John "Pinocchio" McCain, Says One Thing, Does Another, Playing Games With America's Future

So that famous “only one task at a time” candidate, John “Pinocchio” McCain, “suspended” his campaign (although his campaign ads still ran, and Sarah Palin still made appearances, and offices were open, and it seemed he lied about the suspension, too). The nation’s erstwhile economic savior went back to Washington where a deal seemed to be forming to bail the country out of the mess he helped start. And then, once he got there, with all his grandstanding and photo-opping, the wheels of the negotiations fell off. Thanks McCain! You really made a difference.

The current Republican Administration came up with the idea of the bailout. Bush himself said the situation was dire. The Federal Reserve chairman warned of terrible results if nothing was done. The working plan was presented by the Republican Treasury secretary. Republicans and Democrats had worked together for seven days on a compromise plan based on the original Republican administration plan. Now, if you hear Republicans on television, the bailout was a Democrat idea. Give me a break!

Now McCain gets to town, and since the Republicans are running against themselves this year, the House Republicans have revolted, and I suspect his devious campaign is behind it. They want to solve their totally free market mess with more of the questionable economics that got us here. Oh, let's just throw some more gasoline on that fire!

This is what happens when you play politics with our children’s future, which the Republicans have been doing for the last eight years. McCain pulled what pundit Pat Buchanan called a “Hail Mary pass.” I describe it not with a sports analogy, but a literary one: it was a Trojan Horse maneuver, deceitfully seeming to be one thing, but being done for deviously self-serving reasons. He hit the reset button of the news cycle to take attention away from Palin’s ineptness, his own complicity in the financial collapse, and his campaign manager’s revealing scandal.

Yes, my friends, John McCain’s campaign manager, the wonderfully duplicitous Rick Davis, super lobbyist, was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations, current and former officials say, according to the New York Times and Newsweek.

McCain, the Republican candidate for president, has recently begun campaigning as a critic of the two companies and the lobbying army that helped them evade greater regulation as they began buying riskier mortgages with implicit federal backing. But he is in cahoots with one!

Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager and longtime adviser, played a large role in helping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac beat back regulatory challenges when he served as president of their advocacy group, the Homeownership Alliance, formed in the summer of 2000.

“The value that he brought to the relationship was the closeness to Senator McCain and the possibility that Senator McCain was going to run for president again,” said Robert McCarson, a former spokesman for Fannie Mae, who said that while he worked there from 2000 to 2002, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together paid Mr. Davis’s firm $35,000 a month. Mr. Davis “didn’t really do anything,” Mr. McCarson, a Democrat, said.

Newsweek reports that “Davis himself approached Freddie Mac in 2006 and asked for a new consulting arrangement that would allow his firm to continue to be paid. The arrangement was approved by Hollis McLoughlin, Freddie Mac's vice president for external relations, because "he [Davis] was John McCain's campaign manager and it was felt you couldn't say no," said one of the sources.”

The New York Times reports that one of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 through last month to a firm owned by Davis. Freddie Mac, until it was taken over by the government this month along with Fannie Mae, the other big mortgage lender whose deteriorating finances helped precipitate the cascading problems on Wall Street, paid Davis’s firm, Davis & Manafort. Davis took a leave of absence in 2006 to run McCain’s campaign, but as a partner and equity-holder he continues to benefit from income of Davis & Manafort.

Apparently, Davis did next to nothing for the money. Columnist Andrew Sullivan says thus “was classic corporate insurance, shaken down by someone in their pocket.” And this person, Davis, is running the McCain campaign, and it was he who told the Washington Post that the presidential race will be decided more over personalities than issues.

"This election is not about issues," said Davis. "This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates." Obviously, this is the Republican strategy – distract the voters from the issues and the supreme fact that POLICIES, not personality, REALLY MATTER! (In other words, do things razzle-dazzle things like “suspend” your campaign.)

Meanwhile, McCain has no clue on the Davis scandal, as he seems to have no clue about Palin:

In an interview with CNBC and The New York Times, McCain responded to a question about Davis's role in the advocacy group through 2005 by saying that his campaign manager "has had nothing to do with it since, and I'll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it." Yeah, right! McCain’s right hand man was a key cog in the terrible collapse. Do you really want this bunch giving us four more years of the last eight years?

Or, perhaps better stated, as columnist Andrew Sullivan wrote in The Daily Dish this week, “Do we really want an out-of-it president surrounded by corporate lobbying sleazeballs?”