In Bed with Lobbyists: Just Another Day at the Office for McCain

By Christy Hardin Smith, Firedoglake. Posted February 22, 2008.

St. John McVain has a dirty little secret. The vaunted "maverick" Senator who works tirelessly against corruption and undue lobbyist interest in Washington?

Sham. He's been in bed with lobbyists for quite some time.

Why do I say that? Well, there's this: McCain's campaign staff had more lobbyists on it than any other back in June. And, after the staff massacre in July, the person he hired to be his new campaign manager (resurrecting his position from the failed 2000 campaign)? Uber-lobbyist Rick Davis. Who is Rick Davis? Try this on for starters:

So now that very same Rick Davis will be taking over as campaign manager. Who is he? Fittingly for the most lobbyist-infested campaign in the race (on either side), Davis is yet another lobbyist. Davis founded Davis, Manafort & Freedman, Inc., through which he served clients ranging from Nigerian dictator Gen. Sani Abacha to "mafia-like" Argentine legislator Alberto Pierri. Davis has had a long association with McCain -- one tangled up in webs of special influence. In 1999, while Davis was working for McCain, two of his firm's clients, COMSAT and SBC, "had major (and controversial) mergers pending before the Federal Communications Commission in 1999, and both mergers were approved." The FCC was under the legislative oversight authority of McCain's Commerce Committee, yet McCain refused to recuse himself from the proceedings.

Davis was also a central figure in McCain's Reform Institute scandal, an under-reported affair in which the "Maverick" Senator used a nonprofit, tax-exempt "reform" organization to trade political favors for corporate cash.

Think this is a new development for St. McVain? That his scramble to win the GOP presidential nomination at all costs came at the price of climbing into bed with some DC lobbyists, that besmirching his otherwise squeaky clean, burnished image of integrity is a recent phenomenon? Think again:

In 2000, when McCain set out to seek the Republican Party's presidential nomination, his campaign charter jet landed in New Hampshire early on with some lobbyists aboard.

David Broder, dean of the political writers, was aboard that plane. And he duly noted the presence of Ken Duberstein, the lobbyist and former chief of staff for Ronald Reagan, aboard the plane of the senator running as the anti-establishment candidate.

Yours truly was on that plane, too, and duly noted the presence of Tom Panza, a Florida-based lobbyist for GTech, the lottery-management company that has mopped up contract after contract in the states running lotteries and provided lucrative employment for a lot of former state workers in the process.

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Christy Hardin Smith blogs daily at the FireDogLake blog.

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