapping, sprawling bueracracies who could respond to good, CEO style leadership.
But Mitt Romney wasn’t Jack Welch, or Fred Smith or any “CEO” we would think of. He was more like the chairman of a large, powerful law firm. Private equity firms aren’t like GE or Ford, they rarely have more than 1000 employees, most of whom are professionals with ivy league degrees, IQs three standard deviations above the mean, and quite a bit of autonomy. And while private equity firms often commandeer large companies and start making the strategic and managerial decisions that we associate with CEOs; as the head of a private equity firm, Romney was probably more busy raising money and deciding which company to buy next, rather than getting in the down and dirty of running his newly acquired companies.
To be fair to my man Mitt, what he did with Salt Lake Olympics, where he basically singlehandedly took a corrupt, mismanaged project and turned it into one of the most successful winter Olympics in recent history, does speak well to his managerial and “CEO” capabilities. But his experience at Bain, while impressive, did not speak to his capabilities as a “CEO.”
Jonathan Cohn’s reflection on Mitt Romney’s ending his campaign captures a lot of how I feel about the guy. He clearly had the highest IQ of any Republican candidates, and while he probably believes in little besides his own ambition, he was once a moderate, technocratic governor who showed real competence and ability at governing and management, something that we can’t say about the White House’s current occupant or the GOP’s presumptive nominee.
Cohn is also right that it’s somewhat distressing that Romney wasn’t able to capture the conservative base — a base that had accepted craven conversions before — largely because he simply couldn’t appeal to Evangelicals. There’s a reason conservative movement types like Hewitt and National Review endorsed Romney, it’s because he made an explicit effort to run as the candidate of the Reagan coalition and be the standard-bearer for modern, American conservatism. And it looks like a failure of our electoral process that a wealthy candidate who so willingly pandered to the primary electorate was defeated by someone who relishes fights with conservatives and starkly disagreed with them on a major, emotive issue.
So I guess we should all pour a 40 for my man Mitt, we’ll miss you.
J-Pod mocks Romney for talking about his running the Salt Lake Olympics right after McCain reminiscing about the Hanoi Hilton. I guess I’m different from most voters (shocking, I know), but Romney’s executive experience seems much more relevant than McCain’s “war heroism.” McCain’s experience in Hanoi is supposed to be stand-in for his straight-talk and integrity. But McCain’s been in public life for more than 20 years, so we can probably look to his actual record, rather than Vietnam experiences to see if straight-talk and integrity really mean anything. And, in my estimation, it seems like the only thing McCain “straight talks” about is his desire to continue and start more foreign wars. On other issues — regulation, taxes, social issues — he wildly oscillates around, without any political grounding except the adoration of the press and his own pursuit of power.
The only area where McCain’s experience as a POW seems to have a substantial influence on anything besides burnishing his media-image is his opposition to torture. Incidentally, J-Pod and much of Commentary isn’t on the same page.
The Times has yet another article in a seemingly endless series devoted to proving that while Mayor, Giuliani was vindictive, secretive, obstructionist, bitter, nasty, overly demanding of loyalty and, in general, had all the attributes that good people know makes a bad president. Some of the anecdotes are just shocking in how petty they make Giuiliani seem:
When former Mayors Edward I. Koch and David N. Dinkins spoke publicly of Mr. Giuliani’s foibles, mayoral aides removed their official portraits from the ceremonial Blue Room at City Hall…After AIDS activists with Housing Works loudly challenged the mayor, city officials sabotaged the group’s application for a federal housing grant. A caseworker who spoke of missteps in the death of a child was fired. After unidentified city workers complained of pressure to hand contracts to Giuliani-favored organizations, investigators examined not the charges but the identity of the leakers.
As in foreign policy, Giuliani’s approach to governance is “more Bush that Bush.” All of this, if reported six months ago, would have worried me because Giuliani was the prospective Republican nominee. But now that he hasn’t even gotten close to winning a primary, is behind in his home state and is floundering at third in his Floria “firewall,” I almost feel a little sorry for him. Almost.
I felt that since it’s MLK day, it was appropriate to mention how some of my political allies are opportunistically silent on instances of horrible bigotry.
I wrote a post about a week ago pointing out that Glenn Greenwald smeared Ezra Klein and Dana Goldstein for objecting to Ron Paul as an effective defender of individual freedom because of his retrograde views on abortion comments about blacks published under his name. They wrote these criticism and Greenwald attacked them in December, well before Jamie Kirchick’s article came out on January 8th. In the five days since I wrote that first post, Greenwald has not even mentioned “Ron Paul” once, let alone explain his thoughts on the candidate with a “sterling record across the board on liberty” who isn’t above implementing a political strategy based around race-baiting. For someone who writes roughly 23 billion words a week, one would think he could get around to it…
First it was Richard Cohen with his six degrees of seperation, racially charged, jew-baiting smear of OBama, and now it’s Rogen Cohen telling us that McCain is “too honorable to dismiss at a moment so critical to U.S. standing in the world.centrist candidate.” From the very first sentence, we know that Cohen is up to some hard core McCain fluffing, “Nobody’s been right all the time on Iraq, but Senator John McCain has been less wrong than most.” Cohen is right, with the exception of many Middle East scholars, more than half of the Senate Democrats and Barack Obama, nobody has been right all the time on Iraq. While McCain was right that the strategy was poor, he was wrong on the central question — whether the war was a good idea and whether it’s a good idea to pursue it now. Democrats and liberals like Matt Yglesias, Matt Stoller and Josh Marshall all were wrong on the war initially, but have since strongly reversed their positions, putting them in a better spot that McCain.
Cohen also misdiagnoses why McCain was “dead” just a few months ago. He argues that McCain was “undone by his backing of President Bush’s Iraq policy.” Wrong again, in the GOP primary, you don’t lose points by backing the president on foreign policy. Instead, McCain was undone by his opposition to the whole of the GOP on immigration, as any two-bit analyst would be able to tell you.
Cohen then goes on to insinuate that all who opposed the ” misbegotten, mishandled, bloody and costly war” are soft on fascism and that because Saddam invaded a foreign nation and gassed his own people a decade before the war began, we absolutely had to invade. And McCain was right in this decision, not because of a thoughtful weighing of the cost and benefits of the war, but because McCain was “imprisoned…and know[s] what terror means: death of spirit, soul, life itself.”
Cohen and McCain — they both argue that the worst foreign policy blunder since Vietnam was OK because they can feel it, because they couldn’t have been soft on a nation whose militaristic expansionism was ten years old and was no threat to the greater Middle East, so that they could stop genocides and wars that weren’t happening in 2003. These two were made for each other.
PS - Not only does Cohen paint McCain’s war mongering in the best possible light, he also describes as a “straight talker,” as McCain’s media fluffers are want to do. For the proper antidote, everyone should go read Matt Welch’s message to newspaper editorial boards preparing to endorse McCain.
I, like every liberal blogger, am just thrilled that Romney won, and won decidedly in Michigan, making the GOP race at least a three, or maybe even four, person race. Romney is not only the least electable Republican, he is also the least-bad. For one, I’m happy that he is pretty decidedly running against “Washington” and implicitly against the Bush administration. Secondly, he promised to ensure that “every American has health care,” and while his plan nearly as comprehensive or desirable as Obama-Edwards-Clinton, it’s still more than even Howard Dean was promising in 2004. Third, compared to Giuliani and McCain, he is not competing to be super crazy on foreign policy, so that’s a plus for him.
Rudy released his tax plan today, and as Kevin Drum explains, not only does he want to make the Bush cuts permanent, he also wants to slash capital gains and corporate taxes, while eliminating the estate tax. In short, he’s trying to make sure rich people get to keep as much money as possible. It’s obvious that I disagree with his plan almost entirely, with the possible exception of a corporate tax reduction, I really dont think that what America needs is to reduce the tax burden of the wealthiest sector of the population.
What is interesting about Giuliani’s fiscal vision is how well it conforms to his hagiography of Reagan. In the ABC debate before the New Hampshire primary, Giuliani emphasized how important it was for a president to have goals and vision for his time in office. He claimed that Reagan wanted to do three things “cut taxes, expand the military and reduce the deficit. He could only manage two out of three.” Rudy then laughed, and it seemed like the inconsistency between those three goals was so glaring, that he could only pretend he was half kidding. But if we look at Rudy’s goals today, his basic plan is to slash taxes 2.5 times more than the Bush administration, expand the military by ten combat brigades, massively increase homeland security spending on the border, and purchase a next generation of fighter jets and submarines. But what about the budget deficits, you ask? Well, as we all know from Hizzoner, the idea that tax cuts reduce revenue is a “liberal assumption” that he doesn’t have. When you look at his plans of massive military spending along with tax cuts without that pesky liberal assumption, everything starts to make a bit more sense.
Many were puzzling over exactly what David Brooks meant when he called his former Weekly Standard comrade and now New York Times colleague William Kristol a “pseudoconservative.” Maybe he meant that Kristol has gotten a case of the Huckafever and devoted his first Times column to (sorta) making the case for a Huckabee nomination. Many, including myself, all thought that Kristol wouldn’t be a great columnist because not only has he been embarrassingly wrong about Iraq, but he also views Democrats as always treasonous and is something of a GOP hack. But in this column he goes against much of the conservative establishment media and makes a decent case for Huckabee.
This may sound like weak-kneed groveling, but it’s certainly true that there’s some GOP reformism in Kristol. His magazine, after all, is the one that published Reihan Salam’s and Ross Douthat’s “The party of Sam’s Club” piece. Also, he (with Brooks) was the originator of “national greatness conservatism” which was the GOP reform message circa 1997. I’m still waiting for Kristol to accuse his employers of treason, but this was certainly an auspicious start for his Times gig and if he can keep on writing columns like this, maybe it won’t be such a bad hire after all. Maybe Reihan was on to something after all…
This isn’t verbatim, but John McCain just said, basically, that “pharmaceutical companies are the problem.” Maybe he’s deciding to offend parts of the GOP base, thus reversing a two year campaign of extreme right-wing pandering. Impressive stuff. I agree with Yglesias, the health care section of this debate was really good. There were some great questions, Romney defended his mandate, and besides Rudy, the candidates talked about all the major issues afflicting our health care system in a serious, comprehensive way.
PS - McCain just called Romney a flip-flopping liar on immigration. Hard-core stuff - everyone hates Romney.
Just in case you’re wondering, I’m listening from a live-feed on the WMUR website.
There’s a lot of talk by GOP reformers, like David Brooks and Reihan Salam, is the candidate that can find a way to meld the party’s socially conservative message as part of a greater message of security and support for the middle income, downscale, white voters that make up much of the GOP base. He’s the one that will be able to wean the GOP from the ideologically rigid Norquist-Kristol-Scaife axis that controls much of the GOP’s fundraising and policies. The implicit message is that his appeal would be different from Bush’s by way of Rove.
But when it came down to the most important part of governance and reform — getting votes — Huckabee is something of an ur-Rovian. His support was almost entirely driven by evangelicals, who seemingly support him because there is no other credible candiate that shares their faith or their values. While evangelicals are good for working phone banks and getting voters in the booth, one can not reform a party or try to re-orient it ideologically by solely making Christian identity politics appeals. And while Ross Douthat may be begging Huckabee to pivot into a candidate with heterodox policy ideas to go along with his evangelical appeal, it does not seem that Huckabee wants to do that or even knows how.
In yet another edition of “The World is Scary, Vote Republican” we have Giuliani’s most recent ad, part of his push to gain ground in the polls by telling the world how much ass he wants to kick:
This could be the ur-GOP campaign ad. We’re dealing with a “perverted people” and “madmen” — scary, Arab madmen. And because a crisis is just only a moment away, we need a mean sonofabitch to kick some Muslim ass. There’s no argument for why Rudy, who has no real foreign policy or national defense related experience to speak of, is just assumed to be the best candidate for security. The images — the explosions, the “madmen,” the goosestepping terrorists — aren’t designed to evoke a rational or contemplative response. And that’s what Rudy is going for, because if someone thought about Rudy’s dangerously stupid foreign policy vision, they’d realize that it’s, well, dangerous and stupid. And even if there was an argument for why we need Rudy is these scary times, this ad makes it seem like arguing or discussing foreign policy and national security is a waste of time, instead we need Rudy because we can “trust” him. Scary stuff.
It’s good that McCain, and some of his reporters, aren’t sticking with that inane “maverick” meme these days, because it is simply no longer plausible. If we remember back in 2000, McCain’s signature issue was campaign finance reform. And now this McCain-Feingold passed and having zero effect on the amount of money in politics, campaign finance has mysteriously disappeared from his pitch. Another reason for this shift might be the fact that he has more lobbyists raising money for him than any other candidate. Another sign of his adoption of GOP convention is his closing TV ad in Iowa. The ad consists of three things. 1) Images of violence and terrorists in the Middle East 2) A quote by Mitt Romney taken out of context to make it seem like he said presidents don’t need foreign policy experience and 3) Vote for John McCain.
It is almost a parody of using sub-rational responses to fear as a way to scare people into votes. McCain doesn’t have an argument for why his long career in the Senate of trying to regulate sports and constantly supporting wars and their escalation actually makes him a better candidate on foreign policy, but we’re just supposed to know that he has the biggest balls in the room, especially compared to that effete wimp Romney. A real maverick.
Giuliani’s City Journal essay laying out his homeland security vision is notable for a bunch of reasons, including his shocking refusal to mention that he put his disaster command center in the World Trade Center so he’d have a “shag shack” in which to…do stuff…with his girlfriend, but more importantly, he has decided that his response to every policy question is to establish a “-stat” program. For example, here’s what he wants to do on counter terrorism:
To gather and analyze such useful information, first preventers can be assisted by the widespread implementation of a “Terrorstat” program, an idea proposed by former NYPD police commissioner William Bratton and criminologist George Kelling… By bringing all crime and arrest data together by category and by neighborhood, Compstat revolutionized policing, enabling officers to focus their efforts in problem areas, armed with up-to-the-minute, accurate intelligence, rapid deployment of resources, individual accountability, and relentless follow-up. Terrorstat would do the same for counterterrorism.
And border security:
To bring real order to the border, we should establish a “Borderstat” program, also based on Compstat principles. Borderstat would use technology to monitor illegal border crossings and compare them with captures…Even before the completion of SBI, however, we can use Borderstat to monitor incidents better along the border—shootings, petty crimes, and garbage dumping—that indicate illegal crossings and deploy border law enforcement resources to where they can have the most impact. Borderstat will apply a version of the Broken Windows policing theory to our borders.
Disaster Preparedness:
Federal officials need a new “Readystat” system to measure localities’ preparedness against risks and prioritize federal funding accordingly. Readystat would conduct annual assessments to determine the needs of each locality based on geography, population, and the unique threats that each community faces. These data would then be used as an objective guide to funding and grant decisions. Armed with the data, DHS regional directors would also work with state and local leaders to ensure preparedness. Readystat could have pointed out New Orleans’s pre-Katrina vulnerabilities and given us the chance to correct them.
What’s next? How about “healthstat”to address people not using government programs like medicaid or S-CHIP? (oh wait, Rudy already proposed that) Abortionstat to identify women who are likely to have unwanted children?
Biden’s quip definitely needs an update. “Noun-Verb-9/11-Stat”
Apropos of the discussion Kerry Howley and I had about how nepotism is important for getting women into high office, it’s worth noting that nepotism is now hitting closer to home — namely at how it can get teenagers to be in charge of political parties. Specifically, Benazir Bhutto’s 19 year-old son Bilawal will become the leader of the PPP. A great sign for teenage equality? Is Pakistan more progressive for the young than America? The Time article discusses Bilawal’s qualification for being head of the party - not only is only 1.5 years older than me, but he also “attended the Rashid School for Boys, serving as Vice President of the school’s student council.” Now that’s some experience.
