Putting McCain to the Ethics Test

The U.S. Senate is a lousy launching pad for sainthood, a place of compromise and backslaps, of hidden doors that lead to gilded rooms where the real work gets done. To succeed is to succumb, often to the courtship of big-ticket donors.

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And yet for more than a decade,John McCain has claimed to truck with angels. He condemns his colleagues who earmark bridges or bike trails, often at the request of contributors. When a powerful trade group is arrayed against him, he bellows, "The fix is in." He exploded with contempt for the corrupting ways of Washington at one hearing in 1999. "This is Congress," McCain declared, "where telecommunications-industry lobbying is no-holds-barred."

Such displays of outrage have fueled the G.O.P. nominee's political success, earning him a reputation as a reformer with higher nationwide favorability ratings than either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. It's because of that reputation, which particularly appeals to independent voters, that Democrats have started targeting McCain's reformer cred.

In recent weeks Democratic leader Howard Dean has called McCain a "situation ethicist" who "runs on his integrity, but he doesn't seem to have any." Obama has alleged that McCain puts lobbyists "in charge of his campaign," even though the Democratic candidates are also advised by current and former influence brokers. The Democratic National Committee regularly blasts out statements tagging McCain with ominous phrases like special-interest cronyism.

The McCain campaign has publicly welcomed the questioning. "We're happy to debate ethical standards and commitment to reform and ethics all day long," says Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager, pointing to the Senator's record of reform in the Senate. But Davis' own résumé, as a former telecommunications lobbyist who twice switched sides to work for McCain, illustrates the clouds circling the candidate's blue-sky reputation.

No longtime Senate leader can escape charges of favoritism, even a crusader against improper influence like McCain. This is especially true for a former chairman of the powerful Commerce Committee. "The issues before the committee often pit industry against industry," explains Ivan Schlager, who served as the committee's Democratic chief counsel, "so you are always appearing to favor somebody."

Take that 1999 outburst about no-holds-barred lobbying, for example. The subject of the hearing was legislation to allow satellite companies to relay local network signals to viewers, an idea promoted by McCain but opposed by the broadcast and cable industries. A major proponent of the bill happened to be a McCain supporter, Charles Ergen, head of the Dish Network. Less than a month after the hearing, Ergen held a fund raiser at his Denver home for McCain, reportedly raising more than $40,000. A few years later, Ergen's company gave more than $50,000 to a nonprofit institute that employed Davis and was chaired by McCain himself. No-holds-barred, indeed.

McCain's defense of such incidents is invariably twofold. First, he declares categorically that he has not betrayed the public trust. "I have never done any favors for anybody — lobbyist or special-interest group," he said last December. But he complicates matters by also admitting what other politicians rarely do: the system itself is corrupted and corrupting. "All of us are tainted," McCain said in 2002. "And I am one of them."

The self-image of McCain as a saint operating in a sinner's world has been carefully crafted over the years and embraces the contradictions of his job. He is both a vigorous fund raiser — collecting more than $135 million over his career — and the nation's leading G.O.P. campaign-finance reformer. His inner circle includes current and former lobbyists, but he has sponsored bills limiting their influence. He has begged discount private-jet flights from companies seeking his favor but also led an effort to end the discount lending practice. McCain is, in other words, not an easy man to judge.

The Problem of Appearance
McCain's trouble with influence-peddling dates to 1987, when he found himself ensnared in the Keating Five scandal. He had met with federal regulators on behalf of banker Charles Keating Jr., a wealthy fund raiser and friend who had flown the McCain family on private jets to vacations in the Bahamas. A Senate ethics panel found that McCain had exercised "poor judgment" but had broken no rules. The honor-bound Senator was nonetheless rattled. "Appearance in politics," McCain said years later, "is reality."

The episode inspired McCain's rebirth as a reformer concerned above all with appearance. He successfully worked to outlaw unregulated, six-figure "soft-money" donations to political parties. That was followed by crusades against lobbying access and an extensive corruption investigation against the Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

But high standards are a double-edged sword. Even as McCain railed against the system, he worked it, sometimes creating unseemly appearances of his own. As with many other Senators, some of McCain's biggest corporate donors were invariably the companies that sought his favor — firms like FedEx, AT&T and Qwest Communications. At one point, he even allowed Fred Smith, a friend who ran FedEx, to sponsor a book party for McCain's memoir Worth the Fighting For.