McCain’s First Appointee Already Resigns

Doug Goodyear was chosen by John McCain to manage the Republican convention in Minnesota this summer. The problem wasn’t just that Goodyear’s company was making millions lobbying for corporations like ExxonMobil and GM, even though that should have been enough of an issue for the supposedly anti-lobbyist McCain.  An even bigger problem, as revealed by Newsweek,  was Goodyear’s lobbying for the military junta in Burma, a government condemned by our own state department for human rights violations.

Another issue: DCI has been a pioneer in running “independent” expenditure campaigns by so-called 527 groups, precisely the kind of operations that McCain, in his battle for campaign-finance reform, has denounced. In 2004, the DCI Group led a pro-Bush 527 called Progress for America, which was later fined (along with several other 527s on both sides of the political divide) for violating federal election laws. Goodyear, however, says that DCI is “not in the 527 business anymore.”

Now, Goodyear is gone, “setting a new land speed record for shortest time lapsed between the ‘story breaks’ and ‘ax falls’ phases of a political scandal.” 

Here’s how Goodyear explains his Burmese involvement: “It was our only foreign representation, it was for a short tenure, and it was six years ago.”   I guess that makes it okay.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.