McCain's real secret

[formerlurker]

McCain's real secret

Wall Street Journal
February 22, 2008; Page A14


Consider us as skeptical as everyone else about yesterday's nonbombshell in the New York Times that John McCain was once friendly with a female lobbyist he did no favors for. It's an ideal story for the blogosphere. We're more interested in his campaign's continued machinations within the election-finance rules that he did so much to create.

Last week, we wrote about the $3 million loan his campaign took out to keep his campaign afloat in November, putting up its fund-raising lists and a life insurance policy as collateral. If the campaign had gone south, Mr. McCain would still have been able to tap into donors from his position as a powerful Senator on the Commerce Committee to make good on the debt. More cash started to come in, but now it turns out that Mr. McCain's campaign looked into borrowing another $1 million at its moment of peril before the New Hampshire primary, this time pledging its eligibility for federal matching campaign funds.

 
Here's where the explanation gets really lawyered up. The McCain campaign hurries to say it didn't actually surrender its public funding certification as collateral, oh no. The campaign applied to the Federal Election Commission for matching funds, and once that application was approved went to a bank and opened a line of credit based on the possibility that they might someday reapply for matching funds if the campaign faltered. "We never claimed that the matching funds were collateral for the loan," says McCain lawyer Trevor Potter. "This was all a hypothetical future transaction." (We wish we could get bank loans like that.)

So why does the distinction matter? Because under FEC rules, using the certification as collateral would have locked the candidate into accepting the matching funds and the federal spending limits that come with them. And Mr. McCain has declared he has no intention of accepting federal funds for the Republican primary season.

Yesterday, FEC Chairman David Mason said he still has questions about Mr. McCain's loan terms -- questions that need to be answered before the candidate will be allowed to drop out of the primary financing system and its restrictions. Adds Capital University Law Professor and Former FEC Chairman Brad Smith: "There is certainly an argument that what they did amounts to a pledge of the funds" as collateral. Either way, it appears that Mr. McCain has been employing lawyers to game the campaign finance rules he hails as a defense against "corruption."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120364094072284517.html

[Lacarnut]

You are telling me that McCain and ALL politicians don't game the system. I am so disheartened.

[DumbAss Tanker]

That being a problem for McCain depends on the reader not only wrapping his or her head around an arcane and undecided fine point of FEC law interpretation, but also actually CARING about it.  I don't think it's his 'real' problem at all.

[Uhhuh35]

Short of kidnapping McCain and beating him for the next eight years, I don't think stuff like this will torpedo his campaign.