In 2000, Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain whupped Governor George Bush Jr.’s behind in the New Hampshire primary.
McCain didn’t get to enjoy his victory very long. For the first time ever, a group organized under section 527 of the tax code could spend over $2 million crapping all over McCain on the airwaves. Who were the guys throwing the slime?
We now know it was the Brothers Wyly, two billionaires Charles and Sam who’d made a mint off a law signed by Governor George W. Bush of Texas deregulating the power industry (a law Sam helped write).
McCain’s campaign was destroyed in the primaries when the Wylys targeted him, and that gave Governor Bush the presidential nomination.
A pissed-off McCain then joined with a Democrat, Russ Feingold, to shame fellow Congressmen into passing the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002.
President George Bush decided to counter McCain and Feingold with a Highly Partisan Campaign Act, appointing in 2005 as chief justice of the Supreme Court a man who would thrill Bush’s funders: John Roberts, corporate lawyer and probusiness fanatic.
Chief Justice Roberts set about immediately to aim his guns at McCain-Feingold. Citizens, which effectively demolished the McCain-Feingold Act, was a foregone decision.
But it wasn’t good enough to demolish their act. The big money had to demolish Feingold and McCain.
With the 2010 decision chopping the head off his campaign reform law, Feingold’s opponents were able to outspend him—extraordinary in a race by an incumbent—and Feingold lost reelection. The Number One contributor to Feingold’s opponent? Sorry, no points for guessing this one either: Koch Industries.
And McCain? McCain saw the light and was born again, voting in 2007 against a law requiring disclosure of donors by lobbying groups—a law he himself proposed. And that 527 lobbying front for the Wylys that smeared McCain? The New McCain of 2008, the GOP presidential nominee, gave a speech to the group and took a big check.
McCain was trying hard to sell his soul to the Devil, but the Devil wasn’t buying. Big Finance put its money on the new kid on the block, The One They’d Been Waiting For.
And adding insult to self-inflicted injury, McCain had to return $20,000 to the Wylys. It later turned out much of the Wylys’ money had been stolen, and in 2010, the Securities Exchange Commission whacked the brothers with charges alleging a half-billion-dollar ($550 million) fraud scheme that provided the grubstake for their billions.