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The John McCain Affair: Thought Crime? Reality?
By Privacy Maven | February 20, 2008
It appears we have come a long way from the Gary Hart days when journalists found pictorial evidence.
Now all it takes is to report on a presidential candidate’s advisers who thought he might have been having an affair eight years ago. The New York Times has just released an explosive story on John McCain, entitled, “For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk.” Naturally, what is grabbing headlines right now is that the story is alleging that McCain’s advisers thought he might be having an affair with lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, and intervened to keep the two of them separate.
Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.
A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.
When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.
Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.
The lengthy article goes on to discuss McCain’s past, particularly with the Keating Five scandal.
It had been just a decade since an official favor for a friend with regulatory problems had nearly ended Mr. McCain’s political career by ensnaring him in the Keating Five scandal. In the years that followed, he reinvented himself as the scourge of special interests, a crusader for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame.
But the concerns about Mr. McCain’s relationship with Ms. Iseman underscored an enduring paradox of his post-Keating career. Even as he has vowed to hold himself to the highest ethical standards, his confidence in his own integrity has sometimes seemed to blind him to potentially embarrassing conflicts of interest.
Mr. McCain promised, for example, never to fly directly from Washington to Phoenix, his hometown, to avoid the impression of self-interest because he sponsored a law that opened the route nearly a decade ago. But like other lawmakers, he often flew on the corporate jets of business executives seeking his support, including the media moguls Rupert Murdoch, Michael R. Bloomberg and Lowell W. Paxson, Ms. Iseman’s client. (Last year he voted to end the practice.)
Issues of ethics are serious and worthy of examination, but speculations of an affair for which there is no solid proof, (as there is in the case of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and the text-messaging sex scandal, for instance) undercuts and overshadows possible violations of public trust.
Wonkette also discusses these issues of ethics.
Topics: Public Figures and Privacy |
February 23rd, 2008 at 8:47 pm
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