Dusted Up

The New York Times dusts up John McCain with a story about a possibly "inappropriate" relationship with a lobbyist before his 2000 campaign. The Times is more than a little coy about the nature of the relationship, but that's to be expected. Josh Marshall has some of the story-behind-the-story at TPM; apparently, lawyers were involved.

Frankly, I don't care about Sen. McCain's personal life, and I doubt that TONE's readers do, either. It seems to me that the real story The Times is telling is about the nature of American political life, and the near-impossibility of an office-holder not having his or her actions influenced by "lobbyists" in a way that could be suspect.

(I put "lobbyist" in quotation marks, because that's become a word like "linked," as in "linked to al Qaeda," that's have lost most of its meaning. If you or I get a chance to speak to a congressman about a piece of pending legislation, that's lobbying. If a lawyer goes to a congressional office to talk about the details of a bill, that's lobbying. But is it the same kind of lobbying that takes place on a corporate plane, out on the golf course or at a dinner when legislators are being wined and dined? Few people even try to draw distinctions any more.)

We can do a lot to clean up Washington; Sens. McCain and Obama have already done good work in this respect; for one thing, it's illegal to have dinner with a lobbyist who's paying. But they system is never going to be clean as a hound's tooth. As the old saying has it (he says, neatly mixing metaphors), the two things you don't want to watch being made are sausages and laws.