RUTHLESS BIPARTISANSHIP

In a post last week about the excellent letter that the revitalized reform group Common Cause sent John McCain, I made what might have seemed a cryptic reference:

A few years ago, McCain and his allies made life very difficult for Common Cause, for not following their line on 527 committees and other regulations. So this letter cannot have been easy.

I probably should have said a little more about what I meant by "made life very difficult," although it was tangential to the main point of the post. Fortunately, via Firedoglake, I learn that in Cliff Schechter's new book about McCain, he gets deeper into the story:

Two sources (neither at Common Cause) who spoke on condition of anonymity told me about McCain's attempts to remove former president of Common Cause, Chellie Pingree, from her job. Common Cause, a non-partisan group devoted to open government, was in some ways the field operative for McCain-Feingold in the Senate. But soon, according to my sources, Pingree saw that this regulatory scheme was too full of loopholes; in particular, she realized that it would lead to too much confusion about what various sorts of organizations could do or not do.

Like many others at the time, Pingree concluded that straightforward public financing was the answer. This wasn't what McCain wanted to hear. In an effort to remove Pingree, McCain's operatives made phone calls to Common Cause board members, funders, and anyone else they thought they could persuade or intimidate. McCain's efforts failed, but they showed that he was willing to attack an ally the moment her judgment veered away from his own.

I wasn't one of Cliff's sources for this account, but I could have been, so make it three, and not all anonymous. (I was in the category "funders ...they thought they could persuade or intimidate," because at the time I worked for a foundation that had supported Common Cause's 501(c)3 affiliate.) For documentary evidence of this period, see this journalistic hit-piece from 2004 by the Washington Post's Jeffrey Birnbaum, one of the reporters and editorial writers who have been reliably channeling the McCain wing's vision of reform for decades, bemoaning that Common Cause "doesn't care as much about campaign finance," and describing unnamed "fans of the organization" as "aghast" and "shocked" by Pingree's expansion of the organization's agenda to include media reform, and her well-founded skepticism about some of the crazy extremes that the logic of limits-based reform led to, such as restrictions on non-profits and on bloggers. 

One point to add to Cliff's account is that the line that McCain's agents took in trying to oust Pingree was that she had hurt the organization's "bipartisan credibility." Yet what constituted a loss of bipartisan credibility? It was McCain alone. If McCain was happy with the organization, they could call themselves bipartisan; if he turned on them because they didn't follow his agenda, they lost their bipartisan cover, because even if there were other Republicans who supported reform, he occupied the entire space. This was a staggering amount of power for one politician to have over an organization that was meant to be a watchdog on politics, and McCain used that power ruthlessly.

This is where I lost my admiration for McCain. And as I've watched McCain's modus operandi on other issues, such as the torture legislation, I've continued to see echoes of the Common Cause episode: Corner the market on bipartisanship. Move to claim the position of bipartisan intermediary, and then use that position ruthlessly to serve his own purposes or sell out his allies, because they are dependent on the reality or perception of bipartisanship. As a study in the art of exercising power, it's quite impressive. Until people see through it.

-- Mark Schmitt