For someone who sure hates lobbyists, he just loves surrounding himself by them:
Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain has engaged a leading GOP lobbyist to coordinate his message and travel schedule with congressional Republicans – the most concrete sign yet that the biggest battleground in the 2008 presidential race may not be Pennsylvania or Ohio or Florida’s I-4 corridor but rather the floor of the United States Senate.
John Green, a founding partner of what is now Ogilvy Government Relations, will soon take a leave of absence from that firm to work as a full-time liaison between McCain’s presidential campaign and Republicans in the House and the Senate, according to GOP aides on Capitol Hill and McCain surrogates downtown. Green, a Mississippi native, has strong ties in the Senate after his years of work for former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), a vocal McCain supporter who left Congress late last year to set up his own lobbying shop.
You know what’s wrong with this? The phoney phony baloney of being hypocritical about it. But I didn’t say that. That’s from Mississippi Governor and former RNC chair, Haley Barbour. Of course now Barbour endorses McCain, so they are BFFs again.