The Other McCain Story

by hilzoy

A few days ago I wrote about a loan John McCain had taken out, in which he tried to use his future eligibility for federal matching funds as collateral. Presumably, he did this in order to get the money he needed to keep his campaign afloat without using the matching finds themselves as collateral. And the reason it was important not to use those funds as collateral was that according to the FEC, doing so would constitute “accepting ” those funds, and thus subjecting himself and his campaign to the limitations that go with it.

I am not a lawyer, and thus have no opinion about whether McCain’s loan violates the, um, McCain Feingold Act, or any other provision of federal law. But I did think that this was a pretty transparent attempt to violate its spirit. Campaign finance laws ask candidates to make a choice: either you take federal money, in which case you are subject to a number of restrictions, or else you don’t take it, in which case you are not. Getting a loan by using the matching funds you have not yet received as collateral is a way of trying to have it both ways: essentially, you get to spend your matching funds now, but because the money did not literally come from the government, you can delay a decision about whether or not to accept the restrictions that go with them until later. If you can leverage the money into enough wins to generate contributions, you can pay back the loan and duck the restrictions; if not, you’ve lost anyways, so you might as well abide by them. That’s exactly what campaign finance laws do not want candidates to be able to do.

McCain tried to be tricky about this: he didn’t use the matching funds he had qualified for as collateral, but he did use the fact that he could qualify for them at any time. That’s why he had to give away his legal right to withdraw from the campaign if he lost: to satisfy his lenders, he had to promise to stay in long enough to actually get the matching funds he qualified for, and to give them first dibs on those funds. Whether or not this violates the law — a law McCain authored — I have no idea, but it is certainly an attempt to wriggle out of its requirements, and it ought to put paid, once and for all, to the idea of McCain as a straight-talking man of principle.

Apparently, the FEC has the same questions I had about McCain’s loan. The AP reports (h/t TPM):

“The government’s top campaign finance regulator says John McCain can’t drop out of the primary election’s public financing system until he answers questions about a loan he obtained to kickstart his once faltering presidential campaign.

Federal Election Commission Chairman David Mason, in a letter to McCain this week, said the all-but-certain Republican nominee needs to assure the commission that he did not use the promise of public money to help secure a $4 million line of credit he obtained in November.

McCain’s lawyer, Trevor Potter, said Wednesday evening that McCain has withdrawn from the system and that the FEC can’t stop him. Potter said the campaign did not encumber the public funds in any way. (…)

By accepting the public money, McCain would be limited to spending about $54 million for the primaries, a ceiling his campaign is near. That would significantly hinder his ability to finance his campaign between now and the Republican National Convention in September.”

The FEC’s letter to McCain is here (pdf); the amount McCain has already spent during the primaries is $49,650,185.36; the exact FEC limits on primary spending are not yet available, but if this were 2007, they would have been $40.89 million, which is considerably less than McCain has already spent. I assume that the AP got its figure of “about $54 million” from the FEC; if so, then McCain has about four and a half million dollars to spend between now and the Convention in September.

One further problem:

“Complicating the dispute is the FEC’s current lack of a quorum. The six-member commission has four vacancies and Senate Democrats and Republicans are at loggerheads over how to fill them.

In his letter, Mason told McCain he would need the votes of four commissioners to accept his withdrawal from the system.

“The commission will consider your request at such a time as it has a quorum,” Mason wrote.

Without action by the Senate, McCain could be waiting indefinitely. (…)

Potter [McCain’s lawyer] said McCain will continue with his campaign and not adhere to the public financing system’s limits on spending. Without a full commission, Mason has little enforcement power. Likewise, without an FEC, McCain has no way to appeal Mason’s conclusion.”

The FEC thinks it needs a quorum in order to approve McCain’s withdrawal. But it also needs a quorum in order to enforce its decisions. And as Mark Schmitt said about McCain, “it’s pretty clear that his attitude toward the Federal Election Commission on this question is, “Come and get me!””

Waiting For More

[Patrick Appel]

Publius has a smart post on the New York Times and the McCain Iseman article:

I’ve got to think there’s more to come. Josh Marshall’s analysis seems spot on – the NYT must have more than they’re publishing at this point. This article wasn’t some rush job – they’ve been mulling it for months. More to the point, they knew exactly the type of conservative firestorm that the article would produce.

It’s hard to imagine the NYT (after institutional deliberation) going forward with such an explosive article with such a thin foundation. In this respect, the sheer recklessness is, in a weird way, perhaps the most frightening thing for the McCain campaign. Maybe the paper has the goods and is trying to tie down one loose end or something. Who knows. They’ve either got the goods or it’s one of the stupidest things in the history of journalism.   

I’m still trying to figure out how to respond to the McCain scandal. The New York Times is sticking by its guns, so, for now, I’m going to assume their reporting has some factual basis. We’ll just have to wait and see how things shake out over the next few days.

Dems Abroad

[Patrick Appel]

I should probably note that Obama won the Democrats Abroad primary getting 66 percent of the vote. Obama earned 2.5 delegates to Clinton’s 2. The group will award 2.5 more delegates at their April convention. I’m not sure what a half-delegate looks like, but every delegate (or part thereof) counts at this point. This is Obama’s 11th straight win.

McCain Iseman Reax

[Patrick Appel]

The much anticipated story on McCain and Lobbyist Vicki Iseman finally broke yesterday. Marc outlines McCain’s response strategy and here is video of McCain’s press conference this morning. Yglesias‘ take:

Basically, in exchange for money and freebies, McCain sought to intervene in a federal regulatory process in favor of a company that had provided him with tens of thousands of dollars in cash and services. He could try to plead naiveté, but in light of the hot water he got into with the Keating Five affair, which had the exactly same structure, he clearly knew what he was doing and knew that it was wrong.

James Kirchick explains what he sees as the gist of the piece:

John Weaver, whom McCain fired last summer (indentified in the Times piece as  "now an informal campaign adviser" to McCain, which sounds like a puffed-up euphemism for "unemployed") says that 8 years ago, he and two other former employees who have since "become disillusioned" (read: disgruntled), suspected that McCain was having an affair with a lobbyist.

The rest of the article, rehashing old news about the Keating Five, is, as Rich Lowry says, complete "window dressing." If you had been wondering whether the Times was in the tank for Obama, well, here’s your answer.

Here’s Matt Cooper on the  NYT’s reporting:

…it’s a weird piece–strangely unsatisfying and it hardly puts McCain’s ethics in much of a context. At bottom, there’s no sign that McCain actually did anything for the woman and her clients that he would have done anyway given his positions on a variety of telecom issues. He didn’t bend principle for her, so far as I can tell.

This story coupled with FEC Chairman David Mason asking questions about McCain’s loan (which Hilzoy wrote about here) makes this a bad day for McCain.

How Lost is Like the War in Iraq

By Peter Suderman

No, really.

Yes, Lost is on tonight, and I’m not sure I’ll get to watch it. So instead: Theories!

Lost, like the war, began with a spectacular opening—a $10 million+ shock-and-awe pilot that you couldn’t possibly ignore. And as it opened, it was sold on the basis of resolving a few key, central mysteries: What, exactly, is the smoke monster? How are all these dead relatives showing up? Are the survivors connected, and how? And what is the nature and origin of the island? And it was sold on the notion that its creators—Lindelof, Cruse, and Abrams—had a master plan, a fully developed narrative that they would unspool with expertise and confidence over the course of time and that would prove satisfying along the way.  And those creators allowed, and even perpetuated, the notion that they were, in fact, in control.

The combination of these elements resulted in an immediate hit. Everyone wanted to talk about the mysteries, about the island’s healing powers, about Jack’s dad, about the Others and the smoke monster. The show was a hit, and a big one. But the show’s actual progress seemed to lag behind both the creators’ hype and fan interest. Backlash developed as it seemed that, no, not all would be resolved quickly or cleanly.  Some began to suspect that maybe those mysteries would never be resolved, and suspicion grew that, no matter what, the creators did not actually know what they were doing. They had not planned that far in advance.

Instead of addressing the central mysteries, the show trailed off on what appeared to many be red herrings. New mysteries developed, and the old ones were ignored, or obliquely referenced. When critics brought up these questions, they were either dismissed or assured that, yes, they would eventually be answered (although likely in a different way than initially promised), but anyone who expected answers to come so quickly was impatient, unwilling to see the story through to its end. Appeals by devotees to stick with the show were made in large part on the basis of trust in its creators rather than on empirical, in-show evidence that it was moving toward a satisfying conclusion.

Around year three, the show seemed to many to go off the rails entirely, floundering and flailing as it struggled to find a storyline that would stick. Viewership dropped noticeably, and the creators were loudly accused of having duped the show’s fans. A few diehards stuck with the show, but even many who continued to follow it doubted that it would ever lead anywhere other than further narrative chaos.

Towards the end of the season, a surge of revelations and plot developments suggested that the creators may have put the show back on track. Now, in the current season, its success it undetermined, and while it has won back some fans, opinions are split.

One important difference should be noted. The creators of Lost have now set an end date.

As an aside, this multi-angle fan edit of the original plane crash is about the coolest thing ever. (Via the Vulture.)

Shorter Lost

by Peter Suderman

The most important result of the end of the $2.5 billion WGA strike is that Battlestar Galactica will not, in fact, be cancelled before the end of its four-year run—which had been a serious possibility. The second most important result is that we will see, if not a full season, at least a fully-developed storyline for the fourth season of Lost. Here’s the story from Variety:

As for Lost, exec producer Carlton Cuse said he and fellow showrunner Damon Lindelof would meet with ABC brass … to hammer out the plan for the rest of the season. They won’t be able to finish the remaining eight segs of the show’s planned 16-episode season — five is a more likely number — but they will be able to craft a completed storyline for the remainder of this season, Cuse said.

And whatever segs are not produced this season will be picked up down the road in the show’s remaining two seasons, Cuse said.

"We’re going to try to make as many as we can and do a good job of finishing out this season," he said. "We’ll have to compress some of the storytelling we planned for this season, and that may not be a bad thing.

A compressed season may not have been a good thing for The Wire (although, hey, it’s still not bad), but I think it stands a good chance of improving the prospects for Lost. One of The Wire’s strengths has always been its expert pacing, balancing the various needs for character moments, plot development, and plain old suspense. The true scope and complexity of each arc usually took five or six episodes to develop and another five or six to unravel before the last two episodes provided closure.

Lost, on the other hand, has had the opposite problem; it’s been positively spastic with its pacing, usually too slow, and always too heavy on laying the groundwork for intrigue without providing nearly enough follow up. The creators are experts—perhaps the best on TV—at sucking viewers in. But they don’t know exactly what to do with you once you’re on the hook. A slightly compressed schedule could potentially force its writers to focus on what’s truly integral to their story rather than on what’s merely tantalizing.