McCain derailed by Rick Davis row?

John McCain finds himself in a tight spot after it emerged on Tuesday night that his campaign manager Rick Davis was being paid $15,000 a month by Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, after McCain specifically said he wasn’t. In a statement on Sunday, McCain claimed Davis, who had been the head of a lobbying consortium led by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, had not worked for either company since 2005.

An article in the New York Times by Jackie Calmes and David D Kirkpatrick, however, says otherwise. According to “two people with direct knowledge” of Davis’ business affairs, “Mr Davis’s firm received the payments from the company, Freddie Mac, until it was taken over by the government this month along with Fannie Mae, the other big mortgage lender whose deteriorating finances helped precipitate the cascading problems on Wall Street”. To make matters more embarrassing for Davis, the two anonymous people used as sources in the article “did not recall Mr Davis doing much substantive work for the company in return for the money”.

This will hit McCain’s campaign hard. He has made lobbyists a target in his recent speeches - all but entirely blaming them for Wall Street’s recent meltdown. On Saturday, in a radio address in Ohio, he said: "At the centre of the problem were the lobbyists, politicians and bureaucrats who succeeded in persuading Congress and the administration to ignore the festering problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac”. Lobbyists, presumably, like Davis.

The Guardian’s Michael Tomasky writes: “Someone's lying - either Davis to McCain, or McCain to the public”. In terms of what exactly happened, Tomasky thinks it’s likely that “Davis concealed it from McCain and that McCain, as is his wont, just winged it Sunday night, without really caring whether it was true, because that's what he does”.

Andrew Romano, writing for Newsweek, considers the situation terrible but not lethal for the Republican presidential candidate. “Is this doomsday for McCain?” he asks. “Hardly. But it is hypocritical… The only thing dumber than throwing a stone from your glass abode is throwing a boomerang. And this one just circled back around.”

Over at Politico Ben Smith wonders whether the Republicans will offer Davis the same protection they gave to Sarah Palin when she came under fire from the media. “The question is whether the conservative base - which hotly contested negative stories about Sarah Palin - will defend Davis, not a particular conservative hero, with the same vigour”.

FIRST POSTED SEPTEMBER 24, 2008