A Question of Propriety

16 August 2008 |permalink | email article

McCain has chided Obama for having the audacity to act too presidential in his visits to the Mideast and Europe.

What really blew McCain’s mind, and his obsession with the phony issue of “celebrity,” was Obama’s outdoor rally in Berlin.

The Washington Post noted, while Obama vacationed in Hawaii, that McCain has performed as if he were President in dealing with the international crises in Georgia. Also mentioned was a lobbyist long on Georgia’s payroll who has mentored the senator.

“Standing behind a lectern in Michigan this week, with two trusted senators (Graham and Lieberman) willing to do his bidding, McCain seemed to forget that he was only running for president.”

On his tough rhetoric about the conflict in Georgia, McCain began: ‘If I may be so bold, there was another president…’ He caught himself and started again: ‘At one time, there was a president named Ronald Reagan who spoke very strongly about America’s advocacy for freedom and democracy.”

Lawrence Korb, a Reagan Defense Department official and an informal adviser to Obama, said “it’s very risky and can send mixed messages to foreign governments.”

Randy Scheunemann is now McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser. With his business partner he lobbied the senator and his staff on 49 occasions in over three years while being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by Georgia, a former Soviet republic.

On April 17, six weeks after Scheunemann stopped working for Georgia, his partner signed a $200,000 agreement with the Georgian government – a deal which brought in over $800,000 to the firm from 2004 to mid-2007.

Is that why McCain has talked to Saakashvili daily? Or that, despite warnings from the State Department not to taunt Russia, the Georgian president’s troops initially launched an offensive in pro-Russian South Ossetia?

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