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Ben Smith at Politico:
I'd always thought McCain's great strength in defending the Keating affair was that he'd acknolwedged making a huge mistake, and spent his career repenting by recasting himself as a reformer.
So when his campaign puts his lawyer on the line with reporters to contest the details of a congressional inquiry that, largely, let McCain off the hook, doesn't that cloud the sin-confession-atonement dynamic a bit?
In Halperin's account, McCain lawyer John Dowd described McCain's "former relationship with Charles Keating as 'social friends,'" and called the situation a "classic political smear job on John."
Dowd also "thinks that the committee went too far in suggesting that McCain’s intervention with regulators was poor judgment," Halperin writes.But if so, what's this giant mistake that transformed McCain into a reformer?
As Billmon notes, McCain developed his phony Maverick image because of the scandal.
In a sense, the scandal marked the birth of the McCain "brand," because unlike the other four of the Five, he stood up in the Senate and more or less admitted he was guilty (not nearly as guilty as the others, he hastened to point out – but still, he felt bad about what he had done.) This went over really big with the media ("Senator admits guilt") outranking even man bites dog on the news-o-meter.
Shortly before the New Hampshire primary in 2000 . . .
Watch It:
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