In the last week John McCain has purged – there’s no other word – his campaign of a number of key staffers who have had past or current lobbying ties. Near as I can tell the whole thing got started when Michael Isikoff wrote this article for Newsweek, in which one of McCain’s campaign staff was revealed to have done consulting work for the military government of Burma. The timing, post-Cyclone Nargis, couldn’t have been worse. Things snowballed from there and four more campaign staff (so far) have now been let go for being lobbyists. The revealing point here is not that McCain, a man who has been in Congress for a quarter of a century, knows and counts as friends a lot of lobbyists. The revealing point here is that McCain’s sterling image of incorruptible reformer is already being investigated and sullied, and it’s only May.
(This morning’s Politico has a succinct run down of the whole thing and it’s chock full of gory quotes from pissed of lobbyists suddenly wondering why no one will dance with them anymore, “Aren’t we still pretty!?”.)
McCain’s hopes for November rest on that image though. He needs to be seen as above the usual politics-of-Washington clusterfuck, otherwise people might associate him with the current Administration and every other deeply unpopular thing that’s happened in the last eight years. His campaign’s reaction to the lobbyist disclosure was an attempt to restore that idea. They had their own people fill out disclosure forms about past and current lobbying work and then canned the most egregious offenders. But, as anyone who has ever been through abstinence-only sex-ed knows, once your virginity is gone you’re ruined forever.
McCain could’ve tried to take the high road like Hillary Clinton did at the YearlyKos convention last August. He could’ve defended lobbying as an unpopular but legitimate part of the process of governing. She got booed for it, but that was in front of a bunch of liberal bloggers; McCain’s people might be more receptive, in fact he could even spin it as straight talk. “It’s unpleasant, my friends, but it’s necessary . . .”
Instead he tried to sew his lobbying hymen back together and pretended to have been at church on Friday nights. That approach is, needless to say, doomed from the start. Anytime Barack Obama or one of his minions wants to sully McCain’s reformer credentials they need only raise the issue. A coherent attack isn’t even required, McCain’s halting explanations will do most of the damage for them. And that’s a best case scenario, it assumes McCain’s purge was completely successful in ridding his campaign of embarrassing lobbying ties and there won’t be more. The odds of that are pretty slim.
What’s worse, the reporters now have the taste of blood. One little Newsweek story cost McCain five high level staffers. That’s a very dangerous precedent for a candidate who openly depends on his warm and fuzzy relations with the press.
