John McCain, the presumptive G.O.P. nominee, is cleaning up some ethical entanglements after news outlets questioned his campaign’s association to some questionable supporters.
First of all, the McCain campaign publicized its ethical conflict policy after Politico surfaced information about one of its consultants who also seemed to be an adviser to an independent political group.
John McCain’s campaign asked a prominent Republican consultant, Craig Shirley, to leave his official campaign role Thursday after a Politico inquiry about Shirley’s dual role consulting for the campaign and for an independent “527″ group opposing the Democratic presidential candidates. The campaign also released a new conflict of interest policy barring such arrangements.
Shirley, a conservative public relations veteran, doubled as a consultant to McCain and to the group Stop Her Now, a 527 group barred from coordinating its activities with presidential campaigns. He is not currently on the McCain campaign’s payroll, but would also step down from his role on McCain’s Virginia Leadership Team, a McCain spokesman, Brian Rogers, said.
Also, Matt Kelley of USA Today reports another instance of Mr. McCain using his senatorial connections to secure another government land deal for a top supporter.
Sen. John McCain secured millions in federal funds for a land acquisition program that provided a windfall for an Arizona developer whose executives were major campaign donors, public records show.
McCain, who has made fighting special-interest projects a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, inserted $14.3 million in a 2003 defense bill to buy land around Luke Air Force Base in a provision sought by SunCor Development, the largest of about 50 landowners near the base. SunCor representatives, upset with a state law that restricted development around Luke, met with McCain’s staff to lobby for funding, according to John Ogden, SunCor’s president at the time.
Brian Rogers, a McCain campaign spokesman, wrote in an e-mail to the USA Today reporter, “Sen. McCain’s interest in this matter was only to support the formal requirements of the Air Force in a way that furthered the interests of the taxpayer.”
Mr. McCain jumped into the fray surrounding President Bush’s comment to the Israeli Knesset Thursday. Mr. Bush likened “those who would negotiate with ‘terrorists and radicals’ to appeasers of the Nazis — a remark widely interpreted as a rebuke to Senator Barack Obama, who has advocated greater engagement with countries like Iran and Syria,” write Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times.
Mr. Obama and many other prominent Democrats denounced the statement, while Mr. McCain said he stood by the president’s remark.
The episode placed Mr. Bush squarely in one of the most divisive debates of the campaign to succeed him, as Republicans try to portray Mr. Obama as weak in the fight against terrorism. It also underscored what the White House has said will be an aggressive effort by Mr. Bush to use his presidential platform to influence the presidential election.
In Mr. McCain’s other comments of the day, delivered in the battleground state of Ohio, Elisabeth Bumiller of The Times says he “set forth a sweeping, extraordinarily positive vision of what the world would look like in 2013, when, he said, he would have been in the White House for four years.”
The remarks, which offered no proposals for how he would achieve that vision, were an effort by Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, to define himself and the rationale of his candidacy to voters before he has a single Democratic rival who will try to do it for him.
John Edwards, the new Obama supporter, seems to be everywhere these days. He was in studio with Matt Lauer on “Today,” where he said once again that being Mr. Obama’s vice president “is not something I’m interested in.”
But could Mr. Edwards play a smaller role in an Obama administration? Mr. Edwards said he’s talked about that idea “only in the most abstract way.”
“He said, “I want you on my team,” said Mr. Edwards, who declined to speculate if that meant he’d be tapped for attorney general.
A few experts spoke with The New York Daily News about the merits of an Edwards-Obama ticket.
“He brings very little to an Obama ticket,” said Steffen Schmidt, a political science professor at Iowa State University. “He is not really a kind of southern political asset. He had a very difficult time even getting elected in North Carolina.”
But let’s not belittle Mr. Edwards too much. That’s what we do to Hillary Rodham Clinton — or so says Libby Copeland of The Washington Post, who analyzes the “Poor Hillary” phrase so often used by pundits and bloggers.
“Poor Hillary” speaks volumes about an old truth: Clinton’s wounds have always defined her. The haters are always on the lookout for her comeuppance, and the lovers love her more for what she has endured. The women who turn out to see Clinton holler for her to stick it out, tell her they like her grit.
“She felt everybody was bashing poor Hillary,” says an elderly supporter at Leisure World of Maryland, recalling how a friend founded a Clinton fan club back in 1992; and that’s empathy, organizing to bash back, and there’s a huge gulf between that and pity. Pity never got anyone elected. (Except in New Hampshire, where Hillary cried and won the state. Or so goes the Conventional Wisdom — undermining poor Hillary.)
Pity doesn’t get people elected, perhaps, but religion can play a big part. The Obama campaign is set to roll out a nationwide faith effort to show off his deep Christian faith.
The initiative represents a direct challenge to Republicans, who successfully wooed conservative evangelical votes that in turn fueled President Bush’s re-election in 2004. Liberal evangelicals — such as some members of mainline Protestant churches — have been vocal during this election season, reminding voters that some evangelicals favor abortion rights and gay marriage and oppose the Iraq war, and also vote Democratic. …
Hints of the new faith effort can be glimpsed this week in Kentucky, where the campaign has issued fliers with Sen. Obama speaking in front of a large, illuminated cross. This week the campaign launched a series of radio and television ads across Kentucky touting Sen. Obama as a man of Christian faith. And the campaign has distributed letters to churches that remind readers of his Christian beliefs.
Barack Obama’s campaigning today in South Dakota, which votes June 3. He’s spending time there as a safety precaution in case a Democratic National Committee panel decides May 31 to seat the Florida and Michigan delegates according to Mrs. Clinton’s wishes.
USA Today asks: “what are the last few contests for? Bragging rights, momentum and symbolism.”
“It doesn’t look like it’s going to matter in terms of delegates,” says Kenneth Blanchard, political scientist at Northern State University in Aberdeen, S.D. “The only thing that does matter is if Mrs. Clinton can pull off another blowout here. That would clearly make it look like she is the one who can win in large parts of the country.”
Not receiving the endorsement of Naral, the abortion rights advocacy group, came as a disappointment to Mrs. Clinton, writes Katharine Q. Seelye of The Times. Some Naral affiliates aren’t happy, either, at their parent organization’s choice to endorse Mr. Obama.
The decision by a major abortion-rights group to endorse Senator Barack Obama has created an uproar among some of its affiliates and other abortion-rights advocates. Many said that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had as good a record on reproductive rights as Mr. Obama and that there was no need to take sides in the Democratic primary.
All three major presidential candidates pretty much share the same policy on same-sex marriage, writes Adam Nagourney of The Times: “All oppose it, while saying at the same time that same-sex couples should generally be entitled to the legal protections afforded married couples. All think the decision should be left to the states.”
But the decision by the California Supreme Court on Thursday overturning the state’s ban on same-sex marriage seems likely to put the issue back onto the national political stage for the time being. In the process, it should offer a test of whether the issue is resonant in American politics or whether it has fallen to the side of the road, as many Democrats and some Republicans say.
Media corporations can now own a newspaper and TV station in the same market, now that the Senate voted Thursday night to void a Federal Communications Commissions rule that prohibited such conglomeration. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, however, co-sponsored a “resolution of disapproval” written by Senator Byron Dorgan.
Down ballot: If Mr. Obama heads the Democratic ticket this fall, could we see a purpling of the scarlet South?
Should Mr. Obama become the Democratic nominee, he would still have to struggle for white swing voters in the South and in border states like West Virginia, where he lost decisively to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in Tuesday’s presidential primary. In West Virginia, where more than three-fourths of white voters chose Mrs. Clinton, 20 percent of the white voters said the race of the candidate mattered in their choice.
But in Southern states with large black populations, like Alabama, Mississippi and Virginia, an energized black electorate could create a countervailing force, particularly if conservative white voters choose not to flock to Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee. Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, predicts “the largest black turnout in the history of the United States” this fall if Mr. Obama is the nominee.
Campaign trail roundup:
* Hillary Rodham Clinton holds a campaign event in Junction City, Ore., and attends a town hall meeting in Portland, Ore. Bill Clinton holds events in Owensboro, Madisonville, Paducah, Murray and Hopkinsville, Ky.
* John McCain makes a stop at a gun shop in West Virginia, then delivers remarks to the National Rifle Association of America at its annual meeting in Louisville, Ky.
* Barack Obama holds a town hall meeting in Watertown, S.D., and an early vote rally in Sioux Falls, S.D.
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