The five senators, who would become known as the "Keating Five," had gathered [1] to plead the case of Charles Keating, a real estate executive and president of Lincoln Savings & Loan. Keating was a major fundraiser for McCain and had flown him around on his private jet, including several trips to his vacation home in the Bahamas.
In the ensuing scandal Lincoln Savings & Loan became the poster bank [2] for the massive savings and loans failures of the 1980s and McCain a poster politician for all that was wrong with special influence in Washington.
To his credit, McCain reinvented himself as a champion of campaign finance reform-an issue that up to that point he'd dismissed. He railed against the culture of corruption in Washington. He became the lead champion, along with Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 [3], which eliminated unlimited soft money contributions to federal political parties.
In the years that followed, McCain also spoke out in favor [4]of his home state of Arizona's Clean Elections system. That law provides full public financing to state candidates who raise a specific number of $5 contributions from constituents, agree to abide by spending limits, and to take no more private contributions. McCain lent his support to efforts to bring similar systems to West Virginia and North Carolina [5]. And he stood up for the presidential partial public financing system, in 2003 sponsoring [6]a bill to strengthen it.
But then he started running his 2008 campaign for president. Suddenly, he was not in favor of public financing. "No I don't think that's what we want to do," he told [7] an interviewer when asked whether he supported public financing of congressional elections. McCain is also conspicuously absent from a bill to update the presidential public financing system and another to bring full public financing to congressional elections.
Why the sudden change of heart for Sen. McCain? It surely has something to do with his efforts to shore up support with the conservative base, which detested the McCain Feingold bill. (See: James Bopp [8], who represented the National Right to Life Committee in a lawsuit challenging the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.)
But the bigger reason may have a lot to do with the fact that he has signed up 66 lobbyists as fundraising bundlers [9] for his campaign, and campaign finance reform isn't a particularly popular topic with them. "Senator McCain claims to have learned a lesson during the Keating Five scandal in the late 1980s - that it is important to significantly reduce the impact of money in politics," says my colleague, David Donnelly, national campaigns director for Public Campaign Action Fund. "But McCain, whose campaign is run by a who's who of big money lobbyists, appears to have forgotten that lesson and has so far refused to make a commitment to fight for real change in how campaigns are financed." He's asking people to sign a letter [10]to Sen. McCain asking him to stand up for campaign finance reform.
Happy Keating Five anniversary, Sen. McCain. It's a good time to reflect about what you truly believe.