Yesterday, as if McCain wanted more controversy, Jim Kuhnhenn of the Associated Press reported that "Federal Election Commission Chairman David Mason, in a letter to McCain this week, said the all-but-certain Republican nominee needs to assure the commission that he did not use the promise of public money to help secure a $4 million line of credit he obtained in November" before being allowed to withdraw from the primary election's public financing system. According to the article (which you can find on CNN):
"McCain, a longtime advocate of stricter limits on money in politics, was one of the few leading presidential candidates to seek FEC certification for public money during the primaries. The FEC determined that he was entitled to at least $5.8 million. But McCain did not obtain the money, and he notified the FEC earlier this month that he would bypass the system, freeing him from its spending limits. But [...] Mason, a Republican appointee to the commission, essentially said, 'Not so fast.' By accepting the public money, McCain would be limited to spending about $54 million for the primaries, a ceiling his campaign is near. That would significantly hinder his ability to finance his campaign between now and the Republican National Convention in September."
Further complicating the issue is the deadlock between President Bush and the U.S. Senate over the appointment of Federal Election Commission (FEC) members to fill the 4 vacancies on the 6-seat panel. Lacking a quorum of commissioners to vote on the McCain campaign's request to withdraw from public financing, Chairman Mason (a Republican appointee) has told McCain that he cannot accept his request (and therefore McCain is still bound by the public financing spending limit).
"At issue is the fine print in the loan agreement between McCain and Fidelity & Trust Bank. McCain secured the loan using his list of contributors, his promise to use that list to raise money to pay off the loan and by taking out a life insurance policy. But the agreement also said that if McCain were to withdraw from the public financing system before the end of 2007 and then were to lose the New Hampshire primary by more than 10 percentage points, he would have had to reapply to the FEC for public matching funds and provide the bank additional collateral for the loan. In his letter to McCain, Mason said the commission would allow a candidate to withdraw from the public finance system as long as he had not received any public funds and had not pledged the certification of such funds 'as security for private financing.'"
Obviously, as McCain struggles to raise money at the same pace as Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton and as he works to solidify his presumptive "nominee" status, a spending limit, which he is about to hit, would be devastating to his campaign, and leave the Straight Talk Express stalled on the tracks until September.
It will be interesting to see the double-talk, legal-speak and political wrangling Sen. McCain employs over the next few days to seek maximum advantage for his campaign by rejecting the public financing and limits he previously championed. Are we about to see a repeat of the cowardice and political pandering, so inimical to McCain's crafted image, that he displayed on Immigration Reform last year, on the issue of Campaign Finance rules?
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