McCain's Unlikely Ties to K Street

McCain has personally worked many corporate leaders this year as part of his money chase. At the Utah event, he put on a show for about 90 minutes, holding a "fireside chat" with public television talk show host Charlie Rose and answering pointed questions about his policies from the high-powered audience.

Similar, smaller events in New York City were organized by other well-known Wall Streeters, including Henry Kravis, John Thain and Lew Eisenberg -- all top McCain fundraisers in the presidential race.

McCain began the 2008 race as a Republican front-runner and quickly raised more than $30 million, boosted by large sums of GOP establishment money from such sources. But his prospects plunged by early summer and his campaign spent so heavily that it ran out of money, leaving him financially far behind rivals Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, and Giuliani. McCain jettisoned much of his campaign team over the summer and took a loan to bridge the financial gap, but in recent weeks he has begun to rebound in the polls, giving new life to his campaign and fundraising operation. "The money is coming in very heavily now," McCain boasted yesterday on ABC's "This Week."

Beyond his fundraising, McCain's conduct as chairman of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee between 1997 and 2004 has occasionally raised questions about whether he took actions to benefit major contributors to his political network, which included his Senate and presidential campaign committees, his Straight Talk political action committee and a foundation that he helped start called the Reform Institute.

In 2003 and 2004, for example, McCain took two actions favorable to Cablevision, the cable TV company, while Davis, his chief political strategist at the time, solicited the company for a total of $200,000 for the Reform Institute, a tax-exempt group that advocated an end to outsize political donations.

Davis solicited an initial donation from Cablevision chief Charles Dolan a week after Dolan testified before the Senate Commerce Committee in favor of a position backed by McCain. Davis said there was no connection between the testimony and the solicitation.

Less than a year later, McCain wrote to the Federal Communications Commission recommending Cablevision's position on cable pricing, citing Dolan by name. Cablevision followed soon thereafter with a second $100,000 donation, the Associated Press reported.

In 1999, McCain wrote a letter as committee chairman on behalf of longtime political supporter Lowell "Bud" Paxson, urging the FCC to vote on a long-delayed decision whether to approve the sale of a Pittsburgh television station to Paxson's company. McCain had flown on Paxson's corporate jet four times to appear at campaign events around that time, and had received $20,000 from campaign donations from Paxson and its law firm, the Boston Globe reported. The FCC chairman at the time, William Kennard, called McCain's intervention "highly unusual," but the senator denied doing any favors.