McCain and Obama

(Best Syndication News) Senator Barack Obama has taken a lot of heat for changing his decision to accept Federal matching funding. Now the Illinois Senator can raise and spend as much money as he wants. Not many people know or remember John McCain’s flip-flop, but a recent letter reminded us.

Best Syndication received a letter from the Chairman of the Democrat National Committee Howard Dean. In the letter he complains about McCain accepting money from special interests and lobbyists. Obama has had great success raising money from individual donors. We will need to see how well he continues doing that in the run-up to the election. Will he accept more special interest money?

Here is the letter we received from Howard Dean:

I wrote to you in late February asking that you sign on in support of a complaint we made to the Federal Election Commission regarding John McCain.

The complaint was fairly simple. John McCain decided to break a promise he made to the American people -- he said that he would accept federal matching funds for his primary campaign, but then backed out of the pledge after he started receiving staggering amounts of lobbyist and special interest money. We asked the FEC to enforce the agreement he had made.

When they didn't act on our complaint -- one that thousands of Americans signed on to support -- we sued them. Recently, a federal judge said that we had to give the FEC at least 120 days to act.

Their time runs out on June 24.

You can put pressure on John McCain to honor his agreement with the FEC by signing your support -- we need 100,000 Americans to stand up and demand that he keep the promise that he made the American people. If we're ever going to have truly clean campaigns, it's going to take all of us fighting for them.

I know that lawsuits, FEC rulings, and the intricacies of campaign finance law can be a little dry.

But consider this: while both Senator Obama's campaign and the DNC have unilaterally rejected lobbyist and special interest money, John McCain's campaign is blatantly breaking campaign finance law to raise as much of it as they can.
John McCain -- the self-branded "maverick reformer" -- is the exactly the same kind of Republican we've seen for decades. He breaks the rules to fit his own interests, and he does it at the expense of the American people and the integrity of the electoral process.

He knew exactly what he was doing when he signed the pledge with the FEC, because that used the money he was promised in return as collateral on a loan.
Be one of the 100,000 people to send a message to John McCain -- the law matters, and we're not going to let McCain and his lobbyist supporters ignore it.

By Howard Dean
Chairman Democratic National Committee

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