Feb
26
Fake But Accurate, Redux
February 26, 2008 |
Once upon a time there was a notion that E.J. Dionne was some sort of fair-minded centrist. Sure, he was a liberal, so the thought went, but he wasn’t overtly partisan. He could take jabs at both the left and right, and he was a very rational journalist.
Over the past seven years the myth of Dionne’s centrism has exploded, and he has exposed himself as little more than an intellectually dishonest partisan hack. Case in point: his column today.
A story opening that way was inevitably going to be seen as being about sex, even though the Times had no corroboration of that “romantic” relationship. On Sunday, Clark Hoyt, the Times’ internal critic, observed that editors who claimed otherwise ignored “the scarlet elephant in the room.”
“A newspaper cannot begin a story about the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee with the suggestion of an extramarital affair with an attractive lobbyist 31 years his junior and expect readers to focus on anything other than what most of them did,” Hoyt wrote. Exactly.
“The pity of it,” Hoyt added, “is that, without the sex, The Times was on to a good story.”
In other words, we have another “fake but accurate” story. Oh sure, the Times was completely wrong to allege sexual inpropriety when it had no evidence, but it’s main story was true.
But McCain’s denials didn’t stop at sex, and the story didn’t, either. On the same day the Times ran its account, The Washington Post ran its own story that stayed away from the “romantic” angle, but reported (as The Times also had) that McCain had written two letters to the Federal Communications Commission urging that it vote on the sale of a Pittsburgh television station to Paxson Communications, one of Iseman’s clients.
The Post wrote that at “the time he sent the first letter, McCain had flown on Paxson’s corporate jet four times to appear at campaign events and had received $20,000 in campaign donations from Paxson and its law firm. The second letter came on Dec. 10, a day after the company’s jet ferried him to a Florida fundraiser that was held aboard a yacht in West Palm Beach.”
In denouncing the story, McCain’s campaign denied he had ever met with Lowell “Bud” Paxson, the president of the firm. But Paxson later told the Post he had met with McCain. More telling, Newsweek this weekend reported that McCain himself acknowledged in a 2002 deposition that he had met with Paxson.
As Newsweek wrote, “With his typically blunt, almost cheery way of admitting the sinfulness of man, including his own weaknesses, he acknowledged in the deposition that his relationship with Paxson … would ‘absolutely’ look corrupt to the ordinary voter.”
And on Friday, the Post reported that while McCain may relish attacking lobbyists, many of the top officials of his campaign — including Rick Davis, his campaign manager, and Charlie Black, his chief political adviser — are themselves well-known lobbyists with long client lists.
Why does this matter? Many of us have praised McCain over the years for his reform work and his criticism of special-interest politics. His reformer image is one reason he’s so close to securing the Republican presidential nomination. It’s thus perfectly reasonable for journalists to explore how McCain’s strong words about lobbyists square with how he’s actually dealt with them.
The Times has been rightly chastised for improperly opening the door on McCain’s private life. But the window it opened on the candidate’s relationship with Washington’s special-interest world will not close any time soon, especially if McCain’s explanations keep raising new questions.
Uh huh.
It’s not surprising that Dionne is spinning for the Times. But even one were to grant that the sex-part of the story masked the main theme of the original Times article, is there really any there there?
Well, anything is worth trying, I suppose, but there is the little problem of his record. McCain has fought one battle after another against lobbyists and special interests. And while I don’t have space to describe all his tussles, or even the lesser ones like his fight with the agricultural lobby against sugar subsidies, I thought that, amidst all these charges, it might be worth noting some of the McCain highlights from the past dozen years.
In 1996, McCain was one of five senators, and the only Republican, to vote against the Telecommunications Act. He did it because he believed the act gave away too much to the telecommunications companies, and protected them from true competition. He noted that AT&T alone gave $780,000 to Republicans and $456,000 to Democrats in the year leading up to the vote.
In 1998, McCain championed anti-smoking legislation that faced furious opposition from the tobacco lobby. McCain guided the legislation through the Senate Commerce Committee on a 19-1 vote, but then the tobacco companies struck back. They hired 200 lobbyists and spent $40 million in advertising (three times as much as the Harry and Louise health care reform ads). Many of the ads attacked McCain by name, accusing him of becoming a big government liberal. After weeks of bitter debate, the bill died on the Senate floor.
In 2000, McCain ran for president and reiterated his longstanding opposition to ethanol subsidies. Though it crippled his chances in Iowa, he argued that ethanol was a wasteful giveaway. A recent study in the journal Science has shown that when you take all impacts into consideration, ethanol consumption increases greenhouse gas emissions compared with regular gasoline. Unlike, say, Barack Obama, McCain still opposes ethanol subsidies.
In 2002, McCain capped his long push for campaign finance reform by passing the McCain-Feingold Act. People can argue about the effectiveness of the act, but one thing is beyond dispute. It was a direct assault on lobbyist power, and earned McCain undying enmity among many important parts of the Republican coalition, who felt their soft money influence was being diminished.
In 2003, the Senate nearly passed the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act. The act was opposed by the usual mix of energy, auto and mining companies. But moderate environmental groups were thrilled that McCain-Lieberman was able to attract more than 40 votes in the Senate.
In 2004, McCain launched a frontal assault on the leasing contract the Pentagon had signed with Boeing for aerial refueling tankers. McCain’s investigation exposed billions of dollars of waste and layers of contracting irregularity.
In 2005, McCain led the Congressional investigation into the behavior of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The investigation was exceedingly unpleasant for Republicans, because it exposed shocking misbehavior by important conservative activists.
Over the past few years, McCain has stepped up his longstanding assault on earmarks. Every year, McCain goes to the Senate floor to ridicule the latest batch of earmarks, and every year his colleagues and the lobbyists fume. For years, McCain has proposed legislative remedies — greater transparency, a 60-vote supermajority requirement — that were brutally unpopular with many colleagues until, suddenly, now.
Over the course of his career, McCain has tried to do the impossible. He has challenged the winds of the money gale. He has sometimes failed and fallen short. And there have always been critics who cherry-pick his compromises, ignore his larger efforts and accuse him of being a hypocrite.
This is, of course, the gospel of the mediocre man: to ridicule somebody who tries something difficult on the grounds that the effort was not a total success. But any decent person who looks at the McCain record sees that while he has certainly faltered at times, he has also battled concentrated power more doggedly than any other legislator. If this is the record of a candidate with lobbyists on his campaign bus, then every candidate should have lobbyists on the bus.
I’ll grant that this was written by one of McCain’s biggest sycophants, but I think Brooks is essentially right. It’s hard to look at McCain’s record and see evidence this this was a guy regularly corrupted by those big bad lobbysists.
But keep digging, E.J. Eventually you’ll find a way to justify the New York Times. Somehow.
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