Mr. McCain’s doomed promise of military “victory” in Iraq is akin to Wile E. Coyote’s perpetual pursuit of the Road Runner, ...

McCain convention chief quits after past ties to Burma revealed

The PR executive John McCain just tapped to help run the GOP convention quit today after a report that his firm once represented the Burmese junta that is now doing little to relieve its people from the devastation incurred by this week’s cyclone.

Doug Goodyear, CEO of the DCI Group, said in a statement issued by the convention committee that he was resigning “so as not to become a distraction in this campaign.”

Asked whether he made the decision to quit or was asked by the campaign, Goodyear said: "My decision."

"[It was] unambiguously the right thing to do," he said in an email to Politico.

In a piece posted online today, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff reported that DCI represented Burma’s military regime in 2002.

DCI is a well-regarded firm in the Republican orbit, but has been known to represent some politically controversial clients.

Given McCain’s ardor for campaign finance reform and the number of lobbyists and PR gurus who comprise the senior ranks of his campaign, his aides are acutely sensitive to appearances.

McCain, meanwhile, is guilty of hypocrisy. I am a supporter of Hillary Clinton and believe that she was right to say, about McCain's statement on Hamas, "I don't think that anybody should take that seriously." Unfortunately, the Republicans know that some people will. That's why they say such things.

But given his own position on Hamas, McCain is the last politician who should be attacking Obama. Two years ago, just after Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections, I interviewed McCain for the British network Sky News's "World News Tonight" program. Here is the crucial part of our exchange:

I asked: "Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?"

McCain answered: "They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it's a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that."

Rubin: “So should the United States be dealing with that new reality through normal diplomatic contacts to get the job done for the United States?”

Sen. McCain: “I think the United States should take a step back, see what they do when they form their government, see what their policies are, and see the ways that we can engage with them, and if there aren’t any, there may be a hiatus. But I think part of the relationship is going to be dictated by how Hamas acts, not how the United States acts.”

CNN'S BETTY NGUYEN: " All right, let's shift over to the global front. The Bush administration is reviewing all aspects of U.S. aid to the Palestinians now that Hamas has won the elections. And I do have to quote you here. A State Department spokesman did say this: 'To be very clear' – and I'm quoting now – 'we do not provide money to terrorist organizations.' What does this do to the U.S. relationship with the Palestinians?"

MCCAIN: "Well, hopefully, that Hamas now that they are going to govern, will be motivated to renounce this commitment to the extinction of the state of Israel. Then we can do business again, we can resume aid, we can resume the peace process." (CNN's "Saturday Morning News," 1/28/06)

"They say Hamas will be given a choice: recognize Israel's right to exist, forswear violence and accept previous Palestinian-Israeli agreements — as called for by the United Nations and the West — or face isolation and collapse.

Opinion polls show that Hamas's promise to better the lives of the Palestinian people was the main reason it won. But the United States and Israel say Palestinian life will only get harder if Hamas does not meet those three demands. They say Hamas plans to build up its militias and increase violence and must be starved out of power.

The officials drafting the plan know that Hamas leaders have repeatedly rejected demands to change and do not expect Hamas to meet them.

I'd say any fair assessment would show that McCain was intelligently prepared to see whether the US could talk to Hamas, if there could be ways to engage with them. If their behavior made that fruitless, then we shouldn't bother. That sounds perfectly sensible to me, the kind of politics McCain used to be known for, both realistic and pragmatic, and it is clearly not the rigid posture that dialogue with governments like Hamas is always unacceptable. This new position is obviously part of an attempt to paint Obama as unfit for the presidency. It's Rovian bullshit.

And, of course, with respect to Hamas, there is no daylight between Obama's position and McCain's. The only difference is with Iran.

"[T]here's a lot of things we need to do. We have a lot of work to do, and I'm afraid that it's a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border. And I would not announce that I'm going to attack Pakistan, as Senator Obama did when he was during his campaign."

The ad gave us an uneasy feeling that the McCain campaign was starting up the same sort of racially tinged attack on Mr. Obama that Republican operatives, some of whom work for Mr. McCain now, ran against Harold Ford, a black candidate for Senate in Tennessee in 2006. That assault, too, began with videos juxtaposing Mr. Ford with young, white women.

Mr. Obama called Mr. McCain on the ploy, saying, quite rightly, that the Republicans are trying to scare voters by pointing out that he “doesn’t look like all those other Presidents on those dollar bills.’’

But Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, had a snappy answer. “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck,” he said. “It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.’’

The retort was, we must say, not only contemptible, but shrewd. It puts the sin for the racial attack not on those who made it, but on the victim of the attack.

Mr. Obama, in his first remarks on the matter, raised his voiced when asked whether his campaign or other Democratic operatives were working to advance rumors surrounding the Palin family.

“Our people were not involved in any way in this and they will not be,” Mr. Obama snapped. “And if I ever thought there was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that, they’d be fired, OK?”

Mr. Obama said the pregnancy “has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president.” He added that, “my mother had me when she was 18. How family deals with issues and teen-age children – that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics.”

“So,” he added, “I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories.”