It's Not a Lie So Much As It Is a Delusion

In a statement denying that Senator John McCain was getting a little extramarital hoo-hoo from a lobbyist young enough to be -- in Kentucky, where I live -- his granddaughter, McCain's press office said this:

John McCain has a 24-year record of serving our country with honor and integrity. He has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists, and he will not allow a smear campaign to distract from the issues at stake in this election.

John McCain burst into the public consciousness as a member of the Keating Five, a bipartisan group of Senators that pressured the Federal Home Loan Bank Board to lay off Lincoln Savings and Loan, a corrupt and failing S&L that cost U.S. taxpayers $2 billion to bail out. Lincoln was controlled by Charles Keating, an Arizona real estate developer (and Republican anti-pornography crusader) who used Lincoln to fund his dubious development projects. Keating was an early supporter and underwriter of McCain's political ambitions.

The idea that any career politician has "never done favors for special interests or lobbyists" is absurd. That's a politician's job description. When McCain hauls a load of pork back to his state, he's doing a favor for special interests: his constituents. And lobbyists are not automatically corrupt and doing favors for them is not automatically a bad thing; lobbying is more often than not a legitimate function in our form of government. I have a friend who's a state-level lobbyist, and the value he provides in defending small business from unintended consequences in lawmaking is enormous.

But McCain clearly sees himself in absolute terms, ignoring historic corruption and denying even that he's subject to the pressures to which he's supposed to be subject. This absolutism-in-service-to-ego says interesting things about the kind of President he'd be.

Also interesting is the implied threat at the end of the statement. I, personally, want to see what he'll do to "not allow" his unblemished record of integrity to distract people from what he'd rather talk about. I think we, the people, get to talk about pretty much whatever we want.

Comments

[Pursuit]

Oh come on. I think you're being to hard on him with the whole "not allow" bit. If this were the Clintons, Bill Keller would have been found dead this morning with a self inflicted gun shot wound to the back of the head!

[Adam]

Well-said.