Allex, Koppleman, Salon, February 20, 2008
In December of last year, Matt Drudge reported that John McCain — who was then in the midst of a surprising comeback in the Republican presidential race — was desperately trying to convince the New York Times to kill a story about “charges of giving special treatment to a lobbyist,” and that McCain had hired a prominent attorney to work on his behalf. For the Arizona senator, who has built a good part of his reputation as a straight talker on his efforts toward campaign finance reform and cleaning up the lobbying culture in Washington, D.C., such a story could theoretically prove quite damaging.
Well, apparently we’ll see just what kind of harm the story will do to McCain’s campaign, as on Wednesday evening the Times published the article on its Web site. The Times piece, written by a team of reporters, suggests not just special treatment for the lobbyist in question — Vicki Iseman, 40 — but the possibility of a romantic relationship between the two, beginning in 1999.
“Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of [McCain's] top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block [Iseman's] access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity,” the Times reports.
Both McCain and Iseman deny that their relationship was romantic. But the Times describes McCain’s campaign at the time as being very worried about appearances when it came to the two. In February of 1999, the Times says,
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.
“I did not have sex with that Woman”
Wont They get some fresh material?
Next McCain will have killed Vince Foster.
Stupid Bastards!
Comment by Rainlander — February 22, 2008 @ 1:04 am