Epic Campaign Manager Fail

How to lose an election badly in three days:

1) Get nailed on a decades-long effort to deregulate the financial industry, which leads to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression on Saturday.

2) Get nailed on saying you want to bring those same deregulation efforts to health care and Social Security as you did to Wall Street on Sunday.

3) Get nailed on your campaign manager having taken $2 million in banking lobbyist cash to stop regulation and oversight on Monday(h/t AmericaBlog).

Senator John McCain’s campaign manager was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations, current and former officials say.

Mr. McCain, the Republican candidate for president, has recently begun campaigning as a critic of the two companies and the lobbying army that helped them evade greater regulation as they began buying riskier mortgages with implicit federal backing. He and his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, have donors and advisers who are tied to the companies.

But last week the McCain campaign stepped up a running battle of guilt by association when it began broadcasting commercials trying to link Mr. Obama directly to the government bailout of the mortgage giants this month by charging that he takes advice from Fannie Mae’s former chief executive, Franklin Raines, an assertion both Mr. Raines and the Obama campaign dispute.

Incensed by the advertisements, several current and former executives of the companies came forward to discuss the role that Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager and longtime adviser, played in helping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac beat back regulatory challenges when he served as president of their advocacy group, the Homeownership Alliance, formed in the summer of 2000. Some who came forward were Democrats, but Republicans, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed their descriptions.

“The value that he brought to the relationship was the closeness to Senator McCain and the possibility that Senator McCain was going to run for president again,” said Robert McCarson, a former spokesman for Fannie Mae, who said that while he worked there from 2000 to 2002, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together paid Mr. Davis’s firm $35,000 a month. Mr. Davis “didn’t really do anything,” Mr. McCarson, a Democrat, said.

Mr. Davis’s role with the group has bubbled up as an issue in the campaign, but the extent of his compensation and the details of his role have not been reported previously.

McSame is going down in flames along with Wall Street and the GOP. That may be the only good thing to come from this. John at AmericaBlog seems to think now's the time to go on the full court press and unload ads and calls for Davis to resign. I think he's right. Obama must continue to roll on offense here, and he's got McSame increasingly on the ropes.

EPIC FAIL.