- Apparently, Obama may be trying to squirm out of an agreement to take public funds for the campaign. That means $85m and no private donations in the general election. McCain claims that Obama "signed a piece of paper." Great. Let's see it. Obama raised $35m and likely will win the money war if he is the candidate. Clearly, this ain't over.
- "Iseman, this is Goose, punch out!" According to the NYT, that's what McCain's campaign mgrs told lobbyist Vicki Iseman when they felt she was spending way too much time with him. Everyone knows that. More interesting is the story behind the story -- namely, McCain's effort to kill it, NYT's decision to sit on it until now, and, most interestingly, the right wing conservatives' anger that the story didn't come out sooner. To wit:
Regardless of the paper's motives, conservative pundits were left fuming,
noting that the Times had, at once, spared McCain at the point of his greatest
vulnerability (when his campaign was still a long shot) and denied his primary
opponents perhaps the knock-out blow. Would the GOP have a different candidate
on its hands had things been handled differently?
"Oh, there's no question it would have impacted [the race]," Bay
Buchanan, a former adviser of ex-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, told CNN. "I
think John McCain would not have won this primary if there's any evidence
whatsoever that surfaces that these stories are true... McCain's lawyers went
into the New York Times and said do not touch this story. Do not move on this
story. And there's no question this was beneficial to McCain to hold the story.
No question. His nomination was very much threatened by this story if it broke
too early. So what they did was hurt the Republican Party by not allowing this
to be aired properly at the time they received this information."
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