McCain On Seattle Radio

A couple of national heavies just blew through town to promote either side of our coming senate race and the most interesting things to come out of both visits was the dissent. Maria Cantwell got called out for the Iraq war votes that she's sticking to while she was sharing the stage with Barak Obama. John McCain's finest Seattle moment happened on the radio after his McGavick event. A caller asked about the shady background of a recently hired McCain senior aide to which McCain had no response. Rather, his response was that the guy in question worked for Bush in 2004. Oh yeah, that's clear evidence of a sterling character around Seattle.

CALLER: Thanks, I had a question for the senator. For a reformer, I'm kind of curious why he would hire a guy like Terry Nelson as a senior advisor.

Here's a guy who was actually in the indictment of DeLay on his money laundering charges. When he was at the RNC, he agreed to take the corporate contributions from DeLay's PAC and then recycle them back into the Republican congressional races.

And he was also, this guy Nelson was also the supervisor of James Tobin, who was the guy convicted last year for helping jam the Democratic get-out-the-vote lines in New England a couple years ago.

So I'm curious why would you hire someone with such a shady background?

MCCAIN: None of those charges are true.

CALLER: You don't believe what was actually written in the indictment from Texas?

MCCAIN: No.

CARLSON: All right.

[nervous laughter]

MCCAIN: I will check it out. But I've never heard of such a thing. I know that he was a grassroots organizer for President Bush year 2000 and 2004, and had a very important job in the Bush campaign as late as 2004, but the other charges I will go and look and see if any of them are true, but I've never heard of them before.

Here's the audio of the call in mp3 form.

In the Washington Post article about the McCain hiring of Terry Nelson the guy isn't referred to as a shady character. Rather he's known as one of the heros of the whole Rangers and Pioneers fundraising campaign, but The DeLay indictment refers to Terry Nelson as the guy who received money from the Texans for a Republican Majority PAC (which is under multiple indictments) on behalf of the Republican National Committee. You would think that McCain, a campaign finance reformer in a former political life, would be prepared to talk about that, but no.