The Keating Five scandal, and John McCain’s role in it, has received relatively little mention in presidential campaign coverage, and at least one Fox News host seems dedicated to keeping it that way.
Appearing Thursday morning on Fox & Friends, radio host Mike Papantonio tried to remind viewers about McCain’s intervention with federal regulators on behalf of real estate mogul Charles Keating, who was trying to avoid regulations of a savings and loan he owned during the S&L crisis of the 1980s.
F&F’s Steve Doocy told Papantonio to “pipe down,” called him “rude” and demanded he “cut it out.” A show producer could be overheard saying “cut his mike.”
As Papantonio tries one last time to explain the details of the Keating Five scandal, Doocy again cuts him off.
“This is not the History Channel,” he says.
Papantonio’s apparent crime was interrupting fellow guest Michael Reagan, the conservative radio host, who was arguing that it would be unfair to judge McCain based on his actions 20 years ago.
“It has everything to do with what’s happening today,” Papantonio said before being told to pipe down.
Regardless of whether Papantonio was being rude, preserving an orderly debate certainly could not have been Doocy’s goal in silencing the guest. Not two minutes before his admonition that Papantonio was “being rude,” Doocy repeatedly interrupted his guest to deliver talking points that might as well have been written by the McCain campaign.
At least three times Doocy interrupted Papantonio as he argued that McCain’s political gambit to “suspend” his campaign and delay Friday’s debate was more a response to his flagging poll numbers than an attempt to fix the economic crisis. Doocy wasn’t buying it.
“If Barack Obama wants to do so much for the economy, why doesn’t he go to his day job and work in the US senate?” he asked Reagan, cutting off Papantonio’s argument.
NY Times: McCain had possible relations to Female Lobbyist
NY Times
February 21, 2008
Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.
A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, in his offices and aboard a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.
When news organizations reported that McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s clients, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.
McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.
It had been just a decade since an official favor for a friend with regulatory problems had nearly ended McCain’s political career by ensnaring him in the Keating Five scandal. In the years that followed, he reinvented himself as the scourge of special interests, a crusader for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame.
But the concerns about McCain’s relationship with Iseman underscored an enduring paradox of his post-Keating career. Even as he has vowed to hold himself to the highest ethical standards, his confidence in his own integrity has sometimes seemed to blind him to potentially embarrassing conflicts of interest.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain faced the explosion of a long-ticking timebomb Thursday morning when the New York Times revealed allegations of his questionable conduct with a woman who lobbied for the telecommunications industry.
In a 9 a.m. press conference, McCain denied the Times report, saying he was disappointed with the paper of record’s handling of the story.
“I’m very disappointed in The New York Times piece,” McCain said. “It’s not true.”
The Arizona Senator flatly denied that he had a romantic relationship with the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, and he said campaign aides never warned him about speculation the two were having an affair nor intervened to keep her from campaign events.
While he said he was unaware whether aides discussed the alleged relationship amongst themselves, McCain said he never heard the concerns personally. He went on to pan the Times‘ sourcing of the article.
“I do notice with some interest that it’s, quote, ‘former aides,’ that this whole story is based on anonymous sources. … I’m very disappointed in that,” McCain said.
One former top campaign aide, John Weaver, did speak on the record to the Times and the Washington Post, which produced its own story on McCain and Iseman Thursday.
Weaver told the papers he met Iseman in person at Union Station in Washington, DC, to warn her to stay away from McCain. In his press conference Thursday, McCain said he had not spoken about the Times investigation with Weaver before it was published and he denied knowing about the Union Station meeting.
Right off the bat, McCain was asked about the most salacious implications of the Times article.
Q Senator, did you ever have any meeting with any of your staffers in which they would have intervened to ask you not to see Vicki Iseman or to be concerned about appearances of being too close to a lobbyist? SEN. MCCAIN: No. Q No meeting ever occurred? SEN. MCCAIN: No. Q No staffer was ever concerned about a possible romantic relationship? SEN. MCCAIN: If they were, they didn’t communicate that to me. Q Did you ever have such a relationship? SEN. MCCAIN: No.
McCain also acknowledged speaking to Times editor Bill Keller while the paper was reporting its story, but he said he never tried to dissuade him from publishing it.
“I called him up when the investigation was going on and I asked him basically what was happening and that we hoped that we could bring this to closure,” McCain said. “But it was a very brief conversation.”
At one point, Cindy McCain took to the microphone to share her own criticism of the paper.
“My children and I not only trust my husband but know that he would never do anything to not only disappoint our family, but [to] disappoint the people of America,” she said. “He’s a man of great character, and I’m very, very disappointed in The New York Times.”
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