John McCain is at it again, stretching the bounds of campaign finance law. Elizabeth Holmes has the story for The Wall Street Journal:

To help ease their fund-raising woes, John McCain's campaign has devised a new system to increase the maximum amount an individual can donate to the unofficial Republican nominee's election efforts.

Campaign manager Rick Davis released the details of the "McCain Victory 08" fund on Friday. He said the entity is a joint committee, combining the McCain campaign, the Republican National Committee and four key states under a "hybrid legal structure."

The idea is to tap donors for more than the $2,300 limit set by campaign finance laws. Under legislation pushed by McCain in his role as a senator from Arizona, an individual can donate a maximum of $2,300 to a presidential primary campaign and the same amount to the general election campaign. Although McCain received the number of delegates necessary to secure the nomination in March, he will not be the party's official nominee until the convention in September--so he is still running a primary campaign.

The new structure allows up to $70,000 in individual contributions by channeling the money into different McCain-centric funds. The first $2,300 of that would go to McCain's primary campaign. The Republican National Committee would receive $28,500 of the donation. The remaining funds would be divided equally, up to $10,000 a piece, among four states the campaign has designated as battlegrounds for November: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado and New Mexico.

In and of itself, these hybrid committees are not problematic. In fact, a number of politicians have such committees. What's more, it's not even that such committees violate the letter or even spirit of campaign finance law, in and of itself.

But there's a problem of optics for McCain. When a politician's key legislative accomplishment is campaign finance refom -- legislation that limits contributions to $2,300 per person per election (a number that goes up for inflation) -- but then that politician figures out a way to solicit contributions more than 30 times the size of that ostensible limit, it just doesn't look great. When you tack on the fact that there remain multiple questions about whether that politician is in fact following the letter of campaign finance and ethics laws, then you may have a problem: That politician will have a lot more difficulty sounding credible, whether on the issue of reform or other issues altogether.