Just who is Sen. John McCain?
As Maureen Down asks today in "Who's the Question Mark?" (NYTimes).... "In the final moments of the most gripping campaign in modern history, John McCain is still trying to costume Barack Obama as a dangerous enigma.
"But, in an odd and remarkable reversal, it is McCain who is the enigma, even though he entered the race with one of the best brands in American politics."
Dowd notes that "The McCain campaign specializes in erratica, while the Obama campaign continues to avoid any dramatica."
So just how was it that the man who was one of the most knowable politicians in America..... the Straight-Talking maverick Senator who made the press swoon.... morphed into a political alien? A crooked-talking Bushie insider spouting inanities such as "the fundamentals of our economy are strong."?
Dowd says it was when McCain hired replacement campaign manager Steve Schmidt last summer. Schmidt shackled McCain, "turning the vibrant and respected McCain into a shell of his former self.
"Schmidt abruptly cut off the oxygen supply to McCain's brain" and he became the question mark of the campaign, Dowd opines. The social McCain become "whiny, angry, vengeful and bitter."
Campaign tactics became a see-what-sticks-to-the-wall game of murky constantly-shifting policies and Obama character assassination-by-association.
McCain, like W, likes to depend on his gut for decisions, the most rumbling of which was the selection of Palin the Unpalatable.
For Dowd the "ultimate riddle is this: Why doesn't McCain question why he has become a question mark?"
Like much of the press, Dowd may have a McCain blind spot. She may not want to see that McCain allowed himself to be shackled. That he bought into the Rovian spinmeisters schemes.
And that the relentless spotlight of a fiercely-contested long campaign season exposed the very empty character-vessel beneath McCain's well-crafted public facade.
Vote. It really matters!
Showing posts with label Steve Schmidt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Steve Schmidt. Show all posts
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Sunday, September 21, 2008
History: McKeating to Meltdown
By contrast, the Keating Five scandal was small potatoes. A financial institution bailout costing over $3 billion in 1989.
Compared with the bailout of hundreds of billions for the current financial meltdown, it seems small potatoes. But, there are other comparisons that chill.
The Keating Five scandal.... five Senators entangled in the failure of big- time campaign contributor Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan. The five were accused of intervening with banking regulators to protect Keating.
Then-economist Alan Greenspan wrote a letter on Keating's behalf extolling the management of Lincoln Savings as "seasoned and expert" with a "record of outstanding success."
Sen. John McCain, now seeking the presidency of the United States, was one of the five.
Alan Greenspan went on to become chairman of the Federal Reserve.
In today's New York Times Frank Rich puts a fine point on this history in Truthiness Stages a Comeback.
Rich reminds us that McCain.... "has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen “every part of our economy.” He didn't, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.
McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.
These smear tactics are nothing new.... George Bush smeared McCain in the 2000 GOP presidential primaries, and Swiftboated John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election..... but, it was the former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich who codified such tactics in a 1996 GOPAC memo entitled Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.
Gingrich advised GOP campaigners to memorize as many of his suggested words as possible and use them. He suggested they talk about themselves with optimistic positive governing words such as... change, commitment, moral, family, vision... and use words to define Democrats such as.... abuse of power, betray, cheat, corrupt, greed, hypocrisy, traitors, welfare.... even, gasp, liberal.
And the point.... control. Over our country, over our lives.
And control the GOP did. Congress from 1994 to 2004 and the White House for the last eight years. Now they want to point the finger at everyone else for the dismal state of our economy, although there is plenty of blame to go around and the Democrats skirts aren't all clean.
The combination of Rove's bogus alternative to reality and the application of Gingrich's advice to use words as tactics has been politically successful for the GOP, and lethal for the country as the populace was manipulated and misled.
As Rich explains: "When a McCain spokesman told Politico a week ago that 'we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say' about the campaign’s incessant fictions, he was channeling a famous Bush dictum of 2003: 'Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter.' In Bush’s case, the lies lobbed over the heads of the press were to sell the war in Iraq. That propaganda blitz, devised by a secret White House Iraq Group that included Rove, was a triumph. In mere months, Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein had aided the 9/11 attacks and even that Iraqis were among the hijackers. A largely cowed press failed to set the record straight...
"If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else."
This same media filter is being used in the current financial crisis. Why isn't the press talking about McCain's Keating past? Rich notes that the "indisputable historical antecedent for our current crisis is the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal of the go-go 1980s. When Charles Keating’s bank went belly up because of risky, unregulated investments, it wiped out its depositors’ savings and cost taxpayers more than $3 billion. More than 1,000 other S.&L. institutions capsized nationwide.
"It was ugly for the McCains. He had received more than $100,000 in Keating campaign contributions, and both McCains had repeatedly hopped on Keating’s corporate jet. Cindy McCain and her beer-magnate father had invested nearly $360,000 in a Keating shopping center a year before her husband joined four senators in inappropriate meetings with regulators charged with S.&L. oversight.
"After Congressional hearings, McCain was reprimanded for 'poor judgment.' .... Yet he, like many deregulators in his party, was guilty of bankrupt policy-making before disaster struck. He was among the sponsors of a House resolution calling for the delay of regulations intended to deter risky investments just like those that brought down Lincoln and its ilk."
McCain as a "maverick" is just another manipulative use of a word as a tactic.
In truth, as Rich reminds us.... "The corporate jets, lobbyists and sleazes that gravitated around McCain in the Keating era have also reappeared in new incarnations. The Nation’s Web site recently unearthed a photo of the resolutely anticelebrity McCain being greeted by the con man Raffaello Follieri and his then girlfriend, the Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway, as McCain celebrated his 70th birthday on Follieri’s rented yacht in Montenegro in August 2006. It’s the perfect bookend to the old pictures of McCain in a funny hat partying with Keating in the Bahamas."
Eric Hovde explains today in Calling Out the Culprits Who Caused the Crisis (WaPo) ...."In the run-up to the millennium, the Federal Reserve, led by then-Chairman Alan Greenspan, began to pump money into the capital markets to deal with any financial problems that might arise from a Y2K meltdown."
The meltdown didn't happen, but the "monetary stimulus, coupled with the aforementioned hype, created an unfortunate bubble in Internet, technology and telecommunications stocks."
Large Wall Street investment banks recognized the potential profit in promoting the technology boom and from mid-1999 to mid-2000 they took about 500 companies public, raising about 77 billion for the IPOs, for which they received a 6 percent underwriting fee.
In this rush for profits, the investment banks also invested in these companies before the IPO when the stock was valued at a fraction of the post IPO, and threw out their underwriting guidelines in place since the Great Depression.
Then.... the technology bubble burst and as Hovde explains, "America's corporate landscape was littered with bankruptcies and mass layoffs, and investor losses have been estimated at more than $1 trillion."
Greenspan's Federal Reserve reacted by increasing the money supply and slashing short-term interest rates to 1 percent... a level not seen for more than 45 years. This stimulus led to an enormous housing boom and new mortgage products that ignored all previous lending guidelines.
Wall Street then packaged these subprime mortgages, again receiving billions in fees, and sold them to investors.
We are now facing the disastrous result as this whole get-rich-quick scheme falls apart as the bills come due.
Hovde explains, "First, the Fed laid the groundwork for both these asset bubbles by lowering interest rates to historic lows. In an attempt to protect his legacy after the Internet-bubble collapse, Greenspan provided unprecedented stimulus to re-inflate the economy and maintain his popularity with Wall Street.... But in doing so, he spawned the largest debt and asset bubble in U.S. history."
Of course, the SEC stood idly by as Wall Street took advantage of the investing public in the Internet and housing bubbles. Treasury secretaries took no action to curb these abuses, and "Wall Street investment banking firms sprinkled some of its massive gains into the pockets of our elected officials," and bought itself protection from any tough government enforcement, Hovde explains.
And, regardless of his current fiery calls for a crackdown on Wall Street, McCain opposed the very regulations that might have helped avert the current catastrophe. In 1999, he supported a law co-authored by his campaign financial guru then-Sen. Phil Gramm "that revoked the New Deal reforms intended to prevent commercial banks, insurance companies and investment banks from mingling their businesses," Rich reminds us.
Now, Gramm is keeping a low profile after he blamed the economic meltdown on our 'nation of whiners' and 'mental recession,' but he remains in the McCain loop.
So there you have it.... greed, corruption and a gulled electorate have brought us to this catastrophic financial crisis.
But history doesn't have to be prologue to the future. We can and must change business as usual.
November!
Compared with the bailout of hundreds of billions for the current financial meltdown, it seems small potatoes. But, there are other comparisons that chill.
The Keating Five scandal.... five Senators entangled in the failure of big- time campaign contributor Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan. The five were accused of intervening with banking regulators to protect Keating.
Then-economist Alan Greenspan wrote a letter on Keating's behalf extolling the management of Lincoln Savings as "seasoned and expert" with a "record of outstanding success."
Sen. John McCain, now seeking the presidency of the United States, was one of the five.
Alan Greenspan went on to become chairman of the Federal Reserve.
In today's New York Times Frank Rich puts a fine point on this history in Truthiness Stages a Comeback.
Rich reminds us that McCain.... "has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen “every part of our economy.” He didn't, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.
McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.
These smear tactics are nothing new.... George Bush smeared McCain in the 2000 GOP presidential primaries, and Swiftboated John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election..... but, it was the former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich who codified such tactics in a 1996 GOPAC memo entitled Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.
Gingrich advised GOP campaigners to memorize as many of his suggested words as possible and use them. He suggested they talk about themselves with optimistic positive governing words such as... change, commitment, moral, family, vision... and use words to define Democrats such as.... abuse of power, betray, cheat, corrupt, greed, hypocrisy, traitors, welfare.... even, gasp, liberal.
And the point.... control. Over our country, over our lives.
And control the GOP did. Congress from 1994 to 2004 and the White House for the last eight years. Now they want to point the finger at everyone else for the dismal state of our economy, although there is plenty of blame to go around and the Democrats skirts aren't all clean.
The combination of Rove's bogus alternative to reality and the application of Gingrich's advice to use words as tactics has been politically successful for the GOP, and lethal for the country as the populace was manipulated and misled.
As Rich explains: "When a McCain spokesman told Politico a week ago that 'we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say' about the campaign’s incessant fictions, he was channeling a famous Bush dictum of 2003: 'Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter.' In Bush’s case, the lies lobbed over the heads of the press were to sell the war in Iraq. That propaganda blitz, devised by a secret White House Iraq Group that included Rove, was a triumph. In mere months, Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein had aided the 9/11 attacks and even that Iraqis were among the hijackers. A largely cowed press failed to set the record straight...
"If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else."
This same media filter is being used in the current financial crisis. Why isn't the press talking about McCain's Keating past? Rich notes that the "indisputable historical antecedent for our current crisis is the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal of the go-go 1980s. When Charles Keating’s bank went belly up because of risky, unregulated investments, it wiped out its depositors’ savings and cost taxpayers more than $3 billion. More than 1,000 other S.&L. institutions capsized nationwide.
"It was ugly for the McCains. He had received more than $100,000 in Keating campaign contributions, and both McCains had repeatedly hopped on Keating’s corporate jet. Cindy McCain and her beer-magnate father had invested nearly $360,000 in a Keating shopping center a year before her husband joined four senators in inappropriate meetings with regulators charged with S.&L. oversight.
"After Congressional hearings, McCain was reprimanded for 'poor judgment.' .... Yet he, like many deregulators in his party, was guilty of bankrupt policy-making before disaster struck. He was among the sponsors of a House resolution calling for the delay of regulations intended to deter risky investments just like those that brought down Lincoln and its ilk."
McCain as a "maverick" is just another manipulative use of a word as a tactic.
In truth, as Rich reminds us.... "The corporate jets, lobbyists and sleazes that gravitated around McCain in the Keating era have also reappeared in new incarnations. The Nation’s Web site recently unearthed a photo of the resolutely anticelebrity McCain being greeted by the con man Raffaello Follieri and his then girlfriend, the Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway, as McCain celebrated his 70th birthday on Follieri’s rented yacht in Montenegro in August 2006. It’s the perfect bookend to the old pictures of McCain in a funny hat partying with Keating in the Bahamas."
Eric Hovde explains today in Calling Out the Culprits Who Caused the Crisis (WaPo) ...."In the run-up to the millennium, the Federal Reserve, led by then-Chairman Alan Greenspan, began to pump money into the capital markets to deal with any financial problems that might arise from a Y2K meltdown."
The meltdown didn't happen, but the "monetary stimulus, coupled with the aforementioned hype, created an unfortunate bubble in Internet, technology and telecommunications stocks."
Large Wall Street investment banks recognized the potential profit in promoting the technology boom and from mid-1999 to mid-2000 they took about 500 companies public, raising about 77 billion for the IPOs, for which they received a 6 percent underwriting fee.
In this rush for profits, the investment banks also invested in these companies before the IPO when the stock was valued at a fraction of the post IPO, and threw out their underwriting guidelines in place since the Great Depression.
Then.... the technology bubble burst and as Hovde explains, "America's corporate landscape was littered with bankruptcies and mass layoffs, and investor losses have been estimated at more than $1 trillion."
Greenspan's Federal Reserve reacted by increasing the money supply and slashing short-term interest rates to 1 percent... a level not seen for more than 45 years. This stimulus led to an enormous housing boom and new mortgage products that ignored all previous lending guidelines.
Wall Street then packaged these subprime mortgages, again receiving billions in fees, and sold them to investors.
We are now facing the disastrous result as this whole get-rich-quick scheme falls apart as the bills come due.
Hovde explains, "First, the Fed laid the groundwork for both these asset bubbles by lowering interest rates to historic lows. In an attempt to protect his legacy after the Internet-bubble collapse, Greenspan provided unprecedented stimulus to re-inflate the economy and maintain his popularity with Wall Street.... But in doing so, he spawned the largest debt and asset bubble in U.S. history."
Of course, the SEC stood idly by as Wall Street took advantage of the investing public in the Internet and housing bubbles. Treasury secretaries took no action to curb these abuses, and "Wall Street investment banking firms sprinkled some of its massive gains into the pockets of our elected officials," and bought itself protection from any tough government enforcement, Hovde explains.
And, regardless of his current fiery calls for a crackdown on Wall Street, McCain opposed the very regulations that might have helped avert the current catastrophe. In 1999, he supported a law co-authored by his campaign financial guru then-Sen. Phil Gramm "that revoked the New Deal reforms intended to prevent commercial banks, insurance companies and investment banks from mingling their businesses," Rich reminds us.
Now, Gramm is keeping a low profile after he blamed the economic meltdown on our 'nation of whiners' and 'mental recession,' but he remains in the McCain loop.
So there you have it.... greed, corruption and a gulled electorate have brought us to this catastrophic financial crisis.
But history doesn't have to be prologue to the future. We can and must change business as usual.
November!
Friday, July 04, 2008
Obama Explains, McCain Games
OK, Obama supporters, let's think things through. Is Barack Obama actually going back on promises and taking new positions as charged by the McCain campaign and an obliging media?
Is it a surprise that Obama is articulating the middle ground and willing to compromise.
After all, he said he would be a new kind of leader, a leader for all.... not just the left.... and that we must come together in order to overcome the devastation wrought by years of extremism on both sides, and a Decider who stubbornly stuck to his radical ideology regardless of the abject failure of his policies.
Remember Obama's background as a community organizer, as someone who wants to bring people together to solve their problems.... not as just another political brand like a "compassionate conservative" full of sound and fuzzies and signifying nothing.
Yet, many Obama supporters are angry with him.... because he's compromising on the FISA bill in order to move forward and put in place needed safeguards.
Yesterday Obama released a statement regarding his position on the FISA bill that passed the House and will now go to the Senate. He admits that the legislation is far from perfect and hopes to remove the Title II portion that grants retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies involved in warrantless wiretapping for the Bush administration.
Still, Obama stands by his general support of this bill because, as he says, "the compromise bill is far better than the Protect America Act that I voted against last year. The exclusivity provision makes it clear to any President or telecommunications company that no law supersedes the authority of the FISA court.... This compromise law assures that the FISA court has that responsibility."
This bill gives a real mechanism for accountability while still allowing the government to monitor and track individuals who want to attack the United States, which Obama feels "is a vital counter-terrorism tool."
While supporting this bill, Obama promises that once he is sworn in as President, he will have his Attorney General "conduct a comprehensive review of all our surveillance programs, and make further recommendations on any steps needed to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in the future."
In the meantime, expect a lot of distortions of his positions by an increasingly devious McCain campaign and a Straight-Talk-fumes-sniffing media.... any utterance of Obama or his spokesmen that can be turned on its head, will be, and then it will be repeated over, and over, and over until.... presto, it's fact!
What you have been witnessing are the political games of "Rove's Third Term." As Paul Krugman points out in his oped in today's NY Times, there is "increasing influence of veterans of Mr. Rove's shop in the McCain operation."
Like....the recent elevation in McCain's campaign of Steve Schmidt to campaign manager. Schmidt is a veteran of Bush's 2004 campaign and worked closely with Karl Rove.... the guru of political manipulation.
Look at what happened to Gen. Wesley Clark when he said that while John McCain's war service was heroic, it didn't necessarily constitute a qualification for the presidency. McCain's campaign went ballistic.... it "went beyond condemning General Clark's remarks; it went out of its way to distort them" Krugman points out.
Swiftboat star Col. John Day, no less, said of Clark's remark... "This backhand slap against John as not being a worthy warrior because he just got shot down is one of the more surprising insults in my military history." Of course, Clark said no such thing.
Hopefully the electorate will see through the distortions of Obama's positions and statements of his supporters.
Just remember, this Rovian propaganda is an attempt to divert attention from Bush's failed economic policies and disastrous war.... "both of which Mr. McCain promises he will continue if he wins."
Is it a surprise that Obama is articulating the middle ground and willing to compromise.
After all, he said he would be a new kind of leader, a leader for all.... not just the left.... and that we must come together in order to overcome the devastation wrought by years of extremism on both sides, and a Decider who stubbornly stuck to his radical ideology regardless of the abject failure of his policies.
Remember Obama's background as a community organizer, as someone who wants to bring people together to solve their problems.... not as just another political brand like a "compassionate conservative" full of sound and fuzzies and signifying nothing.
Yet, many Obama supporters are angry with him.... because he's compromising on the FISA bill in order to move forward and put in place needed safeguards.
Yesterday Obama released a statement regarding his position on the FISA bill that passed the House and will now go to the Senate. He admits that the legislation is far from perfect and hopes to remove the Title II portion that grants retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies involved in warrantless wiretapping for the Bush administration.
Still, Obama stands by his general support of this bill because, as he says, "the compromise bill is far better than the Protect America Act that I voted against last year. The exclusivity provision makes it clear to any President or telecommunications company that no law supersedes the authority of the FISA court.... This compromise law assures that the FISA court has that responsibility."
This bill gives a real mechanism for accountability while still allowing the government to monitor and track individuals who want to attack the United States, which Obama feels "is a vital counter-terrorism tool."
While supporting this bill, Obama promises that once he is sworn in as President, he will have his Attorney General "conduct a comprehensive review of all our surveillance programs, and make further recommendations on any steps needed to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in the future."
In the meantime, expect a lot of distortions of his positions by an increasingly devious McCain campaign and a Straight-Talk-fumes-sniffing media.... any utterance of Obama or his spokesmen that can be turned on its head, will be, and then it will be repeated over, and over, and over until.... presto, it's fact!
What you have been witnessing are the political games of "Rove's Third Term." As Paul Krugman points out in his oped in today's NY Times, there is "increasing influence of veterans of Mr. Rove's shop in the McCain operation."
Like....the recent elevation in McCain's campaign of Steve Schmidt to campaign manager. Schmidt is a veteran of Bush's 2004 campaign and worked closely with Karl Rove.... the guru of political manipulation.
Look at what happened to Gen. Wesley Clark when he said that while John McCain's war service was heroic, it didn't necessarily constitute a qualification for the presidency. McCain's campaign went ballistic.... it "went beyond condemning General Clark's remarks; it went out of its way to distort them" Krugman points out.
Swiftboat star Col. John Day, no less, said of Clark's remark... "This backhand slap against John as not being a worthy warrior because he just got shot down is one of the more surprising insults in my military history." Of course, Clark said no such thing.
Hopefully the electorate will see through the distortions of Obama's positions and statements of his supporters.
Just remember, this Rovian propaganda is an attempt to divert attention from Bush's failed economic policies and disastrous war.... "both of which Mr. McCain promises he will continue if he wins."
Friday, February 22, 2008
McCain's "Revolving" Straight Talk
It's candidate Sen. John McCain's public face..... for years he has ranted against lobbyists and the influence of "special interests" in DC. His website even says he's fighting against "the 'revolving door' by which lawmakers and other influential officials leave their posts and become lobbyists...."
Well, he should know.
The Washington Post today spells it out, "The Anti-Lobbyist, Advised by Lobbyists."
"...when McCain huddled with his closest advisers at his rustic Arizona cabin last weekend to map out his presidential campaign, virtually every one was part of the Washington lobbying culture he has long decried.
"His campaign manager, Rick Davis, co-founded a lobbying firm whose clients have included Verizon and SBC Telecommunications [remember McCain chaired the Senate Commerce Committee]. His chief political adviser, Charles R. Black Jr., is chairman of one of Washington's lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has represented AT&T, Alcoa, JP Morgan and U. S. Airways.
"Senior advisers Steve Schmidt and Mark McKinnon work for firms that have lobbied for Land O' Lakes, UST Public Affairs, Dell and Fannie Mae."
These lobbyists are not only running McCain's campaign, but most of them aren't getting paid.... at least by McCain.... for their campaign work.
There's more.... McCain recently hired Mark Buse to be his Senate chief of staff. Buse until last fall was a lobbyist. McCain's top fundraising official is former congressman Tom Loffler (R-TX) who revolved himself into heading a lobbying law firm that counsels the Saudis and Toyota among others.
Public Citizen found that McCain has more bundlers from the lobbying community gathering checks for him than any other presidential candidate during the entire campaign from either party. By their current count, McCain has at least 59 federal lobbyists raising money for his campaign.
Of course, all these influence peddlers proclaim that they don't lobby McCain, or that they aren't currently working as lobbyists.... but how do they square that with McCain's "revolving door" rhetoric that is his crusading persona for his all-war-all-the-time no hope agenda.
In November we must stop the "revolving door" The Decider exits as McCain enters pushing the same failed policies and hackneyed ideas in the vanguard of an army of lobbyists with special influence.
Well, he should know.
The Washington Post today spells it out, "The Anti-Lobbyist, Advised by Lobbyists."
"...when McCain huddled with his closest advisers at his rustic Arizona cabin last weekend to map out his presidential campaign, virtually every one was part of the Washington lobbying culture he has long decried.
"His campaign manager, Rick Davis, co-founded a lobbying firm whose clients have included Verizon and SBC Telecommunications [remember McCain chaired the Senate Commerce Committee]. His chief political adviser, Charles R. Black Jr., is chairman of one of Washington's lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has represented AT&T, Alcoa, JP Morgan and U. S. Airways.
"Senior advisers Steve Schmidt and Mark McKinnon work for firms that have lobbied for Land O' Lakes, UST Public Affairs, Dell and Fannie Mae."
These lobbyists are not only running McCain's campaign, but most of them aren't getting paid.... at least by McCain.... for their campaign work.
There's more.... McCain recently hired Mark Buse to be his Senate chief of staff. Buse until last fall was a lobbyist. McCain's top fundraising official is former congressman Tom Loffler (R-TX) who revolved himself into heading a lobbying law firm that counsels the Saudis and Toyota among others.
Public Citizen found that McCain has more bundlers from the lobbying community gathering checks for him than any other presidential candidate during the entire campaign from either party. By their current count, McCain has at least 59 federal lobbyists raising money for his campaign.
Of course, all these influence peddlers proclaim that they don't lobby McCain, or that they aren't currently working as lobbyists.... but how do they square that with McCain's "revolving door" rhetoric that is his crusading persona for his all-war-all-the-time no hope agenda.
In November we must stop the "revolving door" The Decider exits as McCain enters pushing the same failed policies and hackneyed ideas in the vanguard of an army of lobbyists with special influence.
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