Hardball: Max Cleland and the Chairman of the FEC.

On Hardball tonight, Max Cleland (he of the undelivered letter) fast-talked his way through a series of accusations against Bush, most notably that it was absolutely clear that Bush had broken the law by having connections to the Swift Boat Veterans. Chris Matthews loved Cleland's rant and told him he was more articulate than Kerry. Later, Matthews brought out Bradley Smith, the Chairman of the Federal Election Commission and asked him why the Democratic lawyer, Robert Bauer wasn't in the same position as Ginsberg, the Bush lawyer who quit today. Smith's answer was enlightening:

People have to decide how they want to handle their own affairs, but I was surprised to see, for example, Senator Cleland be so aggressive on saying that's proof that they're violating the law, because clearly a lawyer can advise two clients. What he can't do is transfer inside information from the campaign from one to another.



MATTHEWS: Why'd Ginsberg quit if he did nothing wrong?



SMITH: Because he thought appearances were perhaps bad. I mean, the thing is if that's the standard, merely having the same lawyer, then the Kerry campaign and a lot of these Democrats have a big, big problem on their hands for the reasons you've already suggested.



MATTHEWS: So you think that on its face, prima facie, there's no case to be made for coordination, simply by the presence of a shared lawyer.



SMITH: That, in and of itself, wouldn't be enough. Now, it might be something that might be enough to trigger an investigation into various ties between the groups, but that's going to be sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.



MATTHEWS: How do you prove that some guy like Bob Perry didn't get a call from somebody like Karl Rove or anybody else in the Bush world and said, you know, we could use a little money. Shake some money loose for these vets? ...



SMITH: Well, this is very hard stuff to prove. How do you prove that Americans Coming Together isn't coordinated with the Kerry Campaign? They've got offices next to one another. Kerry's former campaign manager runs one of these groups ... These are fact-intensive investigations. ... I'm surprised to see how aggressive the Kerry folks have come out on this.

Smith notes that the FEC will investigate if it receives a complaint, but it must take 60 days before issuing a finding, at which point it might impose a fine. I guess that shows why aggressively asserting that there are legal violations might work as a political argument: the FEC's finding will come too late to undercut those assertions. Meanwhile, the mere fact that Ginsberg has resigned will be waved around as proof that there was a violation. Quite deceptive. But will people see through it, or will they just say: oh, it's a big, weird legal tangle, so let's forget about all of this Vietnam stuff? That's the "swirly mass of confusion" strategy I theorized Kerry was following, and it irks me no end to see these spurious claims of legal violations being thrown about. The campaign law is already burdening free speech, and the ease of making these accusations seems to be causing people to restrict themselves even beyond what that law requires. The law didn't make Ginsberg quit: people's willingness to sling accusations about did. Cleland's performance on Hardball tonight was a very low sort of partisan politics, which I hope will be ineffective.



UPDATE: Ginsberg appeared on "The O'Reilly Factor" tonight and, not surprisingly, stated emphatically that he hadn't violated the law, that he was entitled to have several clients, and that he didn't pass information from client to client. He quit, he said, because he'd become a distraction. This was his parting shot, in answer to O'Reilly's question "Do you think Kerry's an honest man":

I don't know that. I think that the tactics that they've taken towards the Swift Boat Vets and, frankly, towards my role in this controversy is far from honorable and far from honest.