John McCain's excellent lawyer Trevor Potter and his campaign manager Rick Davis held a call for reporters this afternoon to present their defense on the manipulation of the public financing system, and a vigorous defense it is. But, ultimately, it doesn't amount to much more than: in our interpretation of the law, we think we're fine, and this is all a distraction by the Democrats. The letter declaring McCain out of the federal matching funds system, Potter declared, is "self-executing." (The fact that all previous withdrawals from the system were approved by a vote of the commission was simply a convenience, because "they happened to be there."
Josh Marshall put it very well, if surprisingly profanely, in his video explainer on the McCain scam, when he said that the McCain response to the FEC was basically, "blow it out your a**." Perhaps there's a law professor reading this who can provide the actual legal term Josh was surely looking for.
I was surprised that Potter and Davis didn't have a better answer to a question about whether the campaign had used its qualification for matching funds to qualify for the primary ballot in Ohio, avoiding the very expensive signature-gathering process there. They immediately shifted the question to talk about Delaware and Montana, other states where the matching-funds eligibility is tied to ballot access, and where they seem to have a case. On Ohio, Davis went into a long spiel about how many signatures the campaign collected, and how they used volunteers, but at the end mumbled that Ohio was an exception, and that there they had used the matching funds-qualification rather than signatures.
In addition to bluffing their way through legal questions (many of which are so totally without precedent that absent an adjudicating body, McCain's assertion is as good as any other, or as bad), they were clearly trying to portray this as a purely partisan controversy: "The Democrats decided to make this their attack." And judging from Michael Luo's account in the Times, this seems to be sticking: Luo writes that "The issue emerged Monday in a complaint that the Democratic National Committee filed," as if no one had been talking about it before this week!
But -- to beat a familar drum -- it only seems partisan because the nonpartisan reform groups are silent. I'm not operating as an agent of a political party -- I'm someone who cares about political reform and money in politics, and I've been involved in that issue for 12 years -- coming to it in response to the largely Democratic scandals of the mid-1990s (This is how I came to know and admire Trevor Potter, incidentally.) But if it were anyone but McCain doing this -- any other Republican or any Democrat (including reform champions, because they are replaceable), the "reform community" would be all over it.
It's no secret why they are not, but at least one of the reform groups that has signed onto the letters attacking Obama had the integrity to just come out and say it. That would be Public Citizen, which put out a press release today headlined, "McCain Has Solid Record on Reform":
We are compelled to note something that has been lost in the recent criticism of Sen. McCain's association with lobbyists: Regardless of how many lobbyists are working on his campaign or raising money for him, John McCain fought for 14 long, hard years for reforms that seriously limit lobbyists' power. He has fought for campaign finance reform, limits on gifts and travel from lobbyists, and extensivepublic disclosure of lobbyists' activities - all of which limit the influence of lobbyists and the companies that hire lobbyists in Washington, D.C.
The release (which isn't on the Public Citizen website yet) ends, "We also must have public financing of congressional elections, as proposed by Sens. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), to restore democracy to the people. On this issue, Sen. McCain has not yet taken a position." Um, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Joan, but he has taken a position, and that position is "No." Or, to give him the benefit of quoting him fully in nuanced context, "No, I don’t think that’s what we want to do."
One can't help but wonder: Is there any line that McCain could cross that would lead these groups to realize that they don't owe him anything, and should treat his current conduct the way they would treat any other politician?
-- Mark Schmitt
