Last week I got a mountain of emails asking me to call the McCain campaign out for ‘lying’ about former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines’ relationship with the Obama campaign. It was pretty clear, as Karen Tumulty noted in Time, that the McCain camp was happy to play up Raines’ race. And all the McCain camp could find to justify calling Raines an Obama ‘advisor’ was a stray reference in an article in the Washington Post which reported that Raines had taken a couple phone calls with people tied to the Obama campaign.
Still, in the rough world of politics, this amounted to basically a lie and not the usual McCain standard of 100% lie. But now we learn from the NY Times that McCain’s campaign manager and right hand man Rick Davis bagged more than $2 million running a front group set up by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stepped up federal regulation.
