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Autos The Long Run For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Senator John McCain during his 2000 presidential bid. His campaign this year is not as focused on the corrupting power of money in politics.
Skip to next paragraph The Long Run Honor and Influence This is part of a series of articles about the life and careers of contenders for the 2008 Republican and Democratic presidential nominations.
More Politics News Stephen Boitano/Getty Images The lobbyist Vicki Iseman, whose relationship with Mr McCain troubled some of his aides. Mark Mainz/Getty Images Lowell W Paxson, one of Ms Iseman's clients. Andrea Mohin Mr McCain, with his lawyers, before he testified to the Senate Ethics Committee in 1991 about his involvement in the Keating Five scandal. A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on 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 Mr McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist's client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement. Mr 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 Mr 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 Mr 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 Mr McCain's relationship with Ms 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. Mr McCain promised, for example, never to fly directly from Washington to Phoenix, his hometown, to avoid the impression of self-interest because he sponsored a law that opened the route nearly a decade ago.
Michael R Bloomberg and Lowell W Paxson, Ms Iseman's client. But he later resigned as its chairman after news reports disclosed that the group was tapping the same kinds of unlimited corporate contributions he opposed, including those from companies seeking his favor. He has criticized the cozy ties between lawmakers and lobbyists, but is relying on corporate lobbyists to donate their time running his presidential race and recently hired a lobbyist to run his Senate office. "He is essentially an honorable person," said William P Cheshire, a friend of Mr McCain who as editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic defended him during the Keating Five scandal. Mr Cheshire added, "That imprudence or recklessness may be part of why he was not more astute about the risks he was running with this shady operator," Charles Keating, whose ties to Mr McCain and four other lawmakers tainted their reputations in the savings and loan debacle. During his current campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr McCain has played down his attacks on the corrupting power of money in politics, aware that the stricter regulations he championed are unpopular in his party. When the Senate overhauled lobbying and ethics rules last year, Mr McCain stayed in the background. With his nomination this year all but certain, though, he is reminding voters again of his record of reform.
Barack Obama, a Democratic contender who has made lobbying and ethics rules a centerpiece of his own pitch to voters. "I would very much like to think that I have never been a man whose favor can be bought," Mr McCain wrote about his Keating experience in his 2002 memoir, "Worth the Fighting For." "From my earliest youth, I would have considered such a reputation to be the most shameful ignominy imaginable. Yet that is exactly how millions of Americans viewed me for a time, a time that I will forever consider one of the worst experiences of my life." A drive to expunge the stain on his reputation in time turned into a zeal to cleanse Washington as well. The episode taught him that "questions of honor are raised as much by appearances as by reality in politics," he wrote, "and because they incite public distrust they need to be addressed no less directly than we would address evidence of expressly illegal corruption." A Formative Scandal Mr McCain started his career like many other aspiring politicians, eagerly courting the wealthy and powerful. A Vietnam war hero and Senate liaison for the Navy, he arrived in Arizona in 1980 after his second marriage, to Cindy Hensley, the heiress to a beer fortune there. He quickly started looking for a Congressional district where he could run. Mr Keating, a Phoenix financier and real estate developer, became an early sponsor and, soon, a friend. He was a man of great confidence and daring, Mr McCain recalled in his memoir. "I have sometimes forgotten that wisdom and a strong sense of public responsibility are much more admirable qualities." During Mr McCain's four years in the House, Mr Keating, his family and his business associates contributed heavily to his political campaigns. The banker gave Mr McCain free rides on his private jet, a violation of Congressional ethics rules (he later said it was an oversight and paid for the trips). And in 1986, the year Mr McCain was elected to the Senate, his wife joined Mr Keating in investing in an Arizona shopping mall. Mr Keating had taken over the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association and used its federally insured deposits to gamble on risky real estate and other investments. He pressed Mr McCain and other lawmakers to help hold back federal banking regulators. At Mr Keating's request, he wrote several letters to regulators, introduced legislation and helped secure the nomination of a Keating associate to a banking regulatory board. By early 1987, though, the thrift was careering toward disaster. Mr McCain agreed to join several senators, eventually known as the Keating Five, for two private meetings with regulators to urge them to ease up. "Why didn't I fully grasp the unusual appearance of such a meeting?" The scandal sent Mr Keating to prison and ended the careers of three senators, who were censured in 1991 for intervening. Mr McCain, who had been a less aggressive advocate for Mr Keating than the others, was reprimanded only for "poor judgment" and was re-elected the next year. Some people involved think Mr McCain got off too lightly. William Black, one of the banking regulators the senator met with, argued that Mrs McCain's investment with Mr Keating created an obvious conflict of interest for her husband. Mr McCain has since described the episode as a unique humiliation. "If I do not repress the memory, its recollection still provokes a vague but real feeling that I had lost something very important," he wrote in his memoir. A New Chosen Cause After the Republican takeover of the Senate in 1994, Mr McCain decided to try to put some of the lessons he had learned into law. He started by attacking earmarks, the pet projects that individual lawmakers could insert anonymously into the fine print of giant spending bills, a recipe for corruption. But he quickly moved on to other targets, most notably political fund-raising. Mr McCain earned the lasting animosity of many conservatives, who argue that his push for fund-raising restrictions trampled free speech, and of many of his Senate colleagues, who bristled that he wa...
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