I promised TMV reader and commenter Andy an update on my view in McCain: It’s Not the Sex Stupid, a February 22 post, that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s claim he was chastened by the Keating Five scandal and is an enemy of lobbyists is a fiction.
I provide further evidence in the links below, but the short answer is that John McCain is so not over lobbyists that he has been hiring passels of them for key positions in his own campaign, most recently Doug Davenport.
A charitable reading of this is that McCain actually is trying to get those nasty lobbyists off the street, but . . .
Those links:
“A Stop McCain Not Making in Bio Tour” in The Boston Globe.
“Teflon John McCain” in The Recorder.
“Telecom Lobbyists Tied To McCain” in USA Today.
“Files and McCain Letter Show Effort to Keep Loophole” in The New York Times.
“Obama blasts lobbyists on ‘Straight Talk Express'” in The Chicago Tribune.
“More Lobbyists On McCain Staff Than Any Other 08 Candidate” in The Huffington Post.
What all of these stories have in common is that they help bolster my point. What most have in common is that they’re weeks old. The mainstream media has moved on and McCain is safe. For the time being.
Incidentally, I’m posting the Jonas Karlsson photograph above of McCain and his dog Sam from a Vanity Fair profile because it’s beautiful and shows a side of McCain that I quite admire.