G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
February 21, 2008
The Long Run
For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk
By JIM RUTENBERG, MARILYN W. THOMPSON, DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and STEPHEN
LABATON
This article is by Jim Rutenberg, Marilyn W. Thompson, David D. Kirkpatrick
and Stephen Labaton.
WASHINGTON - 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.
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.)
Mr. McCain helped found a nonprofit group to promote his personal battle for
tighter campaign finance rules. But he later resigned as its chairman after
news reports disclosed that the group was tapping the same kinds of
unlimited corporate contributions he opposed, including those from companies
seeking his favor. He has criticized the cozy ties between lawmakers and
lobbyists, but is relying on corporate lobbyists to donate their time
running his presidential race and recently hired a lobbyist to run his
Senate office.
"He is essentially an honorable person," said William P. Cheshire, a friend
of Mr. McCain who as editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic defended
him during the Keating Five scandal. "But he can be imprudent."
Mr. Cheshire added, "That imprudence or recklessness may be part of why he
was not more astute about the risks he was running with this shady
operator," Charles Keating, whose ties to Mr. McCain and four other
lawmakers tainted their reputations in the savings and loan debacle.
During his current campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr.
McCain has played down his attacks on the corrupting power of money in
politics, aware that the stricter regulations he championed are unpopular in
his party. When the Senate overhauled lobbying and ethics rules last year,
Mr. McCain stayed in the background.
With his nomination this year all but certain, though, he is reminding
voters again of his record of reform. His campaign has already begun
comparing his credentials with those of Senator Barack Obama, a Democratic
contender who has made lobbying and ethics rules a centerpiece of his own
pitch to voters.
"I would very much like to think that I have never been a man whose favor
can be bought," Mr. McCain wrote about his Keating experience in his 2002
memoir, "Worth the Fighting For." "From my earliest youth, I would have
considered such a reputation to be the most shameful ignominy imaginable.
Yet that is exactly how millions of Americans viewed me for a time, a time
that I will forever consider one of the worst experiences of my life."
A drive to expunge the stain on his reputation in time turned into a zeal to
cleanse Washington as well. The episode taught him that "questions of honor
are raised as much by appearances as by reality in politics," he wrote, "and
because they incite public distrust they need to be addressed no less
directly than we would address evidence of expressly illegal corruption."
A Formative Scandal
Mr. McCain started his career like many other aspiring politicians, eagerly
courting the wealthy and powerful. A Vietnam war hero and Senate liaison for
the Navy, he arrived in Arizona in 1980 after his second marriage, to Cindy
Hensley, the heiress to a beer fortune there. He quickly started looking for
a Congressional district where he could run.
Mr. Keating, a Phoenix financier and real estate developer, became an early
sponsor and, soon, a friend. He was a man of great confidence and daring,
Mr. McCain recalled in his memoir. "People like that appeal to me," he
continued. "I have sometimes forgotten that wisdom and a strong sense of
public responsibility are much more admirable qualities."
During Mr. McCain's four years in the House, Mr. Keating, his family and his
business associates contributed heavily to his political campaigns. The
banker gave Mr. McCain free rides on his private jet, a violation of
Congressional ethics rules (he later said it was an oversight and paid for
the trips). They vacationed together in the Bahamas. And in 1986, the year
Mr. McCain was elected to the Senate, his wife joined Mr. Keating in
investing in an Arizona shopping mall.
Mr. Keating had taken over the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association and used
its federally insured deposits to gamble on risky real estate and other
investments. He pressed Mr. McCain and other lawmakers to help hold back
federal banking regulators.
For years, Mr. McCain complied. At Mr. Keating's request, he wrote several
letters to regulators, introduced legislation and helped secure the
nomination of a Keating associate to a banking regulatory board.
By early 1987, though, the thrift was careering toward disaster. Mr. McCain
agreed to join several senators, eventually known as the Keating Five, for
two private meetings with regulators to urge them to ease up. "Why didn't I
fully grasp the unusual appearance of such a meeting?" Mr. McCain later
lamented in his memoir.
When Lincoln went bankrupt in 1989 - one of the biggest collapses of the
savings and loan crisis, costing taxpayers $3.4 billion - the Keating Five
became infamous. The scandal sent Mr. Keating to prison and ended the
careers of three senators, who were censured in 1991 for intervening. Mr.
McCain, who had been a less aggressive advocate for Mr. Keating than the
others, was reprimanded for "poor judgment" but was re-elected the next
year.
Some people involved think Mr. McCain got off too lightly. William Black,
one of the banking regulators the senator met with, argued that Mrs. McCain's
investment with Mr. Keating created an obvious conflict of interest for her
husband. (Mr. McCain had said a prenuptial agreement divided the couple's
assets.) He should not be able to "put this behind him," Mr. Black said. "It
sullied his integrity."
Mr. McCain has since described the episode as a unique humiliation. "If I do
not repress the memory, its recollection still provokes a vague but real
feeling that I had lost something very important," he wrote in his memoir.
"I still wince thinking about it."
A New Chosen Cause
After the Republican takeover of the Senate in 1994, Mr. McCain decided to
try to put some of the lessons he had learned into law. He started by
attacking earmarks, the pet projects that individual lawmakers could insert
anonymously into the fine print of giant spending bills, a recipe for
corruption. But he quickly moved on to other targets, most notably political
fund-raising.
Mr. McCain earned the lasting animosity of many conservatives, who argue
that his push for fund-raising restrictions trampled free speech, and of
many of his Senate colleagues, who bristled that he was preaching to them so
soon after his own repentance. In debates, his party's leaders challenged
him to name a single senator he considered corrupt (he refused).
"We used to joke that each of us was the only one eating alone in our
caucus," said Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, who became Mr.
McCain's partner on campaign finance efforts.
Mr. McCain appeared motivated less by the usual ideas about good governance
than by a more visceral disapproval of the gifts, meals and money that
influence seekers shower on lawmakers, Mr. Feingold said. "It had to do with
his sense of honor," he said. "He saw this stuff as cheating."
Mr. McCain made loosening the grip of special interests the central cause of
his 2000 presidential campaign, inviting scrutiny of his own ethics. His
Republican rival, George W. Bush, accused him of "double talk" for
soliciting campaign contributions from companies with interests that came
before the powerful Senate commerce committee, of which Mr. McCain was
chairman. Mr. Bush's allies called Mr. McCain "sanctimonious."
At one point, his campaign invited scores of lobbyists to a fund-raiser at
the Willard Hotel in Washington. While Bush supporters stood mocking
outside, the McCain team tried to defend his integrity by handing the
lobbyists buttons reading " McCain voted against my bill." Mr. McCain
himself skipped the event, an act he later called "cowardly."
By 2002, he had succeeded in passing the McCain-Feingold Act, which
transformed American politics by banning "soft money," the unlimited
donations from corporations, unions and the rich that were funneled through
the two political parties to get around previous laws.
One of his efforts, though, seemed self-contradictory. In 2001, he helped
found the nonprofit Reform Institute to promote his cause and, in the
process, his career. It collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in
unlimited donations from companies that lobbied the Senate commerce
committee. Mr. McCain initially said he saw no problems with the financing,
but he severed his ties to the institute in 2005, complaining of "bad
publicity" after news reports of the arrangement.
Like other presidential candidates, he has relied on lobbyists to run his
campaigns. Since a cash crunch last summer, several of them - including his
campaign manager, Rick Davis, who represented companies before Mr. McCain's
Senate panel - have been working without pay, a gift that could be worth
tens of thousands of dollars.
In recent weeks, Mr. McCain has hired another lobbyist, Mark Buse, to run
his Senate office. In his case, it was a round trip through the revolving
door: Mr. Buse had directed Mr. McCain's committee staff for seven years
before leaving in 2001 to lobby for telecommunications companies.
Mr. McCain's friends dismiss questions about his ties to lobbyists, arguing
that he has too much integrity to let such personal connections influence
him.
"Unless he gives you special treatment or takes legislative action against
his own views, I don't think his personal and social relationships matter,"
said Charles Black, a friend and campaign adviser who has previously lobbied
the senator for aviation, broadcasting and tobacco concerns.
Concerns in a Campaign
Mr. McCain's confidence in his ability to distinguish personal friendships
from compromising connections was at the center of questions advisers raised
about Ms. Iseman.
The lobbyist, a partner at the firm Alcalde & Fay, represented
telecommunications companies for whom Mr. McCain's commerce committee was
pivotal. Her clients contributed tens of thousands of dollars to his
campaigns.
Mr. Black said Mr. McCain and Ms. Iseman were friends and nothing more. But
in 1999 she began showing up so frequently in his offices and at campaign
events that staff members took notice. One recalled asking, "Why is she
always around?"
That February, Mr. McCain and Ms. Iseman attended a small fund-raising
dinner with several clients at the Miami-area home of a cruise-line
executive and then flew back to Washington along with a campaign aide on the
corporate jet of one of her clients, Paxson Communications. By then,
according to two former McCain associates, some of the senator's advisers
had grown so concerned that the relationship had become romantic that they
took steps to intervene.
A former campaign adviser described being instructed to keep Ms. Iseman away
from the senator at public events, while a Senate aide recalled plans to
limit Ms. Iseman's access to his offices.
In interviews, the two former associates said they joined in a series of
confrontations with Mr. McCain, warning him that he was risking his campaign
and career. Both said Mr. McCain acknowledged behaving inappropriately and
pledged to keep his distance from Ms. Iseman. The two associates, who said
they had become disillusioned with the senator, spoke independently of each
other and provided details that were corroborated by others.
Separately, a top McCain aide met with Ms. Iseman at Union Station in
Washington to ask her to stay away from the senator. John Weaver, a former
top strategist and now an informal campaign adviser, said in an e-mail
message that he arranged the meeting after "a discussion among the campaign
leadership" about her.
"Our political messaging during that time period centered around taking on
the special interests and placing the nation's interests before either
personal or special interest," Mr. Weaver continued. "Ms. Iseman's
involvement in the campaign, it was felt by us, could undermine that
effort."
Mr. Weaver added that the brief conversation was only about "her conduct and
what she allegedly had told people, which made its way back to us." He
declined to elaborate.
It is not clear what effect the warnings had; the associates said their
concerns receded in the heat of the campaign.
Ms. Iseman acknowledged meeting with Mr. Weaver, but disputed his account.
"I never discussed with him alleged things I had 'told people,' that had
made their way 'back to' him," she wrote in an e-mail message. She said she
never received special treatment from Mr. McCain or his office.
Mr. McCain said that the relationship was not romantic and that he never
showed favoritism to Ms. Iseman or her clients. "I have never betrayed the
public trust by doing anything like that," he said. He made the statements
in a call to Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, to
complain about the paper's inquiries.
The senator declined repeated interview requests, beginning in December. He
also would not comment about the assertions that he had been confronted
about Ms. Iseman, Mr. Black said Wednesday.
Mr. Davis and Mark Salter, Mr. McCain's top strategists in both of his
presidential campaigns, disputed accounts from the former associates and
aides and said they did not discuss Ms. Iseman with the senator or
colleagues.
"I never had any good reason to think that the relationship was anything
other than professional, a friendly professional relationship," Mr. Salter
said in an interview.
He and Mr. Davis also said Mr. McCain had frequently denied requests from
Ms. Iseman and the companies she represented. In 2006, Mr. McCain sought to
break up cable subscription packages, which some of her clients opposed. And
his proposals for satellite distribution of local television programs fell
short of her clients' hopes.
The McCain aides said the senator sided with Ms. Iseman's clients only when
their positions hewed to his principles
A champion of deregulation, Mr. McCain wrote letters in 1998 and 1999 to the
Federal Communications Commission urging it to uphold marketing agreements
allowing a television company to control two stations in the same city, a
crucial issue for Glencairn Ltd., one of Ms. Iseman's clients. He introduced
a bill to create tax incentives for minority ownership of stations; Ms.
Iseman represented several businesses seeking such a program. And he twice
tried to advance legislation that would permit a company to control
television stations in overlapping markets, an important issue for Paxson.
In late 1999, Ms. Iseman asked Mr. McCain's staff to send a letter to the
commission to help Paxson, now Ion Media Networks, on another matter. Mr.
Paxson was impatient for F.C.C. approval of a television deal, and Ms.
Iseman acknowledged in an e-mail message to The Times that she had sent to
Mr. McCain's staff information for drafting a letter urging a swift
decision.
Mr. McCain complied. He sent two letters to the commission, drawing a rare
rebuke for interference from its chairman. In an embarrassing turn for the
campaign, news reports invoked the Keating scandal, once again raising
questions about intervening for a patron.
Mr. McCain's aides released all of his letters to the F.C.C. to dispel
accusations of favoritism, and aides said the campaign had properly
accounted for four trips on the Paxson plane. But the campaign did not
report the flight with Ms. Iseman. Mr. McCain's advisers say he was not
required to disclose the flight, but ethics lawyers dispute that.
Recalling the Paxson episode in his memoir, Mr. McCain said he was merely
trying to push along a slow-moving bureaucracy, but added that he was not
surprised by the criticism given his history.
"Any hint that I might have acted to reward a supporter," he wrote, "would
be taken as an egregious act of hypocrisy."
Barclay Walsh and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
--
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Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
The Long Run
For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk
By JIM RUTENBERG, MARILYN W. THOMPSON, DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and STEPHEN
LABATON
This article is by Jim Rutenberg, Marilyn W. Thompson, David D. Kirkpatrick
and Stephen Labaton.
WASHINGTON - 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.
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.)
Mr. McCain helped found a nonprofit group to promote his personal battle for
tighter campaign finance rules. But he later resigned as its chairman after
news reports disclosed that the group was tapping the same kinds of
unlimited corporate contributions he opposed, including those from companies
seeking his favor. He has criticized the cozy ties between lawmakers and
lobbyists, but is relying on corporate lobbyists to donate their time
running his presidential race and recently hired a lobbyist to run his
Senate office.
"He is essentially an honorable person," said William P. Cheshire, a friend
of Mr. McCain who as editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic defended
him during the Keating Five scandal. "But he can be imprudent."
Mr. Cheshire added, "That imprudence or recklessness may be part of why he
was not more astute about the risks he was running with this shady
operator," Charles Keating, whose ties to Mr. McCain and four other
lawmakers tainted their reputations in the savings and loan debacle.
During his current campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr.
McCain has played down his attacks on the corrupting power of money in
politics, aware that the stricter regulations he championed are unpopular in
his party. When the Senate overhauled lobbying and ethics rules last year,
Mr. McCain stayed in the background.
With his nomination this year all but certain, though, he is reminding
voters again of his record of reform. His campaign has already begun
comparing his credentials with those of Senator Barack Obama, a Democratic
contender who has made lobbying and ethics rules a centerpiece of his own
pitch to voters.
"I would very much like to think that I have never been a man whose favor
can be bought," Mr. McCain wrote about his Keating experience in his 2002
memoir, "Worth the Fighting For." "From my earliest youth, I would have
considered such a reputation to be the most shameful ignominy imaginable.
Yet that is exactly how millions of Americans viewed me for a time, a time
that I will forever consider one of the worst experiences of my life."
A drive to expunge the stain on his reputation in time turned into a zeal to
cleanse Washington as well. The episode taught him that "questions of honor
are raised as much by appearances as by reality in politics," he wrote, "and
because they incite public distrust they need to be addressed no less
directly than we would address evidence of expressly illegal corruption."
A Formative Scandal
Mr. McCain started his career like many other aspiring politicians, eagerly
courting the wealthy and powerful. A Vietnam war hero and Senate liaison for
the Navy, he arrived in Arizona in 1980 after his second marriage, to Cindy
Hensley, the heiress to a beer fortune there. He quickly started looking for
a Congressional district where he could run.
Mr. Keating, a Phoenix financier and real estate developer, became an early
sponsor and, soon, a friend. He was a man of great confidence and daring,
Mr. McCain recalled in his memoir. "People like that appeal to me," he
continued. "I have sometimes forgotten that wisdom and a strong sense of
public responsibility are much more admirable qualities."
During Mr. McCain's four years in the House, Mr. Keating, his family and his
business associates contributed heavily to his political campaigns. The
banker gave Mr. McCain free rides on his private jet, a violation of
Congressional ethics rules (he later said it was an oversight and paid for
the trips). They vacationed together in the Bahamas. And in 1986, the year
Mr. McCain was elected to the Senate, his wife joined Mr. Keating in
investing in an Arizona shopping mall.
Mr. Keating had taken over the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association and used
its federally insured deposits to gamble on risky real estate and other
investments. He pressed Mr. McCain and other lawmakers to help hold back
federal banking regulators.
For years, Mr. McCain complied. At Mr. Keating's request, he wrote several
letters to regulators, introduced legislation and helped secure the
nomination of a Keating associate to a banking regulatory board.
By early 1987, though, the thrift was careering toward disaster. Mr. McCain
agreed to join several senators, eventually known as the Keating Five, for
two private meetings with regulators to urge them to ease up. "Why didn't I
fully grasp the unusual appearance of such a meeting?" Mr. McCain later
lamented in his memoir.
When Lincoln went bankrupt in 1989 - one of the biggest collapses of the
savings and loan crisis, costing taxpayers $3.4 billion - the Keating Five
became infamous. The scandal sent Mr. Keating to prison and ended the
careers of three senators, who were censured in 1991 for intervening. Mr.
McCain, who had been a less aggressive advocate for Mr. Keating than the
others, was reprimanded for "poor judgment" but was re-elected the next
year.
Some people involved think Mr. McCain got off too lightly. William Black,
one of the banking regulators the senator met with, argued that Mrs. McCain's
investment with Mr. Keating created an obvious conflict of interest for her
husband. (Mr. McCain had said a prenuptial agreement divided the couple's
assets.) He should not be able to "put this behind him," Mr. Black said. "It
sullied his integrity."
Mr. McCain has since described the episode as a unique humiliation. "If I do
not repress the memory, its recollection still provokes a vague but real
feeling that I had lost something very important," he wrote in his memoir.
"I still wince thinking about it."
A New Chosen Cause
After the Republican takeover of the Senate in 1994, Mr. McCain decided to
try to put some of the lessons he had learned into law. He started by
attacking earmarks, the pet projects that individual lawmakers could insert
anonymously into the fine print of giant spending bills, a recipe for
corruption. But he quickly moved on to other targets, most notably political
fund-raising.
Mr. McCain earned the lasting animosity of many conservatives, who argue
that his push for fund-raising restrictions trampled free speech, and of
many of his Senate colleagues, who bristled that he was preaching to them so
soon after his own repentance. In debates, his party's leaders challenged
him to name a single senator he considered corrupt (he refused).
"We used to joke that each of us was the only one eating alone in our
caucus," said Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, who became Mr.
McCain's partner on campaign finance efforts.
Mr. McCain appeared motivated less by the usual ideas about good governance
than by a more visceral disapproval of the gifts, meals and money that
influence seekers shower on lawmakers, Mr. Feingold said. "It had to do with
his sense of honor," he said. "He saw this stuff as cheating."
Mr. McCain made loosening the grip of special interests the central cause of
his 2000 presidential campaign, inviting scrutiny of his own ethics. His
Republican rival, George W. Bush, accused him of "double talk" for
soliciting campaign contributions from companies with interests that came
before the powerful Senate commerce committee, of which Mr. McCain was
chairman. Mr. Bush's allies called Mr. McCain "sanctimonious."
At one point, his campaign invited scores of lobbyists to a fund-raiser at
the Willard Hotel in Washington. While Bush supporters stood mocking
outside, the McCain team tried to defend his integrity by handing the
lobbyists buttons reading " McCain voted against my bill." Mr. McCain
himself skipped the event, an act he later called "cowardly."
By 2002, he had succeeded in passing the McCain-Feingold Act, which
transformed American politics by banning "soft money," the unlimited
donations from corporations, unions and the rich that were funneled through
the two political parties to get around previous laws.
One of his efforts, though, seemed self-contradictory. In 2001, he helped
found the nonprofit Reform Institute to promote his cause and, in the
process, his career. It collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in
unlimited donations from companies that lobbied the Senate commerce
committee. Mr. McCain initially said he saw no problems with the financing,
but he severed his ties to the institute in 2005, complaining of "bad
publicity" after news reports of the arrangement.
Like other presidential candidates, he has relied on lobbyists to run his
campaigns. Since a cash crunch last summer, several of them - including his
campaign manager, Rick Davis, who represented companies before Mr. McCain's
Senate panel - have been working without pay, a gift that could be worth
tens of thousands of dollars.
In recent weeks, Mr. McCain has hired another lobbyist, Mark Buse, to run
his Senate office. In his case, it was a round trip through the revolving
door: Mr. Buse had directed Mr. McCain's committee staff for seven years
before leaving in 2001 to lobby for telecommunications companies.
Mr. McCain's friends dismiss questions about his ties to lobbyists, arguing
that he has too much integrity to let such personal connections influence
him.
"Unless he gives you special treatment or takes legislative action against
his own views, I don't think his personal and social relationships matter,"
said Charles Black, a friend and campaign adviser who has previously lobbied
the senator for aviation, broadcasting and tobacco concerns.
Concerns in a Campaign
Mr. McCain's confidence in his ability to distinguish personal friendships
from compromising connections was at the center of questions advisers raised
about Ms. Iseman.
The lobbyist, a partner at the firm Alcalde & Fay, represented
telecommunications companies for whom Mr. McCain's commerce committee was
pivotal. Her clients contributed tens of thousands of dollars to his
campaigns.
Mr. Black said Mr. McCain and Ms. Iseman were friends and nothing more. But
in 1999 she began showing up so frequently in his offices and at campaign
events that staff members took notice. One recalled asking, "Why is she
always around?"
That February, Mr. McCain and Ms. Iseman attended a small fund-raising
dinner with several clients at the Miami-area home of a cruise-line
executive and then flew back to Washington along with a campaign aide on the
corporate jet of one of her clients, Paxson Communications. By then,
according to two former McCain associates, some of the senator's advisers
had grown so concerned that the relationship had become romantic that they
took steps to intervene.
A former campaign adviser described being instructed to keep Ms. Iseman away
from the senator at public events, while a Senate aide recalled plans to
limit Ms. Iseman's access to his offices.
In interviews, the two former associates said they joined in a series of
confrontations with Mr. McCain, warning him that he was risking his campaign
and career. Both said Mr. McCain acknowledged behaving inappropriately and
pledged to keep his distance from Ms. Iseman. The two associates, who said
they had become disillusioned with the senator, spoke independently of each
other and provided details that were corroborated by others.
Separately, a top McCain aide met with Ms. Iseman at Union Station in
Washington to ask her to stay away from the senator. John Weaver, a former
top strategist and now an informal campaign adviser, said in an e-mail
message that he arranged the meeting after "a discussion among the campaign
leadership" about her.
"Our political messaging during that time period centered around taking on
the special interests and placing the nation's interests before either
personal or special interest," Mr. Weaver continued. "Ms. Iseman's
involvement in the campaign, it was felt by us, could undermine that
effort."
Mr. Weaver added that the brief conversation was only about "her conduct and
what she allegedly had told people, which made its way back to us." He
declined to elaborate.
It is not clear what effect the warnings had; the associates said their
concerns receded in the heat of the campaign.
Ms. Iseman acknowledged meeting with Mr. Weaver, but disputed his account.
"I never discussed with him alleged things I had 'told people,' that had
made their way 'back to' him," she wrote in an e-mail message. She said she
never received special treatment from Mr. McCain or his office.
Mr. McCain said that the relationship was not romantic and that he never
showed favoritism to Ms. Iseman or her clients. "I have never betrayed the
public trust by doing anything like that," he said. He made the statements
in a call to Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, to
complain about the paper's inquiries.
The senator declined repeated interview requests, beginning in December. He
also would not comment about the assertions that he had been confronted
about Ms. Iseman, Mr. Black said Wednesday.
Mr. Davis and Mark Salter, Mr. McCain's top strategists in both of his
presidential campaigns, disputed accounts from the former associates and
aides and said they did not discuss Ms. Iseman with the senator or
colleagues.
"I never had any good reason to think that the relationship was anything
other than professional, a friendly professional relationship," Mr. Salter
said in an interview.
He and Mr. Davis also said Mr. McCain had frequently denied requests from
Ms. Iseman and the companies she represented. In 2006, Mr. McCain sought to
break up cable subscription packages, which some of her clients opposed. And
his proposals for satellite distribution of local television programs fell
short of her clients' hopes.
The McCain aides said the senator sided with Ms. Iseman's clients only when
their positions hewed to his principles
A champion of deregulation, Mr. McCain wrote letters in 1998 and 1999 to the
Federal Communications Commission urging it to uphold marketing agreements
allowing a television company to control two stations in the same city, a
crucial issue for Glencairn Ltd., one of Ms. Iseman's clients. He introduced
a bill to create tax incentives for minority ownership of stations; Ms.
Iseman represented several businesses seeking such a program. And he twice
tried to advance legislation that would permit a company to control
television stations in overlapping markets, an important issue for Paxson.
In late 1999, Ms. Iseman asked Mr. McCain's staff to send a letter to the
commission to help Paxson, now Ion Media Networks, on another matter. Mr.
Paxson was impatient for F.C.C. approval of a television deal, and Ms.
Iseman acknowledged in an e-mail message to The Times that she had sent to
Mr. McCain's staff information for drafting a letter urging a swift
decision.
Mr. McCain complied. He sent two letters to the commission, drawing a rare
rebuke for interference from its chairman. In an embarrassing turn for the
campaign, news reports invoked the Keating scandal, once again raising
questions about intervening for a patron.
Mr. McCain's aides released all of his letters to the F.C.C. to dispel
accusations of favoritism, and aides said the campaign had properly
accounted for four trips on the Paxson plane. But the campaign did not
report the flight with Ms. Iseman. Mr. McCain's advisers say he was not
required to disclose the flight, but ethics lawyers dispute that.
Recalling the Paxson episode in his memoir, Mr. McCain said he was merely
trying to push along a slow-moving bureaucracy, but added that he was not
surprised by the criticism given his history.
"Any hint that I might have acted to reward a supporter," he wrote, "would
be taken as an egregious act of hypocrisy."
Barclay Walsh and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson