McCain and the Lobbyist

[lollardfish]

I really don't care whether or not McCain had an affair with the lobbyist. What I care about is the favoritism he showed to her clients in trying to bully the FCC.

That's the scandal here, and I'd really like the media to focus on it, not whether or not there was an affair.

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Undue influence is complicated and subtle; who slept with whom is easy.

And I know I sent this to you, but I'm going to put this link here so that others can follow it: it's a discussion of how McCain would win the election. Interesting, but I don't think he's going to do it.

B

McCain

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

And the defenses are just pathetic.

B

I'm interested in favoritism too...

[regularpapi.livejournal.com]

As in the 16th and 17th centuries (!), the sex angle is a way of making vivid and personal the individual moral weakness involved in arrangements that might otherwise seem systemic and for which the politician might therefore be excused.

To take a meta position, which I know is not the whole story even though I'm a lit type: I'm interested in the shapes various stories of corruption take at different cultural moments, and I think certain angles hit certain nerves for reasons that have partly to do with shifting menus of cultural stereotypes. I'm interested in tracking this McCain story because so many other recent-ish sex scandals with legs have been about dems, and they have therefore had the Kennedy quality of associating sex with youth and progressivism. There were muted rumors about Bush senior having affairs (maybe there are such rumors about all rulers), but they never had traction in part I think because they didn't fit the Kennedy pre-script. This one is interesting because it is about favoritism instead of being about youth and morally lax progressives. Given all the corruption (and prostitution) stories we've had about lobbyists in the last few years, maybe this narrative about political cronyism will hit a nerve now.