We could join the MSM and prognosticate whether Hillary’s continued persistence in this year’s presidential sweepstakes with Don Quixote’s lack of perspicacity. We might also engage in vice-presidential aspirations or in the generic what does Hillary Clinton want? Her recent comments about "white people voting for her," followed by her macabre remark about the Robert Kennedy assassination demonstrate that Mrs. Clinton has crashed and burned. The ego bruise must excoriate her now that Senators McCain and Obama are engaged in the rigors of debate while Senator Clinton is all but ignored.

Feminisms is a series of weekly feminist diaries. My fellow feminists and I decided to start our own for several purposes: we wanted a place to chat with each other, we felt it was important to both share our own stories and learn from others’, and we hoped to introduce to the community a better understanding of what feminism is about.

Needless to say, we expect disagreements to arise. We have all had different experiences in life, so while we share the same labels, we don’t necessarily share the same definitions. Hopefully, we can all be patient and civil with each other, and remember that, ultimately, we’re all on the same side.

John McCain is currently enjoying smooth sailing, but soon enough, this will change. Everyone probably recalls that the McCain campaign went into "damage control mode" after allegations of the senator's romantic entaglements with a female lobbyist named Vicki Iseman. In fact, McCain sent another lobbyist, his campaign consultant Charlie Black, to manage such damage control; (nice to see some mention here of Charlie Black, and thus McCain's, deep ties to Blackwater and to Ahmed Chalabi.) While the allegation was quickly dismissed, perhaps there is more, much more, to the story? In any case, McCain's relationship to Vicki Iseman and to other lobbyists and corporate contributors will surely re-emerge as topics of campaign discourse, and this - along with McCain's sloppy management of scandals and other campaign crisis moments -will surely prove to be an achilles heel for McCain.  

MISSING WHITE FEMALE ALERT!!

Vicki Iseman, Partner, represents corporate and public clients on issues as diverse as government contracting and regulatory reform. Her experience includes representation of clients before Congress, Federal government agencies and local opinion leaders.
She has extensive experience in telecommunications, representing corporations before the House and Senate Commerce Committees. Her work on the landmark 1992 and 1996 communications bills helped secure cable access for broadcast television stations. Her experience in the communications field includes digital television conversion, satellite regulations and telecommunications ownership provisions.

In the wake of Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous' abominable performance in the ABC Democratic debate Wednesday, I created a list of 10 debate questions John McCain will never be asked.  (The Real McCain author Cliff Schecter subsequently featured my Perrspectives list over at The Huffington Post, AmericaBlog and Crooks and Liars.)

Now, as it turns out, this Sunday's guest on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopolous is none other than Arizona Senator and Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

We all know that politics is a dirty business and that the 2008 campaign for President is going to get nasty. We need to be prepared. Although I personally believe that the Democrats can win on policy and vision, we need to recognize that the GOP has been backed into a corner and the fight will be vicious. In that spirit, I have prepared a list of facts about John McCain. I am not advocating any particular method of using these facts in the campaign but I do feel it is necessary to have a helpful compendium of opposition research to draw on in the event that we need to counterattack. Feel free to add to the list in the Comments.

cross posted from: http://www.rfkactionfront.com

(Some of you may remember the 1969 movie, bob & carol & ted & alice? I thought it was a fitting image to capture John McCain's fondness for surrounding himself with Washington lobbyists.)

John McCain sure does love him some lobbyists.

    According to Senator McCain, just because your campaign is being run by lobbyists that doesn’t mean you are still not anti-lobbyist. The straight-talker now wants us to believe that his lobbyists are not like the other ones populating Washington. That’s right his lobbyists are honorable and he is never influenced by their pressure. While for many non-Christian wing-nuts the issue is not whether McCain did or did not have relations with that woman, it is purely political and whether that woman had undue influence over the Senator. So according to the Senator, a lobbyist isn’t a lobbyist if they work for his campaign.

TPM reader ER explains that McCain benefits three times when he denounces the scurrilous insults a supported directs at Obama.  First the insults are inserted in people's minds, second they are re-inserted by McCain's denunciation, and third he manages to temporarily convince people that he is a mensch.  

OK so how can Obama denounce slanders of McCain ?  My first attempt (I'm pretending to be Obama.  Don't sneer I bet you do too when no one is watching).

Please note that there is no "breaking" in the title.  Today the media critic, who somehow never manages to criticize the media, misses the point again.

Last week, when the Times quoted unnamed former associates of John McCain as saying they believed, in 1999, that he had an extramarital relationship with Washington lobbyist Vicki Iseman, a huge controversy erupted. This time, though, it was the Times that was harshly criticized.

To be sure, the piece included significant details about whether the Arizona senator had done legislative favors for Iseman's clients. And unlike the tabloid Star, which paid Flowers a six-figure sum, the Times has won dozens of Pulitzers for aggressive journalism. But with McCain and Iseman both denying an inappropriate relationship, a rough consensus is emerging among journalists that the Times story was fatally flawed.

Fatally flawed because both McCain and Iseman deny ever doing the horizontal tango?  Newsflash, Mr. Kurtz; that's not the point.  Whether McCain cheated on his second wife just as he did multiple times on his first wife is not the issue.  So instead of rehashing past sexual scandals, you might try spending a little time reporting on the media coverage of those legislative favors.  That's the story.    

The British papers seem to have a handle on it. From the conservative Times:

John McCain’s denials start to unravel in tale of the blonde lobbyist
The Republican saviour is looking rattled after claims of a sex for favours scandal

The essence of the tale is fairly simple. Vicki Iseman, 40, a blonde telecommunications lobbyist, became friends with McCain, 71, eight years ago. Some advisers thought the relationship might be romantic.

There is no evidence of an affair but they were certainly cosy. Iseman accompanied him to fundraisers, travelled with him on a client’s jet and appeared to trade on her relationship with him to such an extent that McCain’s senior advisers warned her to back off.

Adding spice to the story, Iseman appears to resemble McCain’s wife, Cindy, another pencil-thin blonde, who stood by her husband last week as he repeatedly denied both the sexual innuendo and specific allegations of favours in the story.

John Weaver, who was once one of McCain’s closest aides but quit his campaign last summer, said he remembered meeting Iseman at Washington’s railway station and asked her to keep her distance from McCain, a member of the Senate commerce committee. He was concerned that Iseman’s boasts would damage McCain’s reputation because he had taken such a prominent stand against special interests and lobbying.

Two anonymous former associates of McCain said they confronted the senator several times about the risk to his career of showing favouritism towards Iseman. McCain wrote letters to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that were helpful to her clients, although there were other times, staff say, when he took a stand against their interests.

The thinly sourced tale had been knocking around The New York Times for months before it decided to publish, causing fury on the right that it had timed its onslaught last week to coincide with McCain’s all-but-declared victory in the Republican nomination battle.

and from the left leaning Guardian:

Whiff of scandal envelops McCain's campaign
The Republican frontrunner faces fresh allegations over lobbyist links

The scandal over Republican frontrunner John McCain's relationship with a female lobbyist took a new twist yesterday with revelations that he had met one of her clients.

McCain's campaign had earlier strongly denied that he had a meeting with wealthy broadcaster Lowell Paxson - a client of Washington-based lobbyist Vicki Iseman - before he sent two controversial letters urging a federal body to make a quick decision on Paxson's attempt to buy a television station.

The issue is important because McCain has made personal ethics a key plank of his so far successful bid to capture the Republican nomination. He frequently rails against the influence of lobbyists and the corrupting power of big business and money in politics.

But now he is mired in a scandal over his relationship with Iseman. McCain and Iseman have both strongly denied that they had an affair, but the emphasis of the story has since shifted towards McCain's relationship with Iseman's clients, which in the end could prove much more politically damaging.

It's the lobbyists, not the sex. Whether he cheated on his second wife like he admitted doing on his first isn't the point. As one wag put it, "it's not what McCain did to Iseman that matters, it's what he did for her." After all, this is a powerful Senator from the party that makes corruption an every month occurrence.

McCain In Oct. 2006: Renzi Has ' Tenacity, Honesty And Integrity Beyond Reproach'

This is Sen. John McCain. I'm calling to urge you to support my friend Rep. Rick Renzi for Congress. Rick has represented the first district of Arizona with tenacity, honesty and integrity beyond reproach. I work with Rick every day and can report to you his total dedication to the people of Arizona and the United States. Please join me in supporting rural Arizona's workhorse congressman on Nov. 7. [Paid for and authorized by Rick Renzi for Congress]."

McCains friend Renzi was indicted Friday.

So why look to the British press? Because McCain has played the American press for suckers and fools. In his biographical book Worth the Fighting For (p.192), McCain talks about how he got himself off the hook with the press over the banking scandal known as the Keating 5 by inventing the Straight Talk Express as a PR ploy (bolded mine):

I was in a hell of a mess. And I decided right then that not talking to reporters or sharply denying even the appearance of a problem wasn't going to do me any good.  I would henceforth accept every single request for an interview from any source, prominent or obscure, and answer every question as completely and straightforwardly as I could. I was confident that the facts were on my side, and if the facts were disseminated broadly in the media would they spare me from a terrible fate. And they wouldn't be disseminated broadly unless I talked to the press constantly, ad infinitum, until their appetite for information from me was completely satisfied. It is a public relations strategy that I have followed to this day, and while it has gotten me in trouble from time to time, it has on the whole served both my interest and that of the public well.

After the NY Times story came out, McCain said he would not speak to the press about it again.  So apparently he is no longer interested in serving the interest of the public.

Anytime John McCain declines to speak to the press, something horrible must be happening.

Currying favor with the press meant that his often crude and cruel sense of humor was overlooked (this 1998 piece by David Corn chronicles one such example):

"Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?
Because her father is Janet Reno."

...The joke did appear in McCain's hometown paper, the Arizona Republic, and the Associated Press did report the joke in full, so everyone in the press had access to McCain's words. But by censoring themselves, the Post, the Times and others helped McCain deflect flak and preserved his status as a Republican presidential contender.

McCain gets more than his share of breaks from the press, and now wants the thinly sourced sex aspects of the lobby scandal to obscure the solidly sourced influence peddling aspects:

Files and McCain Letter Show Effort to Keep Loophole

In late 1998, Senator John McCain sent an unusually blunt letter to the head of the Federal Communications Commission, warning that he would try to overhaul the agency if it closed a broadcast ownership loophole.

he letter, and two later ones signed by Mr. McCain, then chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, urged the commission to abandon plans to close a loophole vitally important to Glencairn Ltd., a client of Vicki Iseman, a lobbyist. The provision enabled one of the nation’s largest broadcasting companies, Sinclair, to use a marketing agreement with Glencairn, a far smaller broadcaster, to get around a restriction barring single ownership of two television stations in the same city.

The GOP candidate for President of the United States is in bed with the lobbyists, and wants kid gloves treatment from the press corps. Are they going to give it to him? Will they continue to be nice to him because they like him? Is it okay as long as you're a Republican? From the Politico:

Imagine for a moment the story had been about McCain’s possible opponent in the general election, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). Might the conservatives have paused to ask why he hired Robert S. Bennett, one of the capital’s most fearsome and expensive lawyers?

Might they have wondered why he had flown aboard a private jet with the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman — on a flight paid for by her client? Might they have probed more deeply why she was supposedly hanging around the senator’s planes, office and events often enough that his staff tried to impose an unofficial restraining order on her?

The Times’ reporters and editors involved in this story are top-notch. Such stories usually only go into the paper when reporters and their editors feel certain they are true — because they know a vicious response will likely follow.

Most importantly with this one, John Weaver, a former McCain aide, is on the record in the Times story saying he warned off the young lobbyist. McCain denies impropriety, flatly and broadly

This lobbying scandal is well-grounded, and McCain's (and Iseman's) lobby ties need to be understood and covered by the press. Even as is, this is a political problem for McCain that goes way beyond bloviating conservative talk show hosts circling the wagons around a damaged candidate. More Politico:

This episode exposes, more clearly than ever, the business model for big-time conservative activism: Its lifeblood is this us-against-them mentality. It needs an enemy, be it The New York Times, or Obama, or secularism or illegal immigrants.

Cable TV has decided that if it's not a problem for Limbaugh and Ingraham (today), it's not a problem for McCain (ever). Make no mistake: as the Brits note, McCain is damaged by this and will be even more so as more comes out. The Brits get that; time will tell about the rest of the press corps.

Is it just me or does this sound like Schlesinger must have heard rumors about the affair the New York Times reported on this week?  This excerpt is from a November 1998 journal entry:

Journals 1952-2000, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
The Penquin Press
Published 2007

(Page 833)

McCain is a loose cannon. He has commendably defied his party on campaign finance, but he is also capable of bizarre behavior. Recently, speaking at a Republican dinner, he told the following so-called joke: why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because she is the illegitimate child of Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno. This plus his reputedly wayward sex life will surely destroy his evident presidential aspirations.

Is this timeline just a coincidence?

When the New York Times published a story about John McCain’s possible inappropriate interactions with lobbyist Vicki Iseman, including a possible romantic relationship, the conservative standard-bearers of our nation suddenly rallied around McCain, even though they had before made their dislike of him all too clear. But what would have happened if John McCain were a Democrat? How would the conservative establishment have reacted to these allegations in that case, especially to the suggestion of an adulterous affair with a lobbyists? Let’s explore.

There is a diary on the Rec List by cookedchicken08 that discusses the follow-up NYT story from today about McCain's lobbying on behalf of Sinclair Broadcasting and Glencairn.  cookedchiken08 was kind enough to include an update with a link to a diary I did a few days ago about McCain's lobbying on behalf of these companies.  These companies were included in the initial NYT article on McCain but most folks missed their importance while focusing on the possible affair.  cookedchicken did me a great honor by linking to my diary.  Nevertheless, I want to post my original diary again so that it gets the attention it needs in order for other kossacks to do some follow-up research.

No Sen. McCain, this story isn't just going to go away.

Today the NY Times is reporting that:

In late 1998, Senator John McCain sent an unusually blunt letter to the head of the Federal Communications Commission, warning that he would try to overhaul the agency if it closed a broadcast ownership loophole.

The letter, and two later ones signed by Mr. McCain, then chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, urged the commission to abandon plans to close a loophole vitally important to Glencairn Ltd., a client of Vicki Iseman, a lobbyist. The provision enabled one of the nation’s largest broadcasting companies, Sinclair, to use a marketing agreement with Glencairn, a far smaller broadcaster, to get around a restriction barring single ownership of two television stations in the same city.

I hereby predict... a 12 page pictorial spread of Vicki Iseman in Playboy by Summer 2009.  Heavily airbrushed.

This scandal is unfolding daily.  The quote from Bud Paxson that he spoke directly to John McCain and that Vicki Iseman was at the meeting was devastating.  Paxson obviously has no reason to lie about such a thing.  The unraveling of McCain's campaign starts now.  

I also predict at least 45 states for Obama in the general.

(X-posted at Economists for Obama)

Now let's see, what oh what will Maureen Dowd find to write about this Sunday? I'd think its a sure bet that the name "Iseman" will feature in there. Maybe some reference to the golden dress she's wearing in the photo that's all over the news. Some references to Cindy's hair?

The straight talk express lost some more wheels with this new story released a few minutes ago from Washingtong Post

Broadcaster Lowell "Bud" Paxson today contradicted statements from Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign that the senator did not meet with Paxson or his lobbyist before sending two controversial letters to the Federal Communications Commission on Paxson's behalf.

Paxson said he talked with McCain in his Washington office several weeks before the Arizona Republican wrote the letters to the FCC urging a rapid decision on Paxson's quest to acquire a Pittsburgh television station.

Paxson also recalled that his lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, attended the meeting in McCain's office and that Iseman helped arrange the meeting. "Was Vicki there? Probably," Paxson said in an interview with The Washington Post today. "The woman was a professional. She was good. She could get us meetings."

McCain, as you guys remember, come out in full force on Wednesday morning to defend himself against the Nytimes story and he denied ever meeting Paxton. So who's involved in double talk now?