McCain will not be the GOP nominee. He is too compromised and has too many enemies.
And scandal will be a big part of McCain’s fall.
Unlike 2000, the Keating Five scandal will get Murtha/Abscam-like scrutiny and reveal a McCain who will bend the rules when it is in his interest.
But the Abramoff Scandal will be the one to pull McCain down.
That may sound odd, as McCain was not involved with Abramoff during Jack’s lobbying career and led the Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee investigation of Abramoff.
Did I say investigation, I meant cover-up.
From the start, McCain worked overtime to keep a lid on the most damaging aspects of the Abramoff scandal.
As they say in Washington, the cover-up is always worse than the crime.
To the jump...
Raise your hand if you remember the Straight Talk Express. Now raise your hand if you liked McCain’s style during the 2000 election. My hand went up both times.
I was (and still am) a firm supporter of Al Gore, but I thought McCain was an oddity, a honest Republican. In many ways I still admire him. McCain does have a good BS detector and has been willing to confront the powerful, but his ambition is stronger than his integrity.
Since his loss to George W. Bush, McCain has made a series of compromises to the most extreme elements of his party. He flips, he flops, he panders, he shuffles, and he’ll do whatever it takes to win in 2008.
And to win the Republican Party nomination, John McCain has turned off his moral compass.
The John McCain of 2006 reminds me of George Wallace.
Wallace began his political career as a liberal progressive. As a delegate to the 1948 Democratic Convention he did not leave when Southerners walked-out to support Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrat segregationists (yes, George Wallace has more integrity than Trent Lott).
In 1958 Wallace ran for Governor. He was endorsed by the NAACP. His opponent was openly supported by the KKK. Wallace lost by a wide margin. Four years later, a new Wallace ran for Governor. He had molded his positions and rhetoric to be in sync with the basest elements of White Southerners. He won.
The Drive By Truckers capture the essence and the costs of this kind of political pandering in their great Southern Rock Opera:
[Scene: set in Hell, September 1998. Told from the Devil's point of view]
Throw another log on the fire, boys, George Wallace is coming to stay
When he met St. Peter at the pearly gates, I'd like to think that a black man stood in the way.
I know "All should be forgiven", but he did what he done so well
So throw another log on the fire boys,
George Wallace is a coming...
Now, he said he was the best friend a black man from Alabama ever had,
And I have to admit, compared to Fob James, George Wallace don't seem that bad
And if it's true that he wasn't a racist and he just did all them things for the votes
I guess Hell's just the place for "kiss ass politicians" who pander to assholes. [snip]
Now the Devil's got a Wallace sticker on the back of his car
Long ago the Devil placed a Bush sticker over his Wallace tag and McCain is pandering to all the right assholes to ensure that the Devil’s Ford Explorer will soon sport a McCain 2008 sticker.
McCain’s pandering is amazing, but he does it with just enough Straight Talk rhetoric to fool the easily bamboozled. Any close inspection of McCain’s record since 2000 shows him selling out any principled stand if it competes with his ambition.
But to win the GOP nomination, McCain would need more than pandering to the basest elements of his party. He would need leverage. He found that in the Abramoff scandal.
When the Abramoff scandal broke on Feb. 22, 2004 in the pages of the Washington Post, it was clear that there would be an investigation. It was a jump ball. If nobody stood up to the task in the GOP controlled Congress, the pressure for a special prosecutor would become intense and it was the beginning of an election year. This had to be controlled.
Enter John McCain, the GOP Maverick.
He was the perfect guy to shape the narrative. Abramoff became a rogue lobbyist who took advantage of his GOP pals to rip off some casinos.
McCain converted the scandal into Hollywood "heist/caper" film, knowing that American prejudices against Native Americans and tribal casinos would help hide the damning details of the Abramoff scandal.
Jack’s role as a 25-year bagman for the GOP: hidden.
Jack’s close working relationship with the Bush White House: hidden.
Jack’s close working relationship with the Republican Congressional Leadership: hidden.
Jack’s role in dirty tricks and off-the-books money for the GOP: hidden.
Jack’s role in Medicare reform: hidden.
Jack’s role energy policy: hidden.
McCain actively controlled the story. He ensured that it was a not a factor in the 2004 election. He ensured that voters would not know about how closely Abramoff, Rove and Bush worked together
The great reporting over at Wampum has more details of the McCain betrayal and Abramoff cover-up:
John McCain, as chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee (SIAC) and the first to have access to the Abramoff documents, redacted all names of his peers from documents released during the SIAC hearings (Sept. 2004 - Nov. 2005) on the Abramoff scandal.
Why would St. John McCain the Maverick lower himself to such insidious behavior? Join me in the time-machine back to late February, 2004, when Susan Schmidt's groundbreaking piece on Abramoff first appeared. At that point, however, Schmidt was focused on the compelling story that Abramoff had taken advantage of the poor, naive tribes who hired him as their lobbyist; he took their gaming money and then called them mean names behind their backs.
Within a few days of the publication of the story, McCain, a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, was in front of media cameras demanding a full-fledged hearing into the allegations surrounding Abramoff and his partners. The day following McCain's press conference, SIAC chairman, Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-CO), checked himself into a Washington hospital, complaining of "chest pains", which turned out to be indigestion. However, it did not stop the Chairman, who had a month earlier kicked off his re-election campaign with quite a splash, from suddenly announcing his retirement due to "health concerns" (Nota bene: Campbell now, in excellent health, is a well-paid lobbyist in Washington.) John McCain pushed forward with his call for hearings, subpoenaing Greenberg-Traurig, which quickly complied, forwarding thousands of emails, billing records and other documents.
A mere few weeks after McCain took possession of the Abramoff emails, he arranged a meeting between one of his most trusted advisors and Karl Rove: The objective? To "heal" the wounds from the 2000 Republican primary, particularly South Carolina (in which, ironically, Abramoff and friend Norquist actively took a hand.) The meeting was so "successful" that less than a month later, McCain joined Bush on the campaign trail, and subsequently became the "anointed" heir to the Bush throne.
In return, McCain sat on the Abramoff emails, and pushed off the hearings scheduled for June until late September. Even then, the hearings focused exclusively on how mean Abramoff was to his tribal clients. No mention of Ralph Reed or Grover Norquist, nothing of the dozens of implicated House and Senate members, or, most importantly, of Bush's own Administration officials, such as Interior Dep. Sec. Steve Griles or Solicitor General William Myers. McCain actively suppressed information which, if released in a timely manner, could have influenced the November 2004 Presidential election.
The SIAC hearings which followed looked more like a McCain witchhunt than any serious approach to justice. Long-time arch-enemy Grover Norquist, while threatened with a subpeona, never appeared (oops, no subpeona issued) and most Abramoff cronies merely took the Fifth. Steven Griles pleaded the Sargent Schultz defend, and Italia Federici (after apparently being sought by federal marshalls,) tried a similar ploy. Abramoff accomplice and serial launderer Amy Ridenour got off with a simple, "I'm so, so sorry, St. John" deferential defense, and came out relatively unscathed.
The entire post (and all their coverage of the Abramoff scandal) is a must read to understand how actively the GOP is working to contain and shape the fall-out from Abramoff’s exposure.
This is a massive cover-up masquerading as a hard hitting investigation led by John McCain.
Two data point provide an idea of the size of it.
First, in Peter Stone’s new book, Heist there is this revealing statistic (emphasis added):
During the course of its two-year investigation, the [Indian Affairs] committee issued more than seventy subpoenas and other requests for documents and received over 750,000 pages of records.
Less than 7,000 pages of those documents have been released by McCain’s investigation.
And second, those records do not include the e-mails, faxes and invoices from Jack Abramoff that were collected to support the November 2001 audit of lobbying expenses conducted by the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) Office of Public Auditor (OPA) for the Marianas government. That is another 5,000 plus pages given to media organizations and others. Only a fraction of these documents have been released to the public.
These CNMI records include detailed invoices.
Here is a sample:
McCain’s committee had these records for ALL of Abramoff’s Tribal clients. An investigation of the scandal would have revealed the existence of these records that place the emails into their wider context. The CNMI records mention contacts with hundreds of Republican aides, think tanks and elected or appointed officials.
McCain hid the vast majority of these contacts.
He covered up his Party’s and his President’s deep, deep, deep ties to the Abramoff slush fund.
As Jack told Vanity Fair:
“Any important Republican who comes out and says they didn’t know me is almost certainly lying,” he says. Such lies are not just, well, lies, but dumb to boot, he adds, for, as his own humiliations suggest, old e-mails never die; they just sit on hard drives, waiting to be subpoenaed and then to be leaked to the press. “This is not an age when you can run away from facts,” he declares. “I had to deal with my records, and others will have to deal with theirs.”
So far, all of the damage to the Republican Party from the Abramoff scandal has come from a very small sample of subpoenaed documents. The most damaging documents were not mentioned—at all—by the Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee; John McCain intentionally only chose documents that would protect his Party, and direct the blast of the scandal to damage his enemies. He has reduced the scandal to a casino caper screenplay. It is so much more.
My point is that there are thousands of stories, crimes and facts waiting to be reported in these documents. And that does not count what the Department of Justice has in their Abramoff files. It may be twice the number of documents that the Indian Affairs Committee collected. No wonder Abramoff had a desk at the DOJ and is serving time within driving distance to DC.
And no wonder the GOP is so scared of Henry Waxman as Head of the Government Reform Committee. He won’t bury evidence like John McCain did.
Indictments are coming. Some documents will come out, but not enough.
We need to demand the release of the 700,000 pages of Abramoff documents intentionally hidden by John McCain.
There will be special elections to fill the seats of those who follow DeLay, Cunningham and Ney into disgrace. And there will be dozens of 2008 Republican candidates closely tied to this scandal and cover-up. We need to be ready to exploit the Abramoff affair in ways we did not exploit it in 2006. One person who will forever be connected to Jack Abramoff is John McCain.
We should hit him very hard on his work to cover-up the scandal and limit damage to his Party and his President, George W. Bush.
It goes right to St. John’s “maverick” image and destroys his strength..
And once this story is out there, McCain’s GOP opponents will lead the attack.
We need to hold McCain accountable for following in the footsteps of George Wallace.
And by that I mean McCain’s pandering to assholes for their votes.