You Can’t Clean the Stench Out of the Straight Talk for Lobbyists Express
The WaPo placed the news that Tom Loeffler, McCain’s Fundraising Chair, has left the campaign because he was unwilling to give up his lobbying gig, on A1.
Tom Loeffler, the national finance co-chairman for Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign, resigned yesterday because of his lobbying ties, a campaign adviser said.
With five high-level resignations in the last week or so and the prominence of coverage about those departures, you might think McCain is really cleaning house.
But here’s the thing. Even with just the resignations of the last ten days, McCain has shown a real inconsistency about what kind of lobbying ties compromise his campaign. With Loeffler and Eric Burgeson, there seem to have been two problems. First, both were active lobbyists, who lobbied the Senate for clients whose issues fell squarely in the purview of the Commerce, Armed Services, and Indian Affairs Committees on which McCain serves. In addition, both represented foreign "countries," Loeffler Saudi Arabia and Burgeson the Kurds.
Of course, that’s true of Charlie Black, as well. For example, Black lobbied the Senate on FISA, and has had an affinity for representing evil dictators throughout his career. So why is okay for Charlie Black to stick around while Loeffler and Burgeson take their blackberries and go home?
John McCain has a ready explanation: Charlie Black (and Rick Davis, someone else McCain couldn’t afford to lose) aren’t really lobbyists anymore:
Charlie Black and Rick Davis are not in the lobbying business; they’ve been out of that business,
Today’s WaPo story provides a little more detail about what that really means.
Until recently, his top political adviser, Charles R. Black Jr., was the head of a Washington lobbying firm. Black retired in March from BKSH & Associates, the firm he helped found, to stay with the campaign. Davis ran a lobbying firm for several years but has said he is on leave from it.
Indeed, Black does seem to have stepped down from his lobbying work sometime before the quarterly disclosure forms were submitted starting on April 18. So by "out of the business," McCain must mean "out of the business for a whopping month and a half." But there are two problems still.
First, how do you wipe clean all the lobbying Charlie Black did from the Straight Talk for Lobbyists Express? Black was, by his own admission, lobbying from McCain’s campaign bus.
Black said he does a lot of his work by telephone from McCain’s Straight Talk Express bus.