06:55 pm
Shocked, Shocked….
In case you missed it, The New York Times ran a big long boring article an exposé yesterday about how corporations and lobbyists give money to the International Republican Institute (IRI) in order to influence Senator John McCain, who is the organization’s chairman
Gasp!
Corporations give money to a non-profit chaired by a Senator!
This is news?
I don’t have the time or inclination to address everything that was wrong with this piece. It was not so much investigative journalism as a hatchet job. And I say that as a long-time critic of McCain and an occasional critic of IRI.
Yes, IRI has made some huge mistakes along the way — support for the coup in Venezuela, for example. Yes, I know that these big corporate donors didn’t necessarily give IRI money with noble and pure intent. And yes, John McCain’s cozy relationship with lobbyists is an under-reported story and worthy of greater attention.
I only wish that The Times had taken a bit more time not to paint IRI and its work with such a broad brush. This is not, as some could infer from The Times piece, a Jack Abramoff-style fake nonprofit set up to hide lobbyist donations. IRI does good work, often in places where no one else does. Much of what they do is widely respected. And the left-wing critics that the story mentioned have equal scorn for its Democratic counterpart, the National Democratic Institute (NDI): their beef is with the entire concept of democracy promotion and not merely with IRI’s application of the concept.
1. If you read the story, it appears that IRI is little more than a slush fund for McCain. That simply isn’t close to the truth. IRI runs a number of outstanding democracy-promotion programs around the world, many in conjunction with NDI. It has supported human rights and democracy advocates in a number of countries, and has helped build democratic institutions. Yes, it focuses on conservative/right-wing parties, but NDI focuses on left-wing/liberal parties — that’s the whole idea.
2. As organizations that receive most of their money from the U.S., both IRI and NDI have rigorous accounting standards in place, and are regularly audited by the government.
3. I am not familiar with the internal workings of NDI, but were I to guess, The Times could have written almost an identical piece about its fundraising practices. That doesn’t make those practices right, but it does raise the question of why the piece was written. Last I checked, non-profits (which is what IRI is) need to raise money to operate, and there are very, very few that are principled enough not to take money from corporations or their representatives. You can argue whether taking corporate money is right, but it seems a little odd to single out IRI just because it takes corporate money.
4. I happen to know Lorne Craner — not well, but nonetheless, well enough to take issue with the manner in which he was portrayed. Those three years in the Bush Administration? They were spent as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, a position he held with great distinction even if the Administration he worked for pursued policies that made his job virtually impossible. He has been a fine leader of IRI, and as far as I know, none of the alleged missteps cited in the article took place on his watch.
5. Regarding the late Jeane Kirkpatrick endorsing McCain in 2000 in part as a result of her belief that his work with IRI demonstrated his foreign policy skills: how is that an indictment of IRI or even McCain? If we can argue that Obama has demonstrated foreign policy leadership as a result of a week-long trip, why is it inappropriate for someone, even Jeane Kirkpatrick, to suggest that McCain had demonstrated similar leadership skill as a result of nearly eight years as chairman of IRI?
I don’t have a problem with The Times raising the questions they did, particularly those about the role of certain sleazeball IRI board members (and McCain advisors) like Charlie Black and Randy Scheunemann. And I do think that there are a lot of reasons we should take a closer look at John McCain’s relationship with lobbyists.
But the piece would have been a lot more credible had The Times decided to paint a complete and accurate picture of IRI’s work rather than use the story as an opportunity to make McCain look unprincipled.
I know some of you are going to give me a lot of grief about this. I don’t care.
I’ve spent the past week bashing the McCain campaign for blatantly lying about Obama and twisting facts for its own purposes. It’s important to hold others — including The New York Times — to the same standard.
FULL DISCLOSURE: Fifteen years ago, R. Bruce McColm (who is mentioned in The Times’s article) was executive director of Freedom House, which is where I then worked. Although I interacted with Bruce, he was my boss’s boss, and only rarely did he direct me to do something. I liked Bruce (quite a bit, as a matter of fact), but have not spoken to him since he left Freedom House to take the IRI job. And I have no idea why he subsequently left IRI.
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