WASHINGTON
Maureen Dowd
"I am under no illusion that Obama will fix all America's problems, but the tenor will, and has, already changed."
I walked over to the White House Tuesday night and leaned against the fence. How can such a lovely house make so many of its inhabitants nuts?
There was no U-Haul in the driveway. I don’t know if W. was inside talking to the portraits on the wall. Or if the portraits can vanish from their frames, as at Hogwarts Academy, to escape if W. is pestering them about his legacy.
The Obama girls, with their oodles of charm, will soon be moving in with their goldendoodle or some other fetching puppy, and they seem like the kind of kids who could have fun there, prowling around with their history-loving father.
I had been amazed during the campaign — not by the covert racism about Barack Obama and not by Hillary Clinton’s subtext when she insisted to superdelegates: “He can’t win.”
But I had been astonished by the overt willingness of some people who didn’t mind being quoted by name in The New York Times saying vile stuff, that a President Obama would turn the Rose Garden into a watermelon patch, that he’d have barbeques on the front lawn, that he’d make the White House the Black House.
Actually, the elegant and disciplined Obama, who is not descended from the central African-American experience but who has nonetheless embraced it and been embraced by it, has the chance to make the White House pristine again.
I grew up here, and I love all the monuments filled with the capital’s ghosts. I hate the thought that terrorists might target them again.
But the monuments have lost their luminescence in recent years.
How could the White House be classy when the Clintons were turning it into Motel 1600 for fund-raising, when Bill Clinton was using it for trysts with an intern and when he plunked a seven-seat hot tub with two Moto-Massager jets on the lawn?
How could the White House be inspiring when W. and Cheney were inside making torture and domestic spying legal, fooling Americans by cooking up warped evidence for war and scheming how to further enrich their buddies in the oil and gas industry?
How could the Lincoln Memorial — “With malice toward none; with charity for all” — be as moving if the black neighborhoods of a charming American city were left to drown while the president mountain-biked?
How can the National Archives, home of the Constitution, be as momentous if the president and vice president spend their days redacting the Constitution?
How can the black marble V of the Vietnam Memorial have power when those in power repeat the mistake of Vietnam?
How can the Capitol, where my dad proudly worked for so many years, hold its allure when the occupants have spent their days — and years — bickering and scoring petty political points instead of stopping White House chicanery and taking on risky big issues?
How can the F.D.R. Memorial along the Tidal Basin be an uplifting trip to the past when the bronze statue of five stooped men in a bread line and the words of F.D.R.’s second inaugural — “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished” — evokes the depressing present?
Obama may be in over his head. Or he may be heading for his own monument one day.
His somber speech in the dark Chicago night was stark and simple and showed that he sees what he’s up against. There was a heaviness in his demeanor, as if he already had taken on the isolation and “splendid misery,” as Jefferson called it, of the office he’d won only moments before. Americans all over the place were jumping for joy, including the block I had been on in front of the White House, where they were singing: “Na, na, na, na. Hey, hey, hey. Goodbye.”
In the midst of such a phenomenal, fizzy victory overcoming so many doubts and crazy attacks and even his own middle name, Obama stood alone.
He rejected the Democratic kumbaya moment of having your broad coalition on stage with you, as he talked about how everyone would have to pull together and “resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.”
He professed “humility,” but we’d heard that before from W., and look what happened there.
Promising to also be president for those who opposed him, Obama quoted Lincoln, his political idol and the man who ended slavery: “We are not enemies, but friends — though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”
There have been many awful mistakes made in this country. But now we have another chance.
As we start fresh with a constitutional law professor and senator from the Land of Lincoln, the Lincoln Memorial might be getting its gleam back.
I may have to celebrate by going over there and climbing up into Abe’s lap.
Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, is a date that will live in fame (the opposite of infamy) forever. If the election of our first African-American president didn’t stir you, if it didn’t leave you teary-eyed and proud of your country, there’s something wrong with you.
Paul Krugman
"Barack Obama does not need to move to the center. He needs to MOVE the center. The times demand it."
But will the election also mark a turning point in the actual substance of policy? Can Barack Obama really usher in a new era of progressive policies? Yes, he can.
Right now, many commentators are urging Mr. Obama to think small. Some make the case on political grounds: America, they say, is still a conservative country, and voters will punish Democrats if they move to the left. Others say that the financial and economic crisis leaves no room for action on, say, health care reform.
Let’s hope that Mr. Obama has the good sense to ignore this advice.
About the political argument: Anyone who doubts that we’ve had a major political realignment should look at what’s happened to Congress. After the 2004 election, there were many declarations that we’d entered a long-term, perhaps permanent era of Republican dominance. Since then, Democrats have won back-to-back victories, picking up at least 12 Senate seats and more than 50 House seats. They now have bigger majorities in both houses than the G.O.P. ever achieved in its 12-year reign.
Bear in mind, also, that this year’s presidential election was a clear referendum on political philosophies — and the progressive philosophy won.
Maybe the best way to highlight the importance of that fact is to contrast this year’s campaign with what happened four years ago. In 2004, President Bush concealed his real agenda. He basically ran as the nation’s defender against gay married terrorists, leaving even his supporters nonplussed when he announced, soon after the election was over, that his first priority was Social Security privatization. That wasn’t what people thought they had been voting for, and the privatization campaign quickly devolved from juggernaut to farce.
This year, however, Mr. Obama ran on a platform of guaranteed health care and tax breaks for the middle class, paid for with higher taxes on the affluent. John McCain denounced his opponent as a socialist and a “redistributor,” but America voted for him anyway. That’s a real mandate.
What about the argument that the economic crisis will make a progressive agenda unaffordable?
Well, there’s no question that fighting the crisis will cost a lot of money. Rescuing the financial system will probably require large outlays beyond the funds already disbursed. And on top of that, we badly need a program of increased government spending to support output and employment. Could next year’s federal budget deficit reach $1 trillion? Yes.
But standard textbook economics says that it’s O.K., in fact appropriate, to run temporary deficits in the face of a depressed economy. Meanwhile, one or two years of red ink, while it would add modestly to future federal interest expenses, shouldn’t stand in the way of a health care plan that, even if quickly enacted into law, probably wouldn’t take effect until 2011.
Beyond that, the response to the economic crisis is, in itself, a chance to advance the progressive agenda.
Now, the Obama administration shouldn’t emulate the Bush administration’s habit of turning anything and everything into an argument for its preferred policies. (Recession? The economy needs help — let’s cut taxes on rich people! Recovery? Tax cuts for rich people work — let’s do some more!)
But it would be fair for the new administration to point out how conservative ideology, the belief that greed is always good, helped create this crisis. What F.D.R. said in his second inaugural address — “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics” — has never rung truer.
And right now happens to be one of those times when the converse is also true, and good morals are good economics. Helping the neediest in a time of crisis, through expanded health and unemployment benefits, is the morally right thing to do; it’s also a far more effective form of economic stimulus than cutting the capital gains tax. Providing aid to beleaguered state and local governments, so that they can sustain essential public services, is important for those who depend on those services; it’s also a way to avoid job losses and limit the depth of the economy’s slump.
So a serious progressive agenda — call it a new New Deal — isn’t just economically possible, it’s exactly what the economy needs.
The bottom line, then, is that Barack Obama shouldn’t listen to the people trying to scare him into being a do-nothing president. He has the political mandate; he has good economics on his side. You might say that the only thing he has to fear is fear itself.
On Wednesday, Nov. 5, 1980, my 10th-grade American history teacher started class by unfurling The New York Times. She pointed to its triple banner headline: “Reagan Easily Beats Carter; Republicans Gain in Congress; D’Amato and Dodd are Victors.”
“Save this paper,” she told us. “This is the start of a whole new era.”
And it was. An era of unbridled deregulation, wealth-enhancing perks for the already well-off, and miserly indifference to the poor and middle class; of the recasting of greed as goodness, the equation of bellicose provincialism with patriotism, the reframing of bigotry as small-town decency.
In short, it was the start of our current era. The Reagan Revolution was the formative political experience of my generation’s lifetime, like the Great Depression, the Second World War or Vietnam for those before us. And in its intellectual and moral paucity, in its eventual hegemony, these years shut down, for some of us, the ability to fully imagine another way.
I will admit that back in January, when Barack Obama, in his post-Iowa victory speech, spoke about the “cynics,” the “they” who said “this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose,” he was talking about me.
I will admit that the call of “change” did not speak to me as an achievable goal.
Until it actually came.
On Wednesday, there was a run on newspapers, as voters rushed to grab a tangible piece of the history they’d made. My husband Max and I, unable to find extra copies, brought our own worn papers home to 8- and 11-year-old Emilie and Julia.
Sept. 11, the seismic event that we’d feared would forever form their political consciousness, shaping their world and constricting the boundaries of the possible, had actually been eclipsed, light blotting out darkness, the best of America at long last driving away the demons of fear. We wanted them to see that it was the end of an era.
“Look,” we said, pointing to the headline “Racial Barrier Falls.” “This is huge.”
We labored to make them understand that their world — art that day, and orchestra, and Baked Potato Bar at lunch — had irrevocably changed.
But how can you understand change when you’ve only known one way of being?
They were happy because we were happy. They rose to the occasion in that bemused way children do when adults tell them what they should feel. They were glad to be rid of George W. Bush and to be saved – for now – from the specter of Sarah Palin. (“It is not O.K. to say she’s an ‘idiot,’” I had snapped when they came home from school stoked by the mob. “Prove your case. Show, don’t tell.”)
They’d had, like many D.C. children, more than their share of politics. After first following the country into battle against the all-purpose boogeyman Saddam Hussein, they’d become antiwar. They had opinions on tax policy and spoke angrily about the “wealth gap.” In the past election year, they’d been fired up about the woman thing, in all its pretty girl versus smart girl iterations; in fact, they and their friends had remained hard-core Hillaryites long after their moms had moved on.
But the race thing? The groundbreaking immensity of the election of our country’s first African-American president?
“You’re being racist,” Emilie had said when I made a comment about how particularly earth-moving this election was for black voters. “Why should it matter if people are black or white?”
Theirs has often looked to me like a world drained of meaning. Girl power put to the service of selling Hannah Montana. Feel-good inclusiveness that occulted the very real conflicts, crimes and hatreds of history.
It isn’t easy to let go of the past to embrace something new, to risk heartbreak on the chance of the world’s actually having changed.
Or at least, it hasn’t been easy for me. But it comes naturally to some. Like the hundreds of George Washington University students who gathered in front of the White House on Tuesday night, cheering and screaming and shouting their goodbyes to the political era of their youth.
“Bliss it was to be alive, but to be young was very heaven,” Max emailed me, paraphrasing William Wordsworth on the French Revolution, at 11:30 p.m. on election night, after leaving his desk to walk among the revelers downtown. I, home with the kids, was in bed, sleeping the drugged sleep of an alcohol-abstaining migraineuse after drinking half a glass of celebratory champagne.
Colin Powell did not dance for joy over Obama’s victory; he wept.
“Look what we did. Look what we did,” he said, puffy-faced, red-eyed, fighting back more tears on CNN. “He’s won. It’s over.”
David Dinkins was similarly solemn. “Things do change. There is a God. They do get better,” said the mayor who presided over New York City at a time of toxic racial tensions.
Obama, too, resisted giddy gladness on Tuesday night. But he did proclaim an end to the world as we’ve known it for far too long.
“To those who would tear the world down: we will defeat you,” he promised. “This is our moment. This is our time.”
The glory of Barack Obama is that there are so many different kinds of us who can claim a piece of that “our.” African-Americans, Democrats, post-boomers, progressives, people who rose from essentially nowhere and through hard work and determination succeeded beyond their parents’ wildest dreams are the most obvious.
But there are also people who respect intelligence and good grammar. People who see their spouse as their “best friend,” as Barack called Michelle on Tuesday night. People whose children have the same knowing look as Sasha and Malia, who are probably more excited about their puppy than about their father’s presidency.
Two images will forever stay in my mind to mark this epoch-breaking Election Day. One is that of Jesse Jackson’s face, drenched in tears, in Chicago’s Grant Park on Tuesday evening.
And the other is a photo that ran in The Times on Wednesday. In it, a black mother and daughter sit on the floor of a church in Harlem. The mother, Latrice Barnes, having heard of Obama’s victory, is doubled up in tears; her daughter, Jasmine, is reaching a tentative hand up to soothe her. To me, she looks like the future, reaching out to heal the past.
It is, I suppose, in part a matter of temperament, whether one shouts or weeps at happy transformative moments. But I also think it’s a matter of what has come before. The young people joyfully frolicking in front of the Bush White House never knew the universe whose passing was marked by Obama’s victory and Jackson’s tears.
This moment of triumph marks the end of such a long period of pain, of indignity and injustice for African-Americans. And for so many others of us, of the trampling and debasing of our most basic ideals, beliefs that we cherished every bit as deeply and passionately as those of the “values voters” around whose sensibilities we’ve had to tiptoe for the past 28 years.
The election brought the return of a country we’d lost for so long that it was almost forgotten under the accumulated scar tissue of accommodation and acceptance.
For me, this will be the enduring memory of election night 2008: One generation released its grief. The next looked up confusedly, eager to please and yet unable to comprehend just what the tears were about.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/10/14/opinion/20081014_OPCHART.html
Since 1929, Republicans and Democrats have each controlled the presidency for nearly 40 years. So which party has been better for American pocketbooks and capitalism as a whole? Well, here’s an experiment: imagine that during these years you had to invest exclusively under either Democratic or Republican administrations. How would you have fared?
As of Friday, a $10,000 investment in the S.& P. stock market index* would have grown to $11,733 if invested under Republican presidents only, although that would be $51,211 if we exclude Herbert Hoover’s presidency during the Great Depression. Invested under Democratic presidents only, $10,000 would have grown to $300,671 at a compound rate of 8.9 percent over nearly 40 years.
Re: The Blog question: What is the real source of McCainiacs anger?
About that post claiming that Consumer Reports said Obama did not give details about his health care plan and McCain did and that Obama's was unaffordable. I am a Consumers Report subscriber, and so I went to their website, and read their review word for word. Whoever wrote that post flat lied, made it up. The description of McCain's plan was chilling. Obama's good, the report just stated the facts and the facts speak for Obama. The chief difference I see between Republicans year in and year out, and Democrats, is that the Republican house of cards is built on a tissue of lies. If they told the truth, no one would vote for them. The operatives who are drawn to the GOP are, well, drips who started lying when they first ran for student council and lost and never stopped lying after that. The short lesson is: Never trust a man whose hips are wider than his shoulders. jesse helms, karl rove, newt gingrich, richard nixon. I rest my case.
Here's excerpt from Consumer Reports:
"Two prescriptions for America’s ills
Although our article focuses mainly on their differences, the McCain and Obama plans do share some similar priorities, including:
Electronic medical recordsBoth candidates want to speed up adoption of electronic record-keeping systems. Obama says he will spend $50 billion on this over the next five years. McCain doesn¹t specify a funding amount.
Safety and transparencyBoth candidates want the public to have more information about the cost, safety, and outcome of medical treatments. Obama offers more details than McCain; he would require public reporting of preventable medical errors and hospital-acquired infections. He would also set up a government-funded center to study which treatments are most effective.
Lower drug costsBoth would speed up the introduction of generic drugs and make it easier to buy drugs from overseas. Obama would allow Medicare to bargain for lower prices.
Coordination of careSeriously ill people today often are treated by an assortment of specialists who have little or no contact with one another. Both candidates want to fix that. McCain wants Medicare to pay a single bill for an entire course of treatment. Obama would encourage better team care of chronic diseases.
About the McCain RNC phone emssage accusing Obama of consorting with domesic terrorists:
§ 163-274. Certain acts declared misdemeanors.(a) Class 2 Misdemeanors. - Any person who shall, inconnection with any primary or election in this State, do any ofthe acts and things declared in this subsection to be unlawful,....(8) For any person to publish or cause to be circulatedderogatory reports with reference to any candidatein any primary or election, knowing such report tobe false or in reckless disregard of its truth orfalsity, when such report is calculated or intendedto affect the chances of such candidate fornomination or election;And the efforts to keep away voters:
§ 163-275. Certain acts declared felonies.Any person who shall, in connection with any primary,general or special election held in this State, do any of theacts or things declared in this section to be unlawful, shall beguilty of a Class I felony. It shall be unlawful:....(17) For any person, directly or indirectly, tomisrepresent the law to the public through massmailing or any other means of communication wherethe intent and the effect is to intimidate ordiscourage potential voters from exercising theirlawful right to vote.
A son-in-law of Charles H. Keating Jr. pleaded guilty today to three Federal fraud counts in connection with the collapse of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Assocation and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors as they pursue their case against Mr. Keating.
The guilty plea was the sixth from executives and business associates of Lincoln and its parent company, but was the first crack in what until now had been a united Keating family defense against the charges in the case.
Mr. Keating and a son, Charles H. Keating 3d, still face an array of fraud and racketeering charges brought against them in a 77-count Federal indictment issued last year. Their trial is scheduled for August in Federal District Court here. Mr. Keating was convicted last year on separate fraud counts in a California state court and is serving a 10-year prison sentence. Bad Loans to a Hotel
The guilty plea today was from Robert M. Wurzelbacher Jr., who had been a senior vice president of Lincoln's parent company, the American Continental Corporation of Phoenix, and the chief executive of an investment firm owned by Lincoln Savings. Mr. Wurzelbacher, who is 38 years old, is married to the former Elizabeth Keating, one of Mr. Keating's daughters.
Mr. Wurzelbacher pleaded guilty before United States District Judge Mariana Pfaelzer to three felony counts of misapplication of federally insured funds. The charges were not among those made against Mr. Wurzelbacher in last year's Federal indictment.
His guilty plea involved charges arising from $13 million in loans and advances made by Lincoln Savings, which was based in Irvine, Calif. The money went to a limited partnership that owned and operated the Hotel Pontchartrain in Detroit.
Mr. Wurzelbacher and other officers and employees of Lincoln and American Continental, including Mr. Keating and his son, were partners in the limited partnership, according to court documents.
The prosecutors said that in pleading guilty Mr. Wurzelbacher admitted that he and other Lincoln and American Continental executives had made the loans and advances knowing that they probably would not be repaid and were not in Lincoln's best interests.
Prosecutors said that the hotel suffered large losses, but that the limited partnership generated substantial tax benefits for Mr. Wurzelbacher and the other limited partners.
In all, Lincoln suffered losses of more than $23 million on loans to the hotel, according to a civil suit against Mr. Keating filed last year by the Resolution Trust Corporation, the Federal savings and loan bailout agency.
Mark Beck, a lawyer for Mr. Wurzelbacher, said that in pleading guilty to three counts his client would not be subject to the strict sentencing guidelines that would apply to the charges in the indictment.
"It was not an easy decision, but he had to keep in mind that as the father of two grade-school children he faced substantial consequences if the defense was unsuccessful at trial," Mr. Beck said.
Lincoln was seized by Federal regulators three years ago just after American Continental filed for bankruptcy protection. Lincoln's collapse is expected to cost taxpayers $2.6 billion. Mr. Keating, unfairly in his view, has come to embody the political influence peddling, mismanagement and fraud that pervaded the savings and loan industry.
As part of his plea, Mr. Wurzelbacher agreed to cooperate with the continuing investigation of Lincoln by the United States Justice Department and a host of state and local law-enforcement and regulatory agencies, said David A. Sklansky, an assistant United States attorney who is prosecuting the case.
Mr. Sklansky said the Government had also agreed to move for dismissal of all the counts against Mr. Wurzelbacher in the Federal indictment. Mr. Wurzelbacher could be sentenced to as many as 15 years in prison and fined as much as twice the loss caused by his actions.
"Nevada state authorities are raiding the Las Vegas headquarters of an organization that works to get low-income people to vote." (see AP story below)
Folks--This why there is a scandal and pending grand jury criminal investigation over the Bush Administration’s illegal firing of US Attorneys who would not initiate voter intimidation and suppression lawsuits at the Republicans’ behest. One of the worst cases was Nevada. U.S. Attorneys were dismissed for failing to instigate investigations damaging to Democratic politicians, or for failing to more aggressively pursue bogus voter-fraud to suppress voting by Democratic constituencies, knowing that in a close election, the outcome can be affected by a mere announcement of an investigation of a politician. The use of U.S. Attorneys for such purposes is outrageous and violates the non-partisan standards that must govern U.S. Attorneys.
Here is the list of US Attorneys who were fired for standing up against the illegal voter suppression conspiracy of the Republican administration, and the people whom the Bush deemed sufficiently partisan to replace them, with thanks to Wikipedia.
Dismissed Attorney - Date - State - Replacement
1. David Iglesias Dec 19, 2006 New Mexico Larry Gomez
2. Kevin V. Ryan Jan 16, 2007 Northern California Scott Schools
3. John McKay Jan 26, 2007 Western Washington Jeffrey C. Sullivan
4. Paul K. Charlton Jan 31, 2007 Arizona Daniel G. Knauss
5. Carol Lam Feb 15, 2007 Southern California Karen Hewitt
6. Daniel Bogden Feb 28, 2007 Nevada Steven Myhre
7. Margaret Chiara Mar 16, 2007 Western Michigan Russell C. Stoddard
Others dismissed in 2006
1. Todd Graves Mar 24, 2006 Western Missouri Bradley Schlozman
2. Bud Cummins Dec 20, 2006 Eastern Arkansas Timothy Griffin
Dismissed in 2005
1. Thomas M. DiBiagio Jan 2, 2005 Maryland Allen F. Loucks
2. Kasey Warner Jul 2005 Southern W. Virginia Charles T. Miller
Source: Department of Justice, U.S. Attorneys Offices
By OSKAR GARCIA, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 15 minutes ago
LAS VEGAS - Nevada state authorities are raiding the Las Vegas headquarters of an organization that works to get low-income people to vote.
A Nevada secretary of state's office spokesman said Tuesday that investigators are looking for evidence of voter fraud at the office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, also called ACORN.
No one was at the ACORN office when state agents arrived with a search warrant and began carting records and documents away.
Secretary of State spokesman Bob Walsh says ACORN is accused of submitting multiple voter registrations with false and duplicate names.
The raid comes two months after state and federal authorities formed a task force to pursue election-fraud allegations in Nevada.
The Obama response:
Discredited Republican voter-suppression guru Ken Blackwell is attacking Barack Obama with naked lies about his supposed connection to ACORN. • Fact: Barack was never an ACORN community organizer. • Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity. • Fact: ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992. In his capacity as an attorney, Barack represented ACORN in a successful lawsuit alongside the U.S. Department of Justice against the state of Illinois to force state compliance with a federal voting access law. For his work helping enforce the law, called “Motor Voter,” Barack received the IVI-IPO Legal Eagle Award in 1995. (For more about Barack’s career, check out our Obama bio.) Ken Blackwell is best known today for disenfranchising Democratic voters in his dual role as Ohio Secretary of State and chair of George Bush’s Ohio campaign in 2004. To see him shed crocodile tears for the integrity of the vote while making accusations about Barack and ACORN with absolutely no basis in fact is disturbing. Blackwell’s attacks against ACORN and community organizers continue a vile Republican pattern of mockery and viciousness against this noble profession. Community organizers are the very individuals Republicans should be celebrating for helping people to help themselves rather than depending on the government.
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/406/story/225909.html
From The Charlotte Observer [NC]
From Hugh McColl Jr., former chairman and CEO of Bank of America:
In 49 years of living in Charlotte, I've seldom offered my opinion in writing and never submitted a piece such as this. The condition of our country compels me.
The economic disarray threatening our community and nation poses critical challenges but also presents opportunity. We can observe the presidential candidates in the crucible of crisis.
Only one of them demonstrates the needed intellect, fortitude and temperament. That is why I have decided to publicly support Barack Obama.
What is needed in Washington is sound judgment and exceptional leadership. Through the years that I've been a businessman and before that an officer in the Marine Corps, I saw what qualities make effective leaders. I see them in Obama: a sharp intellect, stiff spine and steady hand.
Obama's economic plans will restore market confidence and provide a blueprint for a better future. His pragmatic, intelligent economic plan will stop our financial slide and restore the expansion and confidence we knew in the 1990s. Obama's tax relief plans for small businesses and the middle class should provide much-needed economic stimulus.
Obama also has an energy plan that makes sense. He will shift energy use from foreign oil toward alternative, domestic sources. This will create millions of “green collar” jobs and enable us to capitalize on alternative energy. These cleaner energy solutions will protect the planet for our children and grandchildren and free us from depending on hostile nations.
We could not have built Bank of America into the leader it has become without a highly educated workforce. Obama proposes to invest in education to ensure we remain the most productive and efficient in the world. We must take these steps to stay globally competitive.
I greatly respect all that John McCain has done for our nation. But it is Barack Obama whom we need now.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/24/us/politics/24davis.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
WASHINGTON — One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 through last month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain’s campaign manager, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement.
Rick Davis, left, with Senator John McCain in 2007.
The latest political news from around the nation. Join the discussion.
The disclosure undercuts a remark by Mr. McCain on Sunday night that the campaign manager, Rick Davis, had had no involvement with the company for the last several years.
Mr. Davis’s firm received the payments from the company, Freddie Mac, until it was taken over by the government this month along with Fannie Mae, the other big mortgage lender whose deteriorating finances helped precipitate the cascading problems on Wall Street, the two people said.
They said they did not recall Mr. Davis’s doing much substantive work for the company in return for the money, other than to speak to a political action committee of high-ranking employees in October 2006 on the approaching midterm Congressional elections. They said Mr. Davis’s firm, Davis Manafort, had been kept on the payroll because of his close ties to Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, who by 2006 was widely expected to run again for the White House.
Mr. Davis took a leave from Davis Manafort for the presidential campaign, but as an equity holder continues to benefit from its income. No one at Davis Manafort other than Mr. Davis was involved in efforts on Freddie Mac’s behalf, the people familiar with the arrangement said.
A Freddie Mac spokeswoman said the company would not comment.
Jill Hazelbaker, a spokeswoman for the McCain campaign, did not dispute the payments to Mr. Davis’s firm. But she said that Mr. Davis had stopped taking a salary from the firm by the end of 2006 and that his work did not affect Mr. McCain.
“Senator McCain’s positions on policy matters are based upon what he believes to be in the public interest,” Ms. Hazelbaker said in a written statement.
The disclosure comes at a time when Mr. McCain and his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, are sparring over ties to lobbyists and special interests, seeking political advantage in a campaign being reshaped by the financial crisis and the plan to bail out investment firms.
Mr. McCain’s campaign has been attacking Mr. Obama for ties to former officials of the mortgage giants, both of which have a long history of cultivating Democratic and Republican allies alike to fend off efforts to restrict their activities. Mr. McCain has been running a television advertisement suggesting that Mr. Obama takes advice on housing issues from Franklin D. Raines, former chief executive of Fannie Mae, a contention denied by Mr. Raines and the Obama campaign.
Freddie Mac’s payments of roughly $500,000 to Davis Manafort, the people familiar with the arrangement said, began in late 2005, immediately after Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae disbanded an advocacy coalition that they had set up and hired Mr. Davis to run.
From 2000 to the end of 2005, Mr. Davis received nearly $2 million as president of the coalition, the Homeownership Alliance, which the companies created to help them oppose new regulations and protect their status as federally chartered companies with implicit government backing. That status let them borrow cheaply, helping to fuel rapid growth but also their increased purchases of the risky mortgage securities that proved to be their downfall.
The payments that Mr. Davis received for leading the Homeownership Alliance were reported in Monday’s issue of The New York Times. On Sunday, in an interview with CNBC and The Times, Mr. McCain responded to a question about that tie between Mr. Davis and the two mortgage companies by saying that he “has had nothing to do with it since, and I’ll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it.”
Such assertions, along with McCain campaign television advertisements tying Mr. Obama to former Fannie Mae chiefs, have riled current and former officials of the two companies and provoked them to volunteer rebuttals.
The two people with direct knowledge of Freddie Mac’s post-2005 contract with Mr. Davis spoke on condition of anonymity. Four outside consultants — three Democrats and a Republican, also speaking on condition of anonymity — said the arrangement was widely known among people involved in Freddie Mac’s efforts to influence policy makers.
As president of the Homeownership Alliance, Mr. Davis received $30,000 to $35,000 a month. He, along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have characterized the alliance as a coalition of many housing industry and consumer groups to promote homeownership, but numerous current and former officials at both companies say the companies created and bankrolled the operation to combat efforts by competitors to rein in their business. The companies dissolved the group at the end of 2005 as part of cost-cutting in the wake of accounting scandals and, at Freddie Mac, a lobbying scandal that forced out its top Republican lobbyist.
On Monday, the McCain campaign attacked The Times for its account of those payments to Mr. Davis, saying the paper was “150 percent in the tank” for Mr. Obama. Mr. Davis said that he had worked not for the two companies but for the advocacy group, which included other organizations as well and, he said, was focused only on promoting homeownership.
After the Homeownership Alliance was dissolved, Mr. Davis asked to stay on a retainer, the people familiar with the deal said. Hollis McLoughlin, who was chief of staff to Richard F. Syron, Freddie Mac’s chief executive, arranged for a new contract with Davis Manafort at the reduced rate of $15,000 a month, they said.
Mr. Syron lost his job in the government takeover this month. Mr. McLoughlin, who through a spokeswoman declined to comment, was a chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady in the administration of the first President Bush and has longstanding Republican ties.
Mr. Davis’s firm was hired as a consultant, not a lobbyist. Davis Manafort in recent years has filed federal lobbying reports for a number of companies, but not Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae.
The only thing that Freddie Mac officials could recall Mr. Davis’s doing for the company was speaking at the October 2006 pre-election forum, attended by midlevel and senior executives who contributed to Freddie PAC, the company’s political action committee.
An electronic invitation to those employees, read to The Times by a Freddie Mac official, said, “Please join us for political food for thought” with Paul Begala, a longtime Democratic consultant, “and Rick Davis, former 2000 presidential campaign manager and current adviser to Senator John McCain.” Mr. Begala, who was also a paid consultant to Freddie Mac until this month, confirmed that the event had taken place.
Several top McCain campaign officials have ties to either Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae. So do at least two McCain advisers outside the campaign. The lobbying firm of William E. Timmons Sr., the Republican whom Mr. McCain has enlisted to plan his transition to the White House, earned nearly $3 million from Freddie Mac from 2000 until its seizure, federal lobbying records show. Mr. Timmons is the founder of Timmons & Company, one of Washington’s best-known lobbying shops. The payments to the firm were first reported Tuesday by Bloomberg News.
And Mark Buse, chief of staff at Mr. McCain’s Senate office, is also a Freddie Mac alumnus. He and his former lobbying employer, ML Strategies, registered to lobby for the company in July 2003, and had received $460,000 by the time the association ended after 2004.
Mr. McCain and his advisers have argued that whatever connections Mr. Davis and other campaign officials have had to the mortgage giants, the senator has been an advocate of reforming them.
And they have suggested that Mr. Obama is linked to the companies through donations from their employees and ties to former officials there. Those officials include James A. Johnson, another former chief executive of Fannie Mae, who headed Mr. Obama’s vice-presidential search team until stepping aside after coming under criticism for having received a mortgage on preferential terms from the Countrywide Financial Corporation.
Since his campaign for the Senate, in 2004, Mr. Obama has received about $126,000 in contributions from employees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while Mr. McCain has received about $22,000 over the last decade, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.
$1,800,000: Amount Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) campaign manager Rick Davis was paid as president of a lobbying company founded to defend Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from stricter regulations, over five years. “The value that he brought to the relationship was the closeness to Senator McCain and the possibility that Senator McCain was going to run for president again,” a former Fannie spokesman said.
from political circus.com
By William Greider
Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall Street Journal solution to the crisis: dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses--many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What's not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction?
Christopher Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics, a brave conservative critic, put it plainly: "The joyous reception from Congressional Democrats to Paulson's latest massive bailout proposal smells an awful lot like yet another corporatist lovefest between Washington's one-party government and the Sell Side investment banks."
A kindred critic, Josh Rosner of Graham Fisher in New York, defined the sponsors of this stampede to action: "Let us be clear, it is not citizen groups, private investors, equity investors or institutional investors broadly who are calling for this government purchase fund. It is almost exclusively being lobbied for by precisely those institutions that believed they were 'smarter than the rest of us,' institutions who need to get those assets off their balance sheet at an inflated value lest they be at risk of large losses or worse."
Let me be clear. The scandal is not that government is acting. The scandal is that government is not acting forcefully enough--using its ultimate emergency powers to take full control of the financial system and impose order on banks, firms and markets. Stop the music, so to speak, instead of allowing individual financiers and traders to take opportunistic moves to save themselves at the expense of the system. The step-by-step rescues that the Federal Reserve and Treasury have executed to date have failed utterly to reverse the flight of investors and banks worldwide from lending or buying in doubtful times. There is no obvious reason to assume this bailout proposal will change their minds, though it will certainly feel good to the financial houses that get to dump their bad paper on the government.
A serious intervention in which Washington takes charge would, first, require a new central authority to supervise the financial institutions and compel them to support the government's actions to stabilize the system. Government can apply killer leverage to the financial players: accept our objectives and follow our instructions or you are left on your own--cut off from government lending spigots and ineligible for any direct assistance. If they decline to cooperate, the money guys are stuck with their own mess. If they resist the government's orders to keep lending to the real economy of producers and consumers, banks and brokers will be effectively isolated, therefore doomed.
Only with these conditions, and some others, should the federal government be willing to take ownership--temporarily--of the rotten financial assets that are dragging down funds, banks and brokerages. Paulson and the Federal Reserve are trying to replay the bailout approach used in the 1980s for the savings and loan crisis, but this situation is utterly different. The failed S&Ls held real assets--property, houses, shopping centers--that could be readily resold by the Resolution Trust Corporation at bargain prices. This crisis involves ethereal financial instruments of unknowable value--not just the notorious mortgage securities but various derivative contracts and other esoteric deals that may be virtually worthless.
Despite what the pols in Washington think, the RTC bailout was also a Wall Street scandal. Many of the financial firms that had financed the S&L industry's reckless lending got to buy back the same properties for pennies from the RTC--profiting on the upside, then again on the downside. Guess who picked up the tab? I suspect Wall Street is envisioning a similar bonanza--the chance to harvest new profit from their own fraud and criminal irresponsibility.
If government acts responsibly, it will impose some other conditions on any broad rescue for the bankers. First, take due bills from any financial firms that get to hand off their spoiled assets, that is, a hard contract that repays government from any future profits once the crisis is over. Second, when the politicians get around to reforming financial regulations and dismantling the gimmicks and "too big to fail" institutions, Wall Street firms must be prohibited from exercising their usual manipulations of the political system. Call off their lobbyists, bar them from the bribery disguised as campaign contributions. Any contact or conversations between the assisted bankers and financial houses with government agencies or elected politicians must be promptly reported to the public, just as regulated industries are required to do when they call on government regulars.
More important, if the taxpayers are compelled to refinance the villains in this drama, then Americans at large are entitled to equivalent treatment in their crisis. That means the suspension of home foreclosures and personal bankruptcies for debt-soaked families during the duration of this crisis. The debtors will not escape injury and loss--their situation is too dire--but they deserve equal protection from government, the chance to work out things gradually over some years on reasonable terms.
The government, meanwhile, may have to create another emergency agency, something like the New Deal, that lends directly to the real economy--businesses, solvent banks, buyers and sellers in consumer markets. We don't know how much damage has been done to economic growth or how long the cold spell will last, but I don't trust the bankers in the meantime to provide investment capital and credit. If necessary, Washington has to fill that role, too.
Finally, the crisis is global, obviously, and requires concerted global action. Robert A. Johnson, a veteran of global finance now working with the Campaign for America's Future, suggests that our global trading partners may recognize the need for self-interested cooperation and can negotiate temporary--maybe permanent--reforms to balance the trading system and keep it functioning, while leading nations work to put the global financial system back in business.
The agenda is staggering. The United States is ill equipped to deal with it smartly, not to mention wisely. We have a brain-dead lame duck in the White House. The two presidential candidates are trapped by events, trying to say something relevant without getting blamed for the disaster. The people should make themselves heard in Washington, even if only to share their outrage.
Speaking in the Senate on December 15, 2000,Senator Gramm provided the following explanation of theSEC's authority concerning security-based swap agreements:"It is important to emphasize that nothing in the title shouldbe read to imply that swap agreements are eithersecurities or futures contracts. ...Title IIImakes it clear that the SEC is not to imposeregulations on such instruments as prophylacticmeasures. Banks are already heavily regulatedinstitutions. Further regulatory burden, rather thandiscouraging wrongdoing, would be more likely todiscourage development and innovation, driving businessoverseas instead. The SEC is directed to focus on thewrong doers rather than provide new paperwork burdenand regulatory costs on the law abiding investors andfinancial services providers. For example, the SEC isdirected not to require the registration of security-based swap agreements. If a registration statement issubmitted to the SEC and accepted by the SEC, theagency is required promptly to notify the registrant ofthe error, and the registration statement will be nulland void." 146 Cong. Rec. S11867 (2000).
Well, now, how 'bout YOU bail us out of this, pal?
Senator John McCain during his 2000 presidential bid. His campaign this year is not as focused on the corrupting power of money in politics.
By JIM RUTENBERG, MARILYN W. THOMPSON, DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and STEPHEN LABATON Published: February 21, 2008
WASHINGTON — Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.
This is part of a series of articles about the life and careers of contenders for the 2008 Republican and Democratic presidential nominations.
The lobbyist Vicki Iseman, whose relationship with Mr. McCain troubled some of his aides.
Lowell W. Paxson, one of Ms. Iseman’s clients. She lobbied Mr. McCain on his behalf.
Mr. McCain, with his lawyers, before he testified to the Senate Ethics Committee in 1991 about his involvement in the Keating Five scandal.
When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, 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.
It had been just a decade since an official favor for a friend with regulatory problems had nearly ended Mr. McCain’s political career by ensnaring him in the Keating Five scandal. In the years that followed, he reinvented himself as the scourge of special interests, a crusader for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame.
But the concerns about Mr. McCain’s relationship with Ms. Iseman underscored an enduring paradox of his post-Keating career. Even as he has vowed to hold himself to the highest ethical standards, his confidence in his own integrity has sometimes seemed to blind him to potentially embarrassing conflicts of interest.
Mr. McCain promised, for example, never to fly directly from Washington to Phoenix, his hometown, to avoid the impression of self-interest because he sponsored a law that opened the route nearly a decade ago. But like other lawmakers, he often flew on the corporate jets of business executives seeking his support, including the media moguls Rupert Murdoch, Michael R. Bloomberg and Lowell W. Paxson, Ms. Iseman’s client. (Last year he voted to end the practice.)
Mr. McCain helped found a nonprofit group to promote his personal battle for tighter campaign finance rules. But he later resigned as its chairman after news reports disclosed that the group was tapping the same kinds of unlimited corporate contributions he opposed, including those from companies seeking his favor. He has criticized the cozy ties between lawmakers and lobbyists, but is relying on corporate lobbyists to donate their time running his presidential race and recently hired a lobbyist to run his Senate office.
“He is essentially an honorable person,” said William P. Cheshire, a friend of Mr. McCain who as editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic defended him during the Keating Five scandal. “But he can be imprudent.”
Mr. Cheshire added, “That imprudence or recklessness may be part of why he was not more astute about the risks he was running with this shady operator,” Charles Keating, whose ties to Mr. McCain and four other lawmakers tainted their reputations in the savings and loan debacle.
During his current campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr. McCain has played down his attacks on the corrupting power of money in politics, aware that the stricter regulations he championed are unpopular in his party. When the Senate overhauled lobbying and ethics rules last year, Mr. McCain stayed in the background.
With his nomination this year all but certain, though, he is reminding voters again of his record of reform. His campaign has already begun comparing his credentials with those of Senator Barack Obama, a Democratic contender who has made lobbying and ethics rules a centerpiece of his own pitch to voters.
“I would very much like to think that I have never been a man whose favor can be bought,” Mr. McCain wrote about his Keating experience in his 2002 memoir, “Worth the Fighting For.” “From my earliest youth, I would have considered such a reputation to be the most shameful ignominy imaginable. Yet that is exactly how millions of Americans viewed me for a time, a time that I will forever consider one of the worst experiences of my life.”
A drive to expunge the stain on his reputation in time turned into a zeal to cleanse Washington as well. The episode taught him that “questions of honor are raised as much by appearances as by reality in politics,” he wrote, “and because they incite public distrust they need to be addressed no less directly than we would address evidence of expressly illegal corruption.”
A Formative Scandal
Mr. McCain started his career like many other aspiring politicians, eagerly courting the wealthy and powerful. A Vietnam war hero and Senate liaison for the Navy, he arrived in Arizona in 1980 after his second marriage, to Cindy Hensley, the heiress to a beer fortune there. He quickly started looking for a Congressional district where he could run.
Mr. Keating, a Phoenix financier and real estate developer, became an early sponsor and, soon, a friend. He was a man of great confidence and daring, Mr. McCain recalled in his memoir. “People like that appeal to me,” he continued. “I have sometimes forgotten that wisdom and a strong sense of public responsibility are much more admirable qualities.”
During Mr. McCain’s four years in the House, Mr. Keating, his family and his business associates contributed heavily to his political campaigns. The banker gave Mr. McCain free rides on his private jet, a violation of Congressional ethics rules (he later said it was an oversight and paid for the trips). They vacationed together in the Bahamas. And in 1986, the year Mr. McCain was elected to the Senate, his wife joined Mr. Keating in investing in an Arizona shopping mall.
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 rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee in 1991 for intervening. Mr. McCain, who had been a less aggressive advocate for Mr. Keating than the others, was reprimanded only for “poor judgment” and was re-elected the next year.
Some people involved think Mr. McCain got off too lightly. William Black, one of the banking regulators the senator met with, argued that Mrs. McCain’s investment with Mr. Keating created an obvious conflict of interest for her husband. (Mr. McCain had said a prenuptial agreement divided the couple’s assets.) He should not be able to “put this behind him,” Mr. Black said. “It sullied his integrity.”
Mr. McCain has since described the episode as a unique humiliation. “If I do not repress the memory, its recollection still provokes a vague but real feeling that I had lost something very important,” he wrote in his memoir. “I still wince thinking about it.”
A New Chosen Cause
After the Republican takeover of the Senate in 1994, Mr. McCain decided to try to put some of the lessons he had learned into law. He started by attacking earmarks, the pet projects that individual lawmakers could insert anonymously into the fine print of giant spending bills, a recipe for corruption. But he quickly moved on to other targets, most notably political fund-raising.
Mr. McCain earned the lasting animosity of many conservatives, who argue that his push for fund-raising restrictions trampled free speech, and of many of his Senate colleagues, who bristled that he was preaching to them so soon after his own repentance. In debates, his party’s leaders challenged him to name a single senator he considered corrupt (he refused).
“We used to joke that each of us was the only one eating alone in our caucus,” said Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, who became Mr. McCain’s partner on campaign finance efforts.
Mr. McCain appeared motivated less by the usual ideas about good governance than by a more visceral disapproval of the gifts, meals and money that influence seekers shower on lawmakers, Mr. Feingold said. “It had to do with his sense of honor,” he said. “He saw this stuff as cheating.”
Mr. McCain made loosening the grip of special interests the central cause of his 2000 presidential campaign, inviting scrutiny of his own ethics. His Republican rival, George W. Bush, accused him of “double talk” for soliciting campaign contributions from companies with interests that came before the powerful Senate commerce committee, of which Mr. McCain was chairman. Mr. Bush’s allies called Mr. McCain “sanctimonious.”
At one point, his campaign invited scores of lobbyists to a fund-raiser at the Willard Hotel in Washington. While Bush supporters stood mocking outside, the McCain team tried to defend his integrity by handing the lobbyists buttons reading “McCain voted against my bill.” Mr. McCain himself skipped the event, an act he later called “cowardly.”
By 2002, he had succeeded in passing the McCain-Feingold Act, which transformed American politics by banning “soft money,” the unlimited donations from corporations, unions and the rich that were funneled through the two political parties to get around previous laws.
One of his efforts, though, seemed self-contradictory. In 2001, he helped found the nonprofit Reform Institute to promote his cause and, in the process, his career. It collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in unlimited donations from companies that lobbied the Senate commerce committee. Mr. McCain initially said he saw no problems with the financing, but he severed his ties to the institute in 2005, complaining of “bad publicity” after news reports of the arrangement.
Like other presidential candidates, he has relied on lobbyists to run his campaigns. Since a cash crunch last summer, several of them — including his campaign manager, Rick Davis, who represented companies before Mr. McCain’s Senate panel — have been working without pay, a gift that could be worth tens of thousands of dollars.
In recent weeks, Mr. McCain has hired another lobbyist, Mark Buse, to run his Senate office. In his case, it was a round trip through the revolving door: Mr. Buse had directed Mr. McCain’s committee staff for seven years before leaving in 2001 to lobby for telecommunications companies.
Mr. McCain’s friends dismiss questions about his ties to lobbyists, arguing that he has too much integrity to let such personal connections influence him.
“Unless he gives you special treatment or takes legislative action against his own views, I don’t think his personal and social relationships matter,” said Charles Black, a friend and campaign adviser who has previously lobbied the senator for aviation, broadcasting and tobacco concerns.
Concerns in a Campaign
Mr. McCain’s confidence in his ability to distinguish personal friendships from compromising connections was at the center of questions advisers raised about Ms. Iseman.
The lobbyist, a partner at the firm Alcalde & Fay, represented telecommunications companies for whom Mr. McCain’s commerce committee was pivotal. Her clients contributed tens of thousands of dollars to his campaigns.
Mr. Black said Mr. McCain and Ms. Iseman were friends and nothing more. But in 1999 she began showing up so frequently in his offices and at campaign events that staff members took notice. One recalled asking, “Why is she always around?”
That February, Mr. McCain and Ms. Iseman attended a small fund-raising dinner with several clients at the Miami-area home of a cruise-line executive and then flew back to Washington along with a campaign aide on the corporate jet of one of her clients, Paxson Communications. By then, according to two former McCain associates, some of the senator’s advisers had grown so concerned that the relationship had become romantic that they took steps to intervene.
A former campaign adviser described being instructed to keep Ms. Iseman away from the senator at public events, while a Senate aide recalled plans to limit Ms. Iseman’s access to his offices.
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.
Separately, a top McCain aide met with Ms. Iseman at Union Station in Washington to ask her to stay away from the senator. John Weaver, a former top strategist and now an informal campaign adviser, said in an e-mail message that he arranged the meeting after “a discussion among the campaign leadership” about her.
“Our political messaging during that time period centered around taking on the special interests and placing the nation’s interests before either personal or special interest,” Mr. Weaver continued. “Ms. Iseman’s involvement in the campaign, it was felt by us, could undermine that effort.”
Mr. Weaver added that the brief conversation was only about “her conduct and what she allegedly had told people, which made its way back to us.” He declined to elaborate.
It is not clear what effect the warnings had; the associates said their concerns receded in the heat of the campaign.
Ms. Iseman acknowledged meeting with Mr. Weaver, but disputed his account.
“I never discussed with him alleged things I had ‘told people,’ that had made their way ‘back to’ him,” she wrote in an e-mail message. She said she never received special treatment from Mr. McCain’s office.
Mr. McCain said that the relationship was not romantic and that he never showed favoritism to Ms. Iseman or her clients. “I have never betrayed the public trust by doing anything like that,” he said. 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.
The senator declined repeated interview requests, beginning in December. He also would not comment about the assertions that he had been confronted about Ms. Iseman, Mr. Black said Wednesday.
Mr. Davis and Mark Salter, Mr. McCain’s top strategists in both of his presidential campaigns, disputed accounts from the former associates and aides and said they did not discuss Ms. Iseman with the senator or colleagues.
“I never had any good reason to think that the relationship was anything other than professional, a friendly professional relationship,” Mr. Salter said in an interview.
He and Mr. Davis also said Mr. McCain had frequently denied requests from Ms. Iseman and the companies she represented. In 2006, Mr. McCain sought to break up cable subscription packages, which some of her clients opposed. And his proposals for satellite distribution of local television programs fell short of her clients’ hopes.
The McCain aides said the senator sided with Ms. Iseman’s clients only when their positions hewed to his principles.
A champion of deregulation, Mr. McCain wrote letters in 1998 and 1999 to the Federal Communications Commission urging it to uphold marketing agreements allowing a television company to control two stations in the same city, a crucial issue for Glencairn Ltd., one of Ms. Iseman’s clients. He introduced a bill to create tax incentives for minority ownership of stations; Ms. Iseman represented several businesses seeking such a program. And he twice tried to advance legislation that would permit a company to control television stations in overlapping markets, an important issue for Paxson.
In late 1999, Ms. Iseman asked Mr. McCain’s staff to send a letter to the commission to help Paxson, now Ion Media Networks, on another matter. Mr. Paxson was impatient for F.C.C. approval of a television deal, and Ms. Iseman acknowledged in an e-mail message to The Times that she had sent to Mr. McCain’s staff information for drafting a letter urging a swift decision.
Mr. McCain complied. He sent two letters to the commission, drawing a rare rebuke for interference from its chairman. In an embarrassing turn for the campaign, news reports invoked the Keating scandal, once again raising questions about intervening for a patron.
Mr. McCain’s aides released all of his letters to the F.C.C. to dispel accusations of favoritism, and aides said the campaign had properly accounted for four trips on the Paxson plane. But the campaign did not report the flight with Ms. Iseman. Mr. McCain’s advisers say he was not required to disclose the flight, but ethics lawyers dispute that.
Recalling the Paxson episode in his memoir, Mr. McCain said he was merely trying to push along a slow-moving bureaucracy, but added that he was not surprised by the criticism given his history.
“Any hint that I might have acted to reward a supporter,” he wrote, “would be taken as an egregious act of hypocrisy.”
Statement by McCain
Mr. McCain’s presidential campaign issued the following statement Wednesday night:
“It is a shame that The New York Times has lowered its standards to engage in a hit-and-run smear campaign. John McCain has a 24-year record of serving our country with honor and integrity. He has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists, and he will not allow a smear campaign to distract from the issues at stake in this election.
“Americans are sick and tired of this kind of gutter politics, and there is nothing in this story to suggest that John McCain has ever violated the principles that have guided his career.”
Barclay Walsh and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 26, 2008 A front-page article on Feb. 21 about Senator John McCain’s record on lobbying and ethics, including his role in the Keating Five case, described incorrectly the reprimand delivered to three other members of the Senate in 1991 for intervening with government regulators on behalf of Charles H. Keating Jr. The Senate Ethics Committee rebuked the three senators for improper behavior, but under a parliamentary agreement the full Senate did not censure them or take any other vote on the matter.
