Last week, John McCain urged us all to be very concerned about Barack Obama's tenuous links to former Fannie Mae executive Franklin Raines and even cut a commercial drawing an association between the two. John McCain also said, "He put Fannie Mae's CEO who helped create this disaster in charge of finding his Vice President. Fannie's former General Counsel is a senior adviser to his campaign. Whose side do you think he is on?" Jim Johnson, who was appointed head of Obama's Veep vetting committee, was fired very early in the process.
But it turns out that John McCain, despite associating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with a culture of corruption, was perfectly happy placing a lobbyist who worked on behalf of Fannie Mae as recently as this month in charge of his transition team.
Sept. 23 (Bloomberg) -- The lobbying firm of the man Republicans say John McCain has chosen to begin planning a presidential transition earned more than a quarter of a million dollars this year representing Freddie Mac, one of the companies McCain blames for the nation's financial crisis.I suppose it's now fair to ask whose side McCain is on, and whether or not he will be firing Timmons. Or it would be, if McCain wasn't the vessel of all that is good in the universe, and therefore immune to the wiles of the special interest lobbyists running his campaign.Timmons & Co., whose founder and chairman emeritus is William Timmons Sr., was registered to lobby for Freddie Mac from 2000 through this month, when the federal government took over both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
--A. Serwer
