No one suggests that McCain’s motives are venal. Yet, like other lawmakers, he has written letters to regulatory agencies on behalf of companies that are significant contributors to his campaign. Among the 500 letters from McCain released last week by his aides on the Commerce Committee, several are sure to be scrutinized. In the fall of 1998, McCain urged the FCC to give “serious consideration” to the request by local phone giant BellSouth to be allowed into the lucrative long-distance phone business. McCain has been a consistent supporter of opening up long-distance competition to lower prices for consumers. Still, the letter will raise questions, because the employees of BellSouth have contributed at least $30,000 to McCain’s presidential campaign, the third largest total from any single source. Similarly, the senator wrote a letter on May 12 to the FCC, complaining about a staffer who criticized a proposed merger between Ameritech and SBC Communications, thereby causing the stock of the companies to plummet. McCain pushed the FCC not to approve the merger but rather to move quickly and fairly to a decision. Even so, the letter came a few weeks after the chief of Ameritech, Richard Notebart, held a $1,000-a-person fund-raiser for McCain. Ameritech employees and their families have contributed $16,000 to McCain’s campaign.
The senator can argue that he was doing nothing out of the ordinary for a Senate committee chairman. He was just trying to prod the bureaucrats to act, he said last week, not trying to influence their decision. “We are all tainted,” he said, “because there is so much money washing around.” What is more puzzling is that he kept on doing it after he became a presidential candidate. In September McCain introduced a bill that would allow Paxson to own more TV stations, and in November and December he wrote letters to the FCC on Paxson’s behalf. Only when The Boston Globe broke the story last week did McCain cancel a fund-raiser to be hosted by Paxson over the weekend. Paxson himself shrugged off the flap. “This is politics; this is part of my business,” he said. Now, he grumbles, “I’ve got 1,200 crab cakes left in my house.”
