May 10, 2008
By Jeff Zeleny
BEND, Ore. – Senator Barack Obama said today that a scandal from Senator John McCain’s past – the Keating Five – was just as relevant to the presidential campaign as questions about who Mr. Obama has associated with over the years.
In a news conference here, Mr. Obama was asked whether his campaign intended to raise the banking scandal from the 1980s, which Mr. McCain has apologized for. Every piece of every candidate’s public record, Mr. Obama said, is “germane to the presidency.”
“I was just asked previously about a whole host of issues and associations that are a lot more flimsy than John McCain’s relationship to Keating Five,” Mr. Obama said. “What I said, I can’t quarrel with the American people wanting to know more about that and me having to answer questions about it.”
Mr. Obama’s background, ranging from his longtime pastor to his friendship with former radicals from the 1960s, has been widely debated during the Democratic nominating fight. He said he expected the same level of scrutiny would be applied to Mr. McCain.
The topic was raised briefly during a 20-minute news conference here today. It drew sharp criticism from the McCain campaign, with a spokesman saying: “Apparently, Obama’s lively calls for new politics ended today.”
“If Barack Obama doesn’t have the strength to stand up to his own standards, how is he going to stand up for hardworking Americans?” said Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for Mr. McCain.
moreWho or what are the Keating Five, and how does McCain's record of standing with lobbyists translate to standing up "for hardworking Americans"?
April, 1987--Edwin Gray ends his term as chairman of Federal Home Loan Bank Board in June. Before his departure, he is summoned to the office of Sen. Dennis DeConcini. DeConcini, with four other Senators (John McCain, Alan Cranston, John Glenn, and Donald Riegle) question Gray about the appropriateness of Bank Board investigations into Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan. All five senators, who have received campaign contributions from Keating, would become known as the "Keating Five". The subsequent Lincoln failure is estimated to have cost the taxpayers over $2 billion.
linkIn 1978, the Federal Bureau of Investigation embarked on a sting operation, labeled Abscam, in which agents posed as Middle Eastern businessmen offering bribes to senators and congressmen. The FBI targeted 31 government officials in total during the operation, including state officials in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Six congressmen, Democrats John Jenrette of South Carolina, Raymond Lederer of Pennsylvania, Michael Myers of Pennsylvania, John Murphy of New York and Frank Thompson of New Jersey, and Republican Richard Kelly of Florida, and one senator, Democrat Harrison Williams of New Jersey, were convicted of bribery and conspiracy charges in 1981.
Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania also was indicted but not prosecuted because he gave evidence against Murphy and Thompson. Only one lawmaker, Republican Sen. Larry Pressler of South Dakota, refused to take the bribe, saying at the time, "Wait a minute, what you are suggesting may be illegal."
Kelly initially had the conviction overturned when a judge ruled the sting amounted to illegal entrapment, but in 1984, a higher court sentenced Kelly to 13 months in prison. Kelly was famously caught on videotape packing his pockets with $25,000 in cash, asking the undercover agents, "Does it show?"
But as opposed to Abscam tarnishing Congress, it was the FBI that dealt with much of the long-term scrutiny as investigations into their probe brought up the entrapment issue. After Abscam, there have been no published accounts of efforts to catch lawmakers in the act, rather the focus became investigating wrongdoing after the act.
The Keating Five scandal from 1989 implicated five senators in another corruption probe. Democrats Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, Donald Riegle of Michigan, John Glenn of Ohio and Alan Cranston of California, and Republican John McCain of Arizona, were accused of strong-arming federal officials to back off their investigation of Charles Keating, former chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan association. In exchange, the senators reportedly received close to $1.3 million in campaign contributions.
The Senate Ethics Committee concluded that Glenn and McCain's involvement in the scheme was minimal and dropped the charges against them. In August 1991, the committee ruled that the other three senators had acted improperly in interfering with the Federal Home Loan Banking Board's investigation.
DeConcini and Riegle did not run for re-election in 1994 and were succeeded by Republican Sens. John Kyl and Spencer Abraham.
link<...>
In his early days as a freshman senator, McCain was known for accepting contributions from Charles Keating Jr., flying to the banker's home in the Bahamas on company planes and taking up Keating's cause with U.S. financial regulators as they investigated him.
The Keating Five was the derisive name given McCain and four Democratic senators who were defendants in a congressional ethics investigation of their connections to Keating. McCain is the only one still in the Senate. They were accused of trying to intimidate regulators on behalf of Keating, a real estate developer in Arizona and owner of Lincoln Savings and Loan based in Irvine, Calif.
Keating and his associates raised $1.3 million combined for the campaigns and political causes of all five. McCain's campaigns received $112,000.
The investigation ended in early 1991 with a rebuke that McCain "exercised poor judgment in intervening with the regulators." But the Senate ethics committee also determined McCain's actions "were not improper nor attended with gross negligence."
McCain has claimed the Keating scandal sensitized him even to the appearance of potential conflicts of interest. But in recent weeks, McCain has defended himself anew over another instance in which he intervened with federal regulators on behalf of a prominent campaign contributor -- years ago but after the Keating rebuke. Again, McCain denies acting improperly.
McCain wrote two letters in late 1999 to the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of Florida-based Paxson Communications. He urged quick consideration of a proposal to buy a television station license in Pittsburgh, although he did not ask the FCC commissioners to approve the proposal. At the time, one FCC commissioner's formal nomination was pending before McCain's Senate committee, and the FCC chairman complained that McCain's letters were improper.
moreMcCain didn't get to his current position (sucking up to lobbyists) by accident, nor has he demonstrated that he's capable of "straight talk."
John McCain
<...>
Once in Congress, McCain was the exact opposite of the hotheaded rebel he was at Annapolis. He was elected president of the incoming Republican class. He became a voice of tolerance within his party, championing the rights of Native Americans. When he disagreed with President Reagan, it was to oppose sending troops into Lebanon.
In 1986, after just two terms in the House, McCain moved on to the Senate and deeper into the arms of the GOP establishment.
In 1988, Vice President George Bush sent McCain across the country to attack his Democratic rival for the White House, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. McCain even made the short list of contenders to be Bush’s vice president. Eager to climb the party ranks, he also sought the chairmanship of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee — a job that, ironically, would later go to Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, his future nemesis in the fight over campaign finance reform.
The Hensleys helped a lot throughout these years. So did an Arizona real estate developer named Charles H. Keating, Jr. For years, McCain accepted Keating’s assorted forms of largesse — campaign contributions, all-expenses-paid vacations, free rides on his corporate jet — without realizing, apparently, that there might be strings attached.
The two men met at a Navy League dinner in 1981. Like McCain, Keating was a former Navy pilot and newcomer to Arizona. He’d moved to Phoenix in 1976 and started American Continental Corporation, a real estate development company. When McCain announced that he was running for office, he sought out Keating, who arranged a fundraiser for him. Over the course of his House and early Senate career, McCain would collect $112,000 in campaign contributions from Keating, his relatives, and his employees.
But there was a kicker. When he was asked, years later at a press conference, whether his contributions to politicians bought him influence, Keating replied, “I want to say in the most forceful way I can: I certainly hope so.”
McCain got more than just campaign money from Keating. McCain, his family, and their babysitter flew on Keating-owned or -chartered jets nine times, including three trips to Cat Cay, Keating’s vacation estate in the Bahamas. And in 1986, Keating cut Cindy McCain and her father into Fountain Square Shopping Center, a strip mall that American Continental Corporation built and managed, for a $359,000 investment. <...>
McCain’s career survived the Keating Five scandal. In 1992 he won reelection with 56 percent of the vote. Then he emerged as one of Congress’s leading advocates of political reform. In 1995 he helped to pass a $50 limit on the gifts that senators and members of their staffs can accept from outside interests, as well as a lobbying disclosure law that forces special interests to disclose how much they pay and whom they hire to lobby on particular issues. That year, McCain and Democratic Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin began pushing their proposal to overhaul the nation’s campaign finance system.
A year later, McCain was the only Republican in the Senate to vote against the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Proponents of the law insisted that massive deregulation of the telecommunications industry would bring more Americans into the information age at lower prices. But as McCain tells it, the legislation was “written by every interest in the world except consumers.”
So far, McCain has been right. Cable rates are up 6.8 percent nationwide, and rates for telephone service have gone up as much as 20 percent in some states. Instead of stiffer competition, there’s been speedier consolidation, with one merger after another: NYNEX and Bell Atlantic; SBC Communications, Inc., and Pacific Telesis Group; AT&T and TCI Communications, Inc.
In 1997, McCain found himself in a position to do something about the telecommunications mess. He succeeded the law’s chief sponsor, Larry Pressler of South Dakota, as the chairman of the Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the telecommunications, aviation, and high-tech industries, among others.
While McCain may have come to the job with a well-documented distaste for unregulated monopolies, his equally strong dislike of regulation has led him time and again to side with companies or industries he believes will make a market more competitive. The result: McCain pushes their agenda, and they finance his campaigns.
Corporate interests with business before the Commerce Committee have showered money on McCain — enough money to help him raise $4.4 million for his 1998 Senate race, more than 10 times as much as his opponent, Ed Ranger, a political novice. Today, McCain’s presidential campaign is no different.
One day last March, he collected more than $120,000 at a Washington fundraiser hosted by Kenneth Duberstein, a lobbyist for Time Warner, Inc., CSX Corporation, and many other corporate interests with business before the Commerce Committee; John Timmons, a former McCain aide who’s now a lobbyist for America West Airlines, Inc.; and Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota who now lobbies for Boeing and AT&T.
Special interests are putting money into McCain’s presidential campaign “under the theory,” as J. Steven Hart, a lobbyist for Continental Airlines, put it to a reporter for The Washington Post, “that no matter what happens, he’s still chairman of the Commerce Committee.”
McCain betrays his own coziness with Washington’s influence peddlers when he describes his lobbyist fundraisers as “people I’ve done business with for the past 17 years.”
linkMcCain wasn't against lobbyists before he was for them, he has always been for them. In 2000, when the Republicans had no use for McCain (Bush sold them a better bill of goods), National Review ran this piece explaining McCain's contradictory position on lobbyists:
For too long, McCain has been given a free pass by the media, which promotes campaign-finance reform to silence other voices, and by his Republican colleagues, who are concerned about alienating McCain given the GOP's tenuous majority in the Senate.
In John McCain's America, any politician who accepts a large contribution or gift from a donor, and then takes steps consistent with the donor's interests — even though there is no legal quid pro quo — is corrupt. Well, then, by his own standard, McCain is corrupt.
moreStill, note the caveat: The media is giving McCain a free pass because they are for campaign-finance reform.
The Republicans can never tell the whole truth, it must be tinged with enough distortion to ensure that they can have it both ways. If people buy it, they get to promote Bush, and down the line promote any Republican. According to the piece, McCain was corrupt by his own standard in 2000, not because he was actually corrupt, but because he was talking about the rules too literally. The GOP can then hold his rule-breaking actions up as proof of this.
Here's the real deal: The media has given McCain a free pass because he's for reform in the same way Bush is for ending the war in Iraq, neither (reform or an end to the war) will happen under McCain.
McCain has no room, zero, to criticize Obama on ties to lobbyists or on reform. For nearly 20 years, he has been a huge part of the problem. In fact, he has done everything in his power, which includes backing away from his own legislation (McCain-Feingold), to extend the influence of lobbyists.
McCain = Bush
Bush invaded a country for no reason, and McCain promises to continue Bush's immoral war.
Bush was bad, but there is no telling what horrors a McCain presidency would bring.
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