Use McCain's "Judgment" Against Him

by Steve Soto

We’ve already seen evidence in this general election campaign that McCain and the GOP will be making a big issue out of Obama’s connection to Jeremiah Wright, as a plank in the “company you keep” argument against him. Fine. If McCain wants to raise the “experience” and “judgment” lines of attack against Obama, may I suggest that Obama spend the next two months pounding McCain for the company he keeps?

Thankfully, the media didn’t abandon the relevant angle to McCain’s connection to his "special friend", lobbyist Vickie Iseman, which was never about sex but rather his connection to influence peddling and disaster capitalism while passing himself off as a saint. In fact, McCain is a wholly-owned creature of the GOP’s K Street infrastructure, and his whole campaign is being run by lobbyists whose interests rest not with the public but rather corporate and anti-democratic elements throughout the world.

McCain has already been forced to fire two campaign advisors this week, who were a little too close to dictators and those who would benefit directly from his energy policy at a time when McCain was trying to sound as green as possible. Now he has lost a senior advisor today who when it came out that national finance co-chair Tom Loeffler is a lobbyist for the Saudis, and had cut a sweetheart deal for another lobbyist that causes legal problems for the campaign. Loeffler is now out, but why stop there? McCain’s senior advisor is none other than GOP uber-strategist and bagman Charlie Black, who has a laundry list of reprehensible clients, such as the Reverend Moon, and assorted dictators and authoritarian regimes around the world.

McCain supports keeping Black and long time henchman Rick Davis on his campaign because they have allegedly suspended their lobbying work while working on his campaign. Nice try Straight Talk. Do you really expect such a moronic dodge like that to pass the smell test?

We already know that McCain is using discredited former HP CEO Carly Fiorina as a mouthpiece on economic policy, even though she ran HP into the ground. And he has Reverend John Hagee as a spiritual advisor, even though Hagee justified Hitler’s slaughter of the Jews as a biblical event. So if McCain is so much a whore to the GOP’s lobbyist and disaster capitalism culture that he needed a new policy on lobbyists that if actually enforced would clean out his entire top management team, then let us hope he really wants to run against Obama on judgment and experience. Because McCain is woefully bereft of integrity, and is in no position to question anyone else about judgment once you look at the company he keeps.

As Obama pounds away at McCain for supporting privatizing Social Security, his campaign needs to highlight all the Wall Street types who support McCain that would benefit from private accounts. After a couple of months showing the country that McCain supports Wall Street over seniors, he'll be toxic to those voters as well.