Obama's star rises as whiff of scandal takes shine off McCain

Published on Saturday 23 February 2008 18:47

IT HAS been a week of contrasting fortunes for the two US presidential front-runners. While Barack Obama has been taken under the wing of a paternal nation after fears were raised he might be the target of an assassination attempt, John McCain's squeaky-clean image has been taking a battering.

It has emerged that Obama received Secret Service protection last May partly as a result of racially motivated information received by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, which made him concerned for Obama's safety.

The information was sufficiently serious for Durbin to urge the Secret Service deployment, the earliest ever for any presidential candidate.

For Americans, the spectre of assassination brings unhappy reminders of Martin Luther King and John F Kennedy. The threats were all the more poignant given that Obama is campaigning in Dallas, the scene of the most famous political assassination in US history.

"You can't have lived through the civil rights movement and know something about the history of African-Americans and not be a little concerned," said Edna Medford, a history professor at Washington's Howard University.

If Obama's stoicism in the face of a possible threat has won him admirers, McCain has not had such an easy week.

The Republican is famous for indulging reporters, referring even to hostile ones, as "my friends, the media".

But last Thursday, the day the New York Times ran a story with allegations of cash for favours and a possible extra-marital affair, the shutters came down. As McCain and his wife Cindy arrived at the Ford plant in Toledo, Ohio, reporters were kept out of earshot.

The New York Times alleged a possible affair with Washington lobbyist Vicki Iseman – but did not offer proof. What has really hurt McCain, though, were claims of corruption, in relation to Iseman and the murky world of lobbyists.

Until last week, his campaign revolved around his image as the Mr Clean of US politics. It was McCain's assertion that he never inserted earmarks into federal spending bills – a practice whereby senators insert pet projects into the spending mix.

Indeed, last week, he drew attention to how Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both indulged in such 'earmarks', Clinton to the tune of 160m.

McCain's thirst for campaign finance reform was born when he ran in the Republican primary in 2000 against Bush, and found his efforts swamped by the cash that big business showered on his rival.

In 2002, he earned the fury of politicians on both sides by sponsoring a law, along with a Democrat senator, that tightened rules on corporations and unions funding candidates.

His image as Mr Clean has propelled McCain up the polls. Seldom has trust in politicians been so low in America, mostly thanks to the Bush administration, but also because of the ineptitude of a Democrat-controlled Congress.

Like Obama, McCain has romped through primary contests by promising to end corruption in Washington.

This image now lies in ruins. The New York Times disclosed that McCain was paid cash for favours by clients of Iseman. Most notably, his Senate election campaign was paid 10,000 by a TV company, Paxon Communications, in 1999. In return, he wrote to the Federal Communications Commission pressuring it to grant Paxon a broadcast licence in Pittsburgh.

Later Iseman flew the senator to Florida for a fundraising dinner held by a wealthy donor. He was given four free flights on Paxon corporate jets.

The newspaper article kicked off a media frenzy, with other papers spotlighting McCain's first brush with lobbyists a decade before. As a rookie, he joined with four senators in pushing regulators to go easy on his friend Charles Keating, who operated a savings & loan business. It went bust, forcing the government to pay ruined investors 1.7bn in insurance, leading the senators to be reprimanded.

On Friday, matters got worse. The co-chairman of McCain's election campaign, Arizona congressman Rick Renzi, was indicted on charges of extortion, fraud and money laundering, accused of taking a 350,000 bribe to push legislation forward on a land deal.

Worse still, federal regulators have announced that McCain, having agreed to take public funding for his nomination campaign last summer, when he was broke, cannot change his mind. This may deny him the millions now rolling in from donors.

On Friday McCain, campaigning ahead of the Republican primary contest in Puerto Rico today, adopted an uncharacteristically harsh tone, saying of the ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro: "I hope he has the opportunity to meet Karl Marx very soon."

None of this will prevent him becoming the Republican nominee. But it may derail any chance of winning the White House in November.