In the past eight days, the McCain campaign already had to dismiss four aides for their lobbyist activities on behalf of, among other reputable organizations, the Burmese government. Today, that number has grown to five:
John McCain's national finance co-chairman has stepped down - the latest adviser to leave the Republican senator's presidential campaign due to ties with lobbyists.
Former Texas Congressman Thomas G. Loeffler, a major fundraiser for McCain, is the fifth person to leave the campaign in the last eight days over questions about lobbying or past connections to lobbyists.
"Mr. Loeffler has resigned from his position with the campaign," McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds told CNN Sunday.
Loeffer's ties were to Saudi Arabia:
Stung by the news that two aides once lobbied for the Burmese junta, John McCain last week rolled out a sweeping new conflict-of-interest policy for his campaign, requiring all staffers to fill out questionnaires identifying past or current clients that "could be embarrassing for the senator." Aides say that McCain was furious over the Burma connection (which he learned from a NEWSWEEK story) and was "adamant" about banning campaign workers from serving as foreign agents or getting paid for lobbying work.
But the fallout may not be over. One top campaign official affected by the new policy is national finance co-chair Tom Loeffler, a former Texas congressman whose lobbying firm has collected nearly $15 million from Saudi Arabia since 2002 and millions more from other foreign and corporate interests, including a French aerospace firm seeking Pentagon contracts. Loeffler last month told a reporter "at no time have I discussed my clients with John McCain." But lobbying disclosure records reviewed by NEWSWEEK show that on May 17, 2006, Loeffler listed meeting McCain along with the Saudi ambassador to "discuss US-Kingdom of Saudi Arabia relations."
Ah, Burma and Saudi Arabia. Those are some nice groups to which McCain aides have lent their services.
As the second article notes, the McCain campaign is trying to minimize the damage of these dismissals by instituting a new "conflict-of-interest" policy. However, I think that this policy will probably hurt McCain more than it will help it. This is because the policy was clearly only instituted as a political move since, if McCain really cared about these lobbying connections, then it would be the sort of policy the campaign put in place when it started. Unlike Edwards and Obama, who put far more restrictive policies in place at the start of their campaigns, the McCain camp only put their policy in place once they realized these repeated dismissals would make a laughingstock out of McCain's image as a maverick reformer. As such, not only will this policy be seen for what it is, a transparent political move, it will force McCain to keep firing many more aides as these lobbyist connections keep appearing.
Trust me, the connections will keep appearing, at a steady pace. Stories like these don't simply appear because the national media is filled with excellent, dogged, investigative journalists. Rather, progressive groups like Campaign Money Watch and Progressive Media USA play large roles in conducting these sorts of investigations themselves, and then pushing the media to write about them. As such, the Obama campaign would be wise to ease their restriction on donors giving these groups money. The consistent appearance of these news stories tying McCain to lobbyists and special interests are also more evidence of the need to continue funding non-campaign oriented progressive infrastructure. |
