By GottaLaff
Hear that "thud"? That's Gramm-pa hitting the ground in a dead faint. He may get up in time for the wedding, but other than that, he's down for the count:
Newsweek is reporting that Rick Davis took deferred compensation, funneled into his lobbying firm shop, and was racking up huge fees for a related business run out of the same address.
The McCain campaign told reporters the fees were irrelevant because Davis "separated from his consulting firm ... in 2006," according to the campaign's Web site, and he stopped drawing a salary from it. In fact, however, when Davis joined the campaign in January 2007, he asked that his $20,000-a-month salary be paid directly to Davis Manafort, two sources who asked not to be identified discussing internal campaign business told NEWSWEEK. Federal campaign records show the McCain campaign paid Davis Manafort $90,000 through July 2007, when a cash crunch prompted Davis and other top campaign officials to forgo their salaries and work as volunteers. Separately, another entity created and partly owned by Davis—an Internet firm called 3eDC, whose address was the same office building as Davis Manafort's—received payments from the McCain campaign for Web services, collecting $971,860 through March 2008.
In an e-mail to NEWSWEEK, a senior McCain official said that when the campaign began last year, it signed a contract with Davis Manafort "in which we purchased all of [Davis's] time, and he agreed not to work for any other clients." The official also said that though Davis was an "investor" in 3eDC, Davis has received no salary from it. As to why Davis permitted the Freddie Mac payments to continue, the official referred NEWSWEEK to Davis Manafort, which did not respond to repeated phone calls. One senior McCain adviser said the entire flap could have been avoided if the campaign had resisted attacking Barack Obama for his ties to two former Fannie Mae executives, which prompted the media to take a second look at Davis. "It was stupid," the adviser said. "A serious miscalculation and an amateurish move." Still, this adviser said, McCain's faith in his campaign manager remains unswerving.
While Davis left his lobbying firm, the firm continued to take Freddie Mac money. Davis is of course a major shareholder and all these monies are going to end up with him once this campaign is over and he "puts his lobbying hat back on".
What a fine campaign run by that heroic P.O.W. Gramm-pa John Sidney McCain this is. His "unswerving faith" in Davis is as admirable as his unswerving inability to look Obama in the eye.
I'm sure Soon-to-be-Gramm-ma IWRC* Palin's new Gramm-baby will look up to Gramm-pa Sid as a role model, as all children should. Family values abound: Honesty, transparency, adherance to morals, straight talk... oh, we could go on, couldn't we?
But we won't.
*"In What Respect, Charlie?"
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