Cindy McCain's lawyer cites Obama drug use

firedupdem

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Sat Oct-18-08 11:31 AM
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Cindy McCain's lawyer cites Obama drug use

http://www.politico.com/

John Dowd, Cindy McCain's attorney, complained in a letter to New York Times executive editor Bill Keller earlier this month that the paper had scrutinized the GOP nominee's wife but not investigated matters surrounding Barack Obama including his youthful drug use.

"You have not tried to find Barack Obama's drug dealer that he wrote about in his book, Dreams of My Father," Dowd wrote in a two-page letter sent to Keller while the paper was reporting a piece about Cindy McCain.

The McCain campaign released the missive late Friday night in response to that story, to be published in the paper's Saturday edition. It's the first time anybody so closely associated with McCain has raised the issue.

Continuing the campaign's drumbeat of criticism against the Times, Dowd wrote on Oct. 1 that the paper was not covering the two candidates equally. In addition to the reference to Obama's "drug dealer," Dowd notes that the Times also has not "interviewed his poor relatives in Kenya and determined why Barack Obama has not rescued them."

After mentioning the topics, though, Dowd suggests that "none of these subjects on either side are worthy of the energy and resources of The New York Times."

Dowd is a Washington attorney at Akin Gump. He represented John McCain when the senator was investigated for his involvement in the "Keating Five" scandal in the 1980s. Initially a top fundraiser for McCain at the start of this campaign, Dowd defected to Fred Thompson last year when the Arizonan's campaign nearly ran aground. He's since come back into the fold, deployed to represent Cindy McCain to news organizations running investigative pieces.

The Saturday story, part of the newspaper's biographical "Long Run" series on the two candidates, offers a mostly negative look at Cindy McCain, reprising anecdotes about her drug abuse, miscarriages and the difficulties in her long-distance marriage to a senator.

In addition to releasing the Dowd letter, the campaign issued a lengthy statement denouncing the piece. A spokesman noted that the paper included little about Cindy McCain's extensive charitable work.

"This campaign made every effort to share personal accounts of Mrs. McCain’s good works with the paper, but apparently they were deemed unfit for publication in the New York Times," said Michael Goldfarb.

The aggressive pushback is just the latest in the campaign's ongoing war with the Times. Campaign aides have publicly claimed the paper is an arm of Obama's campaign.

Despite their criticism, McCain officials still cooperate with Times journalists and cite the paper's reporting when it's in their interest. A front-page story on Obama's ties to Bill Ayers earlier this month, for example, was the peg that Sarah Palin used to insert the '60s-era domestic terrorist into the campaign.