MCCAIN’S FREDDIE MAC LOBBYIST…. Honestly, I have no idea what the McCain campaign was thinking.
The lobbying firm of the man Republicans say John McCain has chosen to begin planning a presidential transition earned more than a quarter of a million dollars this year representing Freddie Mac, one of the companies McCain blames for the nation’s financial crisis.
Timmons & Co., whose founder and chairman emeritus is William Timmons Sr., was registered to lobby for Freddie Mac from 2000 through this month, when the federal government took over both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
Newly available congressional records show Timmons’s firm received $260,000 this year before its lobbying activities were barred under terms of the government rescue of the failed mortgage giant. Timmons, 77, is listed as a lobbyist for Freddie Mac on the company’s midyear financial-disclosure form.
John McCain personally spent most of last week railing against Barack Obama’s associations with former Fannie Mae officials were extremely important, worthy of attack ads and overheated speeches. At one point, about a week ago, McCain told CBS, “[T]he influence that Fannie and Freddie had in the inside-the-beltway, old-boy network, which led to this kind of corruption is unacceptable.” Soon after, he told a Wisconsin audience, “At the center 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.”
This, after McCain had tapped Freddie Mac’s lobbyist to head his presidential transition team? And after he tapped a former Fannie Mae lobbyist as his campaign manager? Seriously?
By this standard, McCain probably should feel compelled to vote against himself.
Or, as Josh Marshall concluded, “I expect a lot of hypocrisy of all politicians, of both parties. But John McCain is really in a class of his own.”
