A couple of things John McCain said at his press conference this morning didn’t pass the smell test.
The first was when he claimed that the then-chairman of the FCC said that it was “more than an appropriate role” for McCain to have sent a letter to the Commission about a pending matter, one that involved a lobbying client of Vicki Iseman’s. Paul Kiel tackles that one at TPMmuckraker.
The other comment from McCain that rang as false was when he said that he had not tried to get The Times to spike the story. He personally may not have, but his campaign staff certainly did, according to a number of reports, including the latest from The New Republic. Its exhaustive backgrounder on the story behind the story describes some of the McCain camp pushback:
From the outset, the Times reporters encountered stiff resistance from the McCain camp. After working on the story for several weeks, Thompson learned that McCain had personally retained Bill Clinton’s former attorney Bob Bennett to defend himself against the Times’ questioning. At the same time, two McCain campaign advisers, Mark Salter and Charlie Black, vigorously pressed the Times reporters to drop the matter. And in early December, McCain himself called Keller to deny the allegations on the record. â¦
“There’s absolutely no story there. And it’d be a mistake for you to write about a non-story that didn’t run,” McCain adviser Charlie Black told me last week. “Drudge shouldn’t have put that up. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing.” â¦
Two members of the McCain team had contacted TNR’s editor to pressure him not to investigate the story. â¦
Let’s be clear. Pushback is normal, and there’s not anything particularly unusual about the pushback that occurred here. But it certainly seems to have occurred, contrary to what McCain suggested at his press conference.
It’s not all bad for John McCain, apparently.
The McCain campaign just sent out an email solicitation trying to raise money off of the NYT story.
Late Update: The RNC just sent out a fundraising email, too, claiming, “The New York Times has proven once again that the liberal mainstream media will do whatever it takes to put Senator Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in the White House.”
I haven’t had a chance to say much about the day’s events yet. I’ve been trying to get over a cold which seems much more tenacious than the usual ones. Seems others have too — I guess it’s going around. We’ve already given you our take on the McCain story in a few posts on different TPM sites — the consensus being that at least on the basis of what made it into print it seems a tad thin. But a few thoughts occurred to me as I was watching McCain’s presser. As Paul Kiel pointed out earlier today, McCain at best misstated the facts of the FCC matter. I think I also heard him say that his office made no effort to get the Times not to run the story? Can he possibly be serious about that? Didn’t he hire Bob Bennett to take this up with the Times back in December? And has he really not talked to John Weaver about this since they found out the Times was working the story? That’s difficult for me to believe though it’s certainly more possible than the ‘no effort to kill the story’ line which is demonstrably false.
I don’t think it has anything specifically to do with the McCain-Iseman story. But when I saw Paxson Communications’ name come up as the main lobbying client on behalf of whom Iseman was trying to entice McCain, I couldn’t help but remember the reporting I’d done on these gamesters back in the beginning of the decade. Back in 2001 Paxson was the lead local TV station owner trying to squeeze tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars out of taxpayers based on their bogus claims to ownership of gobs of broadcast spectrum — just the sort of high-stakes taxpayer rip-off that it pays to have a lot of lawmakers in your pocket to pull off.
Here’s the article.
Just to let you know, there’s another Democratic debate tonight hosted down in Texas hosted by CNN. It starts at 8 PM Eastern. And we’ll be blogging it live.
Down in the weeds of today’s McCain presser was the senator’s reference to that controversy over his letters to the FCC about Paxson Communications back in 2000 and McCain’s claim that “the former chairman of the FCC at the time in 2000” said there was no problem with the letters. We thought the common sense interpretation of that remark was that he was referring to William Kennard, the former FCC commissioner who the letters were addressed to. Au Contraire, the McCain camp tells Jake Tapper at ABCNews. It wasn’t Bill Kennard, the former FCC Chair who was in office in 2000. It was Reed Hundt, who was the former FCC Chair back in 2000. Here’s Jake. Here’s Paul’s response.
(Placeholder because nothing’s happened yet.)
Let the uncomfortable moments begin!
8:09 PM … Stage nicely set with two ponderous introductory remarks.
8:19 PM … We get underway with some initial jousting over the hot-button issue of whether to negotiate with foreign dictators with small unnamed conditions or more extensive unnamed preconditions.
8:23 PM … TPM Reader SH asks: “Why do they keep making the candidates sit during these debates?” Good question. I think experience shows it makes for a less confrontational debate, for better or worse.
8:27 PM … I’m now coming out for a new federal law mandating that I get to see what the candidates are writing down on those little notepads. You too. We both can see.
8:40 PM … The undeniable reality is that these two candidates do agree on most issues. And the disagreements tend to be ones of emphasis. But to the extent that Obama can keep saying, Yep, Sen. Clinton and I pretty much agree on this one too, let me add a few points — that’s a big win for him because she’s the one that needs to shake up the race and find some differences to pivot against.
8:46 PM … I note that we’ve gone forty-five minutes with well-spoken and broad-minded discussions of the issues from each candidate. The absence of Russert, Matthews and similar jollymakers is painfully evident.
8:51 PM … Hillary gets the ‘put up or shut up’ question.
8:52 PM … Hillary gives a pretty thoughtful, frank and fairminded response. Gets off a barb at the end. But still a pretty sensible answer.
8:54 PM … Obama comes back with a response to which pretty much all the same adjectives apply. But more spark.
8:57 PM … Obama gets the ‘plagiarism’ question. Does pretty well with it. I must confess, this whole ‘plagiarism’ debate is almost offensive in its militant silliness.
9:00 PM … Alright, let the nastiness begin.
9:06 PM … Okay, nastiness interlude didn’t last long. Back to health care. Barack’s answer was, I think, a good illustration of the bind Hillary’s in at the moment. He keeps drawing back from fights and lays out policy differences which he says reasonable can disagree on, etc. Kind of like a boxer who won’t let an opponent get in close or a football team ahead late in the game who won’t call anything but safe ground plays that run the clock and give little opportunity to force a turnover.
9:11 PM … Hillary yanks it back to the health care debate. But it’s hard for me to see that Hillary doesn’t have the better part of the policy question. If the young and healthy don’t have to buy in, there’s not enough money for the ailing and old to be covered — or for the vast middle who are healthy but might suddenly not be. I don’t see a way around that. And that’s the rub to this whole debate. Not just this debate right now within the Democratic party, but the whole question of health care.
9:16 PM … I don’t see how Sen. Clinton can say she’s been representing the United States for 15 years. I know this is a dicey topic. But she wasn’t president from 1993-2001. What am i missing? Here’s the quote: “For more than 15 years, Iâve been honored to represent our country in more than 80 countries, to negotiate on matters such as opening borders for refugees during the war in Kosovo, to stand up for womenâs rights as human rights around the world.”
9:35 PM … This earmark issue, as it’s become framed, is really silly. Earmarks are a matter of the congress stipulating some spending priorities rather than the executive. The issue is almost, not all, but almost all one of transparency. There is nothing inherently wrong with earmarks, though in practice they’ve caused a lot of problems and have been a playground for the corrupt. And on McCain, put me down as highly suspicious on his claims about earmarks. But that’s a topic for another night.
9:46 PM … That was an interesting final moment to end on for Hillary. Candy Crowley is on CNN now saying how it was a good connect moment for HIllary, which I suspect it may have been. But we all do remember that those words were borrowed from Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, right?