To some, McCain's financial tangle ironic
Charlie Savage
Boston Globe
WASHINGTON - Former Federal Election Commission chairman Bradley Smith, columnist George Will, and a host of other conservatives have spent years criticizing Senator John McCain's push for further rules on the nation's campaign-finance system. Now, McCain's critics on the right have new ammunition: the senator's own woes with the FEC.
Yesterday, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, McCain's chief remaining opponent for the Republican presidential nomination, joined the firing line.
"He wrote these laws, and one of the reasons I think people need to continue this discussion and this debate is, I think, one of the worst things that's ever happened to American politics is the McCain-Feingold campaign finance act," Huckabee said during a conference call with reporters. "It has created more problems than it has solved, and it may very well be that the law that he pushed comes back to bite him."
In fact, McCain has been ensnared by a public-financing law that dates to the Watergate era - not the extra rules he championed in 2001 banning use of unregulated "soft money" to influence elections. His ongoing battle to free himself from his 2007 commitment to take matching funds and abide by a spending cap, critics say, exemplifies the kind of regulations that they hate and that McCain has worked with Democrats to impose.
"There are a lot of ironies to this," said Smith, who repeatedly clashed with the Arizona senator over campaign-finance regulations. "McCain has been such a stickler for years in calling out everybody who does exactly what he has done - saying that they are corrupt, they are finding loopholes, making end runs around the law, that the FEC is not aggressively enforcing the law."
(Continued here.)
Boston Globe
WASHINGTON - Former Federal Election Commission chairman Bradley Smith, columnist George Will, and a host of other conservatives have spent years criticizing Senator John McCain's push for further rules on the nation's campaign-finance system. Now, McCain's critics on the right have new ammunition: the senator's own woes with the FEC.
Yesterday, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, McCain's chief remaining opponent for the Republican presidential nomination, joined the firing line.
"He wrote these laws, and one of the reasons I think people need to continue this discussion and this debate is, I think, one of the worst things that's ever happened to American politics is the McCain-Feingold campaign finance act," Huckabee said during a conference call with reporters. "It has created more problems than it has solved, and it may very well be that the law that he pushed comes back to bite him."
In fact, McCain has been ensnared by a public-financing law that dates to the Watergate era - not the extra rules he championed in 2001 banning use of unregulated "soft money" to influence elections. His ongoing battle to free himself from his 2007 commitment to take matching funds and abide by a spending cap, critics say, exemplifies the kind of regulations that they hate and that McCain has worked with Democrats to impose.
"There are a lot of ironies to this," said Smith, who repeatedly clashed with the Arizona senator over campaign-finance regulations. "McCain has been such a stickler for years in calling out everybody who does exactly what he has done - saying that they are corrupt, they are finding loopholes, making end runs around the law, that the FEC is not aggressively enforcing the law."
(Continued here.)
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