There are few political commodities more lucrative than a reputation for integrity, which may explain why any lobbyist worth his salt would do well to court John McCain. The Arizona senator is considered so beyond the taint of corruption, he is free to engage all the more brazenly in the truck and barter of money and influence that ensures the functioning of the corporate welfare state.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee made a name for himself as a senator as one of the notorious Keating Five, legislators busy intervening in regulatory matters on behalf of crooked S&L baron Charles Keating. As McCain sells it (and the media tell it), this was the turning point in his career, a brush with ignominy that set him on his path as a maverick reformer.

But the narrative of McCain as redeemed sinner is sharply at odds with his record, a sliver of which came to light when the New York Times published, after months of dithering, a front-page story on his relationship with a lobbyist whose clients had business before his Senate committee. Leaving aside the unconfirmed sex insinuations surrounding McCain and lobbyist Vicki Iseman, the established facts are tawdry enough: McCain intervened with a regulatory body on behalf of a cable company his committee was regulating, after receiving thousands in donations from its CEO, meeting with the CEO and spending lots of time with a lobbyist working for the firm. In the ginned-up outrage that followed the Times story, McCain denied ever having spoken to CEO Lowell Bud Paxson about the pending case before the FCC, a falsehood contradicted by Paxson and by McCain himself in a 2002 deposition. And it wasn't just Paxson. In 2001 McCain went to bat for the entire cruise industry when it was a lucrative client of Iseman's firm, Alcalde and Fay.

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