McCain's "close relationship" with an attractive female lobbyist is discussed in the NY Times today....
This story has been making the rounds of Washington for months, and already got published in Drudge's internet site in December. Now the New York Times has run the story, making a lot of people suspect that there is more to the "relationship" than the Times is revealing. And some suspect the Times knows more than they are printing at present. This should make quite the media bombshell for the McCain Campaign.
For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk
Paul Hosefros/The New York TimesSenators John McCain, at lectern, and Russell D. Feingold, right, during a press conference about campaign finance reform legislation in 1997.
WASHINGTON - 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, 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.
Stephen Boitano/Getty ImagesVicki Iseman at an awards dinner in 2004.
