Straight Talk And All That Jazz

(Via Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall.)

We’ve mentioned this before but it remains an interesting dynamic to watch.

You’ve got the John McCain of lore — the maverick riding the Straight Talk Express who flirted with caucusing with the Democrats, if not running with Sen. John Kerry on the Democratic ticket in 2004 — hitching his star to the right-wing noise machine, and the wingnuts hitching their star to him.

It makes for strange bedfellows and for trainwrecks just like this one.

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis sent out a fund-raising letter this week trying to raise money off of George Soros’ funding of indy Dem groups: “He and his group of billionaire left-wing Democrats have pledged $40 million dollars of soft money to smear John McCain in a national television ad campaign,” Davis wrote in the letter.

The problem for McCain is that Soros has also funded groups like the Reform Institute, an advocate of campaign-finance reform that Davis himself served as president of from 2001-05 and for which McCain was honorary co-chairman. As TPM Election Central reports, Soros gave $150,000 to the McCain-Davis outfit back in 2003.

We’re hearing that McCain also benefited indirectly from Soros money that was used for litigation defending the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law.

More on that shortly.