Yesterday brought word from reform organizations about the McCain loan matter, a subject that the reform community more generally has been happy to let pass without comment.  Democracy 21 put out a release acknowledging that McCain’s use of his matching fund certification raised "novel," "close" and "complex" issues that the FEC has been left powerless to resolve.  Joan Claybrook of Public Citizen has concluded that McCain’s prior service to the reform community immunizes him from scrutiny.  Common Cause has just grown quite angry, at the critics and not the cause.

     Here are different points in the stages of grief:  denial (Claybrook), anger (Common Cause), and some place mid-way between bargaining and acceptance (Democracy 21).

     For Democracy 21, the main issue is the FEC’s state of paralysis.  It is in this context that Democracy 21 explains the significance of the McCain loan:  these "complex" issues require attention, and the FEC is required to attend to them, if only the confirmation impasse can be ended and new Commissioners can be appointed.  Democracy 21 effectively converts the McCain case into a case in point for the difficulties we face when the FEC cannot act.  So there is "bargaining" here—if we have the FEC, perhaps we could settle this issue—and along with it or buried within, there is the stirring of acceptance that the McCain conduct does present regulatory issues.

     For Claybrook, there are no such issues, for by definition, John McCain has rendered exemplary service and has earned generous leave to act as he wishes.  For example, he can have lobbyists at his side, running his campaigning and raising his money:  no matter, because:

Regardless of how many lobbyists are working on his campaign or raising money for him, John McCain has fought for 14 long, hard years for reforms that seriously limit lobbyists’ power.

     So long as lobbyists cannot have power over others, they are apparently to have the run of the McCain campaign, and we need not fret, not at all, because the difference between John McCain and other candidates is that he is McCain and they are other candidates. 

     Claybrook’s comment nicely supports George Will’s point this morning that McCain and certain of his admirers think it quite uncalled for that he be held to the conduct he demands of others:

Although his campaign is run by lobbyists; and although his dealings with lobbyists have generated what he, when judging the behavior of others, calls corrupt appearances; and although he has profited from his manipulation of the taxpayer-funding system that is celebrated by reformers -- still, he probably is innocent of insincerity.  Such is his towering moral vanity, he seems sincerely to consider it theoretically impossible for him to commit the offenses of appearances that he incessantly ascribes to others.

Bob Bauer