John Edwards making the case for his candidacy:

"Well, he is starting to look like the Republican nominee," Edwards said in response to a reporter's question about McCain, "and I think it's important for us to have somebody to run against McCain who can beat him. And national polls show that I'm the one who beats John McCain in the general election. And second, I think even more important than that, this is a guy who's made central to his political life campaign finance reform. It seems to me we ought to be putting somebody up against him who's never taken money from special interest PACs or Washington lobbyists. Between the three of us, that's me." [emphasis added]

Leaving aside a debate over whether John Edwards would be the strongest Democrat to go up against John McCain in a general election, I'd like to focus a bit on Edwards' language here. I don't mean to pick on Edwards but rather to use his language here as an example of what I believe we cannot and should not do when dealing with McCain, particularly if he is the Republican nominee.

McCain has done a great job of courting the media, not only over the past 8 to 10 years but throughout his entire career, and on the basis of this close relationship with the establishment press he has been able to position himself as a true champion of clean government. But is he? Is this something that Democrats should be conceding to him?

The only reason why McCain took up the mantle of campaign finance reform was that he was intimately caught up in the Keating Five corruption scandal back in the 1980s -- a scandal that could have strong legs in a general election this year even though it occurred so long ago. In short, the scandal entailed Charles Keating, the head of a Savings and Loan institution that went belly up, and the steps he took -- including trying to call in favors from Senators to whom he and associates had given trips and donated campaign money -- to try to get Congressional investigators off of his back. In an era when the federal government is faced with the possibility of having to bail out billions or even trillions in bad debt resulting from the subprime lending industry, a politician's involvement in a corruption scandal linked to a similar boondoggle -- in the case of the savings and loan crisis, the federal government picked up a tab of close to $125 billion -- isn't necessarily going to be a positive.

And just how closely was McCain tied to the Keating Five scandal? Very. Though McCain might try to downplay his involvement, his campaigns received $124,000 from Keating and his associates during the 1980s (AP, 3/2/91), and McCain was described as being personally closer to Keating than any of the other members of the Keating Five (Roll Call, 1/20/92). What's more, McCain accepted more than $15,000 in free trips from Keating, including vacations to Keating's resort in the Bahamas -- trips that McCain failed to disclose at the time (New York Times, 2/28/91; San Francisco Chronicle, 12/3/90).

With a record like this, do we really want to concede issues of ethics and clean government to McCain? Shouldn't we instead be hitting him hard for his improprieties? I certainly think so. And I definitely hope that in the case that McCain wins the Republican nomination this year that whomever the Democrats nominate roasts McCain on the issue as he so deserves to be roasted.