Ex-Fannie CEO Raines NOT Obama Advisor

Despite John McCain's best attempts to tie Barack Obama to discredited ex-Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines in his speech yesterday in Green Bay, Wisconsin and a newly released ad ( you can see it here), the Republican candidate instead faces new charges of lying in the face of near-financial disaster for the country to make a false political point. And if that's not bad enough, McCain's advertising staff does its best to inject a racial aspect into the whole shebang.

Raines, who left Fannie Mae in 2004 under a cloud of accusations surrounding accounting irregularities, is said by the McCain campaign to have been advising the Obama campaign on housing and other economic issues. The Obama campaign, and Raines himself, have strenuously denied any such connection.

The basis for McCain's charge appear to lie in a few off-the-cuff remarks made by Raines during a photo shoot with Washington Post business writer Anita Huslin back in July and repeated elsewhere in WaPo's pages twice in July and August. Says the Washington Post now:

So what evidence does the McCain campaign have for the supposed Obama-Raines connection? It is pretty flimsy, but it is not made up completely out of whole cloth. McCain spokesman Brian Rogers points to three items in the Washington Post in July and August. It turns out that the three items (including an editorial) all rely on the same single conversation, between Raines and a Washington Post business reporter, Anita Huslin, who wrote a profile of the discredited Fannie Mae boss that appeared July 16. The profile reported that Raines, who retired from Fannie Mae four years ago, had "taken calls from Barack Obama's presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters."

Since this has now become a campaign issue, I asked Huslin to provide the exact circumstances of that passage. She said that she was chatting with Raines during the photo shoot, and asked "if he was engaged at all with the Democrats' quest for the White House. He said that he had gotten a couple of calls from the Obama campaign. I asked him about what, and he said, 'Oh, general housing, economy issues.' ('Not mortgage/foreclosure meltdown or Fannie-specific?' I asked, and he said 'no.')"

The Obama campaign's Bill Burton quickly reacted to the latest attempt to tie Obama to years of neglect and abuse perpetrated by Republican legislators (including top McCain advisor Phil Gramm) and the Bush administration:

This is another flat-out lie from a dishonorable campaign that is increasingly incapable of telling the truth. Frank Raines has never advised Senator Obama about anything -- ever. And by the way, someone whose campaign manager and top advisor worked and lobbied for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shouldn't be throwing stones from his seven glass houses.

Raines himself issued a denial in an email to recently disappeared ex-HP CEO Carly Fiorina obtained by the AP:

"Carly: Is this true?" Raines asks above a forwarded note informing him that Fiorina was on television saying he was an Obama housing adviser. "I am not an adviser to the Obama campaign. Frank."

Obama's campaign says Fiorina did not respond.

If the McCain campaign had wanted to make more of point in the "Advice" ad he would have mentioned former Obama advisor and intially a member of his Vice-Presidential selection committee Jim Johnson, another ex-CEO of Fannie Mae. Johnson resigned from the VP selection committee after it was discovered he may have gotten a favorable mortgage deal from CountryWide Mortgage - an early casualty or the mortgage melt-down. By all accounts Johnson, as a major donation bundler for the Obama campaign, has much closer ties to the Democratic nominee than Raines could ever hope to have.

So why the emphasis on Raines over Johnson? Karen Tumulty of Time Magazine's Swampland put's it best:

This is hardly subtle: Sinister images of two black men, followed by one of a vulnerable-looking elderly white woman.

[snip]

Why? One reason might be that Johnson is white; Raines is black.

And the image of the victim doesn't seem accidental either, given the fact that older white women are a key swing constituency in this election.

In the post-Palin popularity phase of McCain's campaign and after a week of abysmal rhetorical failure during one of the worst economic crises in a generation, McCain takes a page out of the Rove playbook that destroyed him in 2000 and panders to scared while folks. Perhaps if he had chosen someone who could have aided his campaign with some economic expertise, i.e. Mitt Romney, as his running mate rather than some half-assed nod to the extreme right of his party with Palin; McCain wouldn't be reduced to running the type of campaign that Mr. Straight-talker used to despair of and be able to get through a week without lying, defending lies, or now playing an obvious race card.