This past month, Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign paid tens of thousands of dollars to a vendor that was simultaneously working on behalf of a independent group attacking Sen. Barack Obama.
The $47,000 paid to the company Campaign Solutions for web services, on the surface, seems benign. But the expenditure brushes against the campaign’s newly implemented policy which states: “No McCain campaign vendor may work with a 527 or independent group without a pre-approved legal ‘firewall.’”
Campaign Solutions, records show, also provides web services to Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit group headed by David Bossie and chaired by Floyd Brown, famed Republican dirty tricksters. The website for Citizens United features a bevy of sharp attacks on Obama — sample: “BARACK OBAMA – THE CHOICE OF TERRORISTS” — and solicits donations for an anti-Obama documentary film.
In addition, Bossie and Brown run the website ExposeObama.com, which was founded in March 2008 and describes itself as a “group of conservatives concerned that Barack Hussein Obama would be the worst possible President for America at this time, or any time.” ExposeObama.com is paid for by a PAC, established by Brown, called the National Campaign Fund.
An aide to the McCain campaign said that an internal firewall had been in place at the firm since last year. This was the case, the aide said, “long before this [new] policy was in place. So they are fully compliant with our policy.” The campaign did not immediately respond to requests for documentation of the firewall.
While apparently accepted under McCain’s new internal campaign rules, the Campaign Solutions expenditure does, tangentially, provide a problematic connection to Bossie and Brown, two figures renowned for aggressive attack politics. Bossie, who recently authored the book, “Hillary: The Politics of Personal Destruction,” recently told Newsweek that he is “assembling material for TV spots about Obama’s ties with [Bill] Ayers.” Brown, likewise, told Time magazine that “he had established several other front groups to fund a long-range effort to erode Obama’s support.” He has already produced an ad attacking Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton for his 527 group Citizens for a Safe and Prosperous America.
McCain already has had to distance himself from one Republican operative who was spearheading an anti-Obama effort. Just last Friday, the Senator’s campaign appeared blindsided by revelations that an influential but unpaid adviser, Craig Shirley, had been hosting an anti-Obama website. Shirley resigned after Politico revealed his work for the 527 Stop Her Now — an organization that was initially dedicated to taking on Sen. Hillary Clinton but had turned its sites on Obama.
Shirley, like Brown, worked on the infamous Willie Horton advertisements during the Dukakis campaign. And both individuals did PR work to attack Sen. John Kerry in 2004.
In addition McCain’s new policy appears to be upsetting some of his Lobbyist supporters
More than a few Republican lobbyists in Washington are scratching their heads these days, asking: So this is the thanks we get?
It was a small band of loyal lobbyists who stood by presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain last August when his campaign went broke and his White House aspirations seemed doomed.
They raised money for him under impossible odds and kept him company in budget hotels during his darkest days.
Now they are under siege as McCain purges active lobbyists from his campaign team in a quest to wrest the reformist title from Democrat Barack Obama, his likely opponent in this fall’s general election.
The dramatic turnabout among these once-embattled allies may be long forgotten by Republicans — and the voters — come November. But for now, it seems a modern-day case study of Harry S. Truman’s famous truism: “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”
