Smear or Be Smeared?

DNC: We can’t afford four more years with a President who fights an endless war in Iraq. … On the war, McCain scoffed at Bush’s call to leave troops in Iraq for 50 years, saying "Make it a hundred!"

That of course is a serious distortion of what McCain actually said to a town-hall meeting in New Hampshire back on Jan. 3. His actual words are posted in a video on YouTube. Far from advocating "endless war," he said the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq would be "fine with me" provided that they’re not being killed or wounded. Here’s the full quote:

McCain, Jan. 3: Make it a hundred. … We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That would be fine with me, as long as American, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. It’s fine with me and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintained a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al Qaeda is training, recruiting and equipping and motivating people every single day.

It should be noted that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, despite their frequent talk of withdrawing from Iraq, have said repeatedly that they would maintain at least some troops in a combat role in Iraq for some time, possibly their entire term of office.

There’s little doubt that McCain is less eager than either Clinton or Obama to bring troops home without further suppression of insurgent attacks. But it’s a rank falsehood for the DNC to accuse McCain of wanting to wage "endless war" based on his support for a presence in Iraq something like the U.S. role in South Korea. 

DNC: [McCain] looked the other way as Jack Abramoff bought and paid for the Republican Party and the Culture of Corruption.

The truth is that McCain, as chairman of the Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee, vigorously pursued an investigation into how tribes had been fleeced by the mostly Republican lobbyists they hired to back their casino ventures. Federal prosecutors later sent a number of players in the scandal to prison, including lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Republican Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio. The scandal also entangled and contributed to the downfall of ex-Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, the former Republican majority leader, who once described Abramoff as "one of my closest and dearest friends." It also contributed to the defeats of Republican Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana and eight-term Republican Rep. Richard Pombo of California. Even McCain’s critics admit he kept pressure on the Bush Justice Department while it investigated Abramoff. To say that he "looked the other way" is false.

The DNC and others point to a news item from 2005 in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, which said McCain assured colleagues that his investigation wasn’t aimed at them. According to the report, McCain said at the weekly lunch of the GOP’s Steering Committee, "It’s not our responsibility in any way to involve ourselves in the ethics process [of senators].  … That was not the responsibility of the Indian Affairs Committee." But that should come as no surprise; investigating possible misconduct by senators is the job of the Senate Ethics Committee (spelled out on page 12 of the Senate Ethics Manual).

Furthermore, the Ethics Committee publicly declined in 2006 to investigate the Abramoff affair, because the Justice Department was already conducting criminal investigations and had told the committee that a parallel Senate probe could interfere. Even the Ethics Committee’s Democratic vice chairman, Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota, concurred in that decision. We fail to see how the DNC can with any honesty criticize McCain for failing to do the job of another committee, especially when that panel’s leading Democrat feared that a congressional investigation might jeopardize possible criminal cases.

The DNC’s Glass House

The DNC also throws some stones at McCain that could be hurled at their own leading candidates.

• Economics: The DNC paints McCain as untrained to run the economy: "McCain has said: ‘I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.’ " That’s an accurate quote. But while McCain wasn’t trained as an economist, neither were Obama or Clinton. Clinton has touted her experience working for children and health care. Obama talks about his experience organizing the poor and low-income workers in Chicago. None of the three senators sit on the Finance Committee, the Banking Committee or the Budget Committee. We’ll be interested to hear the DNC explain how a graduate of Harvard or Yale law schools is any better educated about economics or the economy than an Annapolis grad who has been in Congress longer than the two Democrats put together.
• Lobbyists: The e-mail criticizes McCain for his reliance on lobbyists to raise campaign money, implying that his past crusades for stricter campaign-finance regulation and tightened congressional ethics laws were insincere efforts to "score political points":

DNC: After championing campaign finance reform and ethics legislation to score political points, he now has a staggering amount of lobbyists involved in every aspect of his campaign.

This is a reference to a recent report by Public Citizen, the group founded by Ralph Nader, which has tallied 59 persons who are or formerly were registered as lobbyists serving as "bundlers" (fundraisers) for McCain’s campaign. That’s more than for any other candidate, and Public Citizen said McCain’s list is growing.

However, neither of the leading Democratic candidates are entirely innocent on this score. Clinton voted for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation in 2002, and nevertheless has 20 lobbyist-bundlers aiding her campaign, according to the Public Citizen report. And even Obama, who crusaded for congressional ethics legislation last year, has 10 fundraisers whom Public Citizen identified as lobbyist-bundlers. In his case, all are former lobbyists and none are now registered.

Closer to the Mark