McCain and the New York Times

The New York Times reported that Sen. John McCain had an affair with Vicki Iseman, a lobbyist for the telecom industry. Here are some of my responses.

Vicky Iseman is good looking, but I am afraid she is not that good looking, she sort of has an oddly shaped face, I think she has a smile of a stroke victim (sorry) and she has that gender neutral non femininity of DC women.

The thing that is great here is that it looks like Vicky Iseman has quite a bit of power in her profession, perhaps somewhere on equal footing with John McCain, it seems to be the subtext in the reporting. Is that what makes it Ok? Attractive? Has this event helped Vicky Iseman professionally?

Bill Clinton's affairs didn't hurt him politically, either in the election or in the White House. Bill Clinton usually had affairs with women who were professionally less powerful than he.

I think the NYT article tried to make this about McCain's record and reality with lobbyists, but it flopped, by injecting a hint of smutty sex. Perhaps there was some humanity involved as well.

Sometimes people who work together have a relationship dynamic that does not involve "doing it" but are intimate and, otherwise, affairs. That is probably what happened.

Why has no one thought that maybe the NYT, a media organization, wanted to attack the telecom industry/lobby/regulations structure through this article? Is this about leverage against that structure? Could it be the cultural establishment thinks the NYT is really more "left" or "independent" than it really is? I read the Financial Times.

If this were a lobbyist from the "Merchants of Death" we met in "Thank You For Smoking," then would the story look the same? Who cares about telecom regulation except the grad students in ICR at UIUC.