MrClean             

Score so far: McCain - millions; The Times - 0!

In what has to be a record-setting quash of a scandal, Mr. and Mrs. Clean denied everything, cancelled their Times subscription and sang all the way to the bank. In the process, McCain’s spirited defense of several lobbyists on his top campaign staff - including his campaign manager who represented telecommunications firms, and a senior adviser who represented drug companies, automakers, oil companies and defense contractors, among others - scored bonus points for the K Street Project!

McCain’s trial by drive-by media even earned him Rush’s endorsement! I mean how much more Conservative can you get - sex, influence peddling and scads of dough?

The last time these charges were leveled against McCain was in the 2000 campaign, when then-Texas Governor Bush portrayed McCain as hypocritical for leading the fight for campaign finance reform while raising money from lobbyists with interests before the Senate Commerce Committee, which he chaired.

What happened this time around?

Well, the Times story has been simmering long enough for McCain’s campaign staffers to have their response in the can. Once the shoe dropped, it was showtime - cue the cameras, bam, bam, bam - and within hours McCain was using the story to pull in contributions from recalcitrant GOP Conservatives.

Whew! Dodged that bullet - despite the inconsistencies between McCain’s blanket denial and others’ accounts of his unprecedented meddling in FCC regulatory affairs and his staff’s intervention to warn him away from Iseman, it looks like the defense will hold up until some of the Times’ anonymous sources come forward with more truths.

Now comes the FEC! They want to talk about all that money!

According the WaPo, there are two separate issues here. First, McCain opted in to the public finance system for the primaries last year which meant that his struggling campaign would get $5.8 million in public matching funds in March. Now that he's effectively the Republican nominee, he wants out, because the system imposes a spending limit of $54 million on the primary season.

So McCain notified the FEC he was opting out, but, IIIEEEEE, there's a problem - the FEC’s response was clear: McCain can't tell the FEC that he's out of the system, he can only ask for permission to leave!

And the FEC can't give him an answer until it has a quorum of four commissioners! There are currently only two because of a partisan deadlock in the Senate.

The second issue has to do with the provisions of McCain's tricky loan that effectively collateralized the FEC’s public matching funds. It remains to be seen whether the FEC will rule that that locked him into the system, but, for now, this one‘s small potatoes - it‘s the $54 million spending cap that looms large.

The WaPo contends the McCain campaign may have already exceeded that limit and - “Knowingly violating the spending limit is a criminal offense that could put McCain at risk of stiff fines and up to five years in prison."

To top all this, the DNC is calling for an investigation. DNC Chairman Howard Dean said McCain benefited from his application for matching funds well beyond the bank loan, pointing out that participating in the system helped McCain to be automatically placed on the presidential ballot in key states.

Because this situation is literally unprecedented, we can expect all manner of partisan pontificating. But it’s hard to see how McCain, the Mr. Clean of campaign-financing, can escape untarnished because, in the past, McCain has refused to support efforts to fix the primary-financing system.

It’s an irony that the system is so unworkable that McCain may have broken the rules just trying to get out of it.

Ah, but that will just further endear him to Bush’s base, no? And, the way things are going, who’d be surprised at a McCain/Huckabee ticket?