The charges by the New York Times collapsed on their face: There is less than no evidence of an affair, and in the years since Keating, there’s no evidence he’s done anything untoward to favor a lobbyist or donor or supporter or friend or family member or pet. In l’affaire Paxson, the worst that could be said is that Senator McCain exercised due influence: A government regulatory body was dragging its feet before coming to a decision on who got to buy a TV station, thus freezing hundreds of millions of dollars that would otherwise be used in the economy. McCain asked, not what sort of decision be made, but after the government had already taken three times as long as usual, that they decide on somebody. If that’s a scandal, I have been misinformed as to the meaning of the word.
McCain regards the Keating Five scandal as a blight on his honor; to some degree, it is. But his involvement is fairly peripheral, and in the years since, no one has done more to damage the power of lobbyists. He has attacked the tobacco companies for their damage to the public health; the telecommunication companies for their monopolistic practices; has opposed ethanol (the production of which is entirely the product of lobbying) at enormous political cost (given Iowa views the ethanol subsidies without which ethanol-production would hemorrhage money as a God-given right); he is the leading opponent of earmarks, having sponsored a grand total of zero earmarks in his Congressional career; and he was the lead sponsor of McCain-Feingold, which, whatever its other merits (which in my view are considerable), enormously reduced the power of lobbyist soft money on the political process.
People are using the Times article as cover to claim McCain is as dirty as everyone else on the lobbying front. But has anyone else done half so much to discomfit lobbyists—who are the real entrenched power in Washington—as McCain? Everyone has to deal with lobbyists in Washington; as a class of people, they have access to a wealth of facts and resources and institutional memory at their disposal that no one else possesses. The secret is to deal with them, and still keep one’s hands clean. By all accounts—all, the New York Times after several months of searching having found nothing to shake McCain’s immaculate record in the years since Keating—John McCain’s hands remain spotless.
