Less than a month after the New York Times endorsed John McCain for the Republican nomination, they hit him with potentially the most damaging story of the 2008 campaign thus far.  It’s a story brimming with the suggestion of improper behavior between McCain and a number of lobbyists, including a relationship with telecommunications lobbyist Vicki Iseman that may have turned sexual, but that never backs it up with much more than anonymous quotes about gut feelings from former McCain advisers.  The story begins with a bombshell:

Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

The story goes on to elaborate on the fears among McCain advisers about an improper relationship without providing any evidence that the relationship ever actually turned into an affair– no lurid photos, no hotel records, no “It’s his baby” confessions.  It fills itself out by rehashing John McCain’s sketchy ethical history, from the Keating Five savings and loan scandal in the early ’90s to McCain’s current lobbyist-run Senate office.

Whatever the original ambitions of the story, and whatever its failings in uncovering any evidence of a sexual relationship between McCain and Iseman, it successfully accomplished two things:

1. It officially puts the liberal left on notice that the straight-talking maverick they’ve championed for years as a model for Republican behavior is no longer “one of us.”  Most of the revelations in the article were public knowledge, but the fact that the New York Times (and later, the Washington Post) are going after McCain like this shows that the free pass he’s been getting in the mainstream media has officially been revoked.

2. It puts every reporter from Washington to Phoenix on McCain’s history with lobbyists, especially his relationship with Iseman, from now until November.  Every lunch meeting, every plane ride, every gift that McCain has ever received from a lobbyist in his 20+ years in Congress will be sifted through by thousands of prospecting reporters looking for general election gold.

The McCain campaign is already dismissing the New York Times story as a “hit-and-run smear campaign,” and many are speculating that this could be the issue that rallies conservatives to his side, the way Democrats rallied to the embattled Clintons during the various sex scandals of the ’90s.  But whatever conservative support McCain gains from the upcoming back-and-forth between him and the media, he’ll lose it among Independents, who will be repelled by the sheer amount of suspicious behavior.  The New York Times story feels rushed, and there isn’t much fire, but there is clearly a whole lot of smoke surrounding McCain’s career– more smoke than most people realize.

I wrote last night that “with 20+ years as a U.S. senator, it will be … easy to portray [McCain] as someone who has been in Washington too long and can’t help but to have been corrupted by the environment.”  Stories such as this, and the many more to follow, will only make it easier for Barack Obama to make the “same old Washington” argument that he used so successfully against Hillary Clinton.  Obama is no angel, but while the two men battle over ethics– as they did earlier this week on campaign finance– the contrasts between their careers will only grow more stark.

For all of McCain’s tough talk on earmarks and pork barrel spending and bridges to nowhere, Washington ethics may not be the issue he wants to push in this campaign.

(Note: It took every fiber of my being not to title this post “The Iseman Cometh.”  I think I made the right call.)

UPDATE: After almost a full day of letting the New York Times bombshell fully sink in and observing some of the reaction to it, here’s my thoughts.

There are really two ways to read the piece.  The first is that it’s a tabloidish smear campaign that alleges John McCain had an affair with no absolutely hard evidence whatsoever to back that up.  That’s a sensationalist reading, but it’s the way the McCain camp and conservative pundits are playing it.  It’s also a politically advantageous reading.  McCain wants desperately to make the story about the Times (and the venomous liberal media), not about the story– the way Republicans made September’s “General Betray Us” ad about MoveOn.org, not about the occasionally-questionable data being presented by General Petraeus.

But there’s another, I believe more accurate way to read the piece.  The story is not about whether John McCain may or may not have had an affair, the story is about the fact that McCain, the straight-talking maverick by reputation, has spent nearly his entire career waist deep in lobbyists– a fact that no one would credibly dispute.  And at one point things had gotten so cozy with one lobbyist that his campaign advisers feared that he may have– not for the first time in his life– been crossing the politically suicidal line of extramarital romance (as opposed to the apparently not politically suicidal line of writing letters and stalling legislation on behalf of lobbyist campaign contributors) and they stepped in to intervene.  It’s not that McCain actually did cross that line, it’s that his actions were careless enough that it looked like he did, even to close advisers.  That is literally all the Times piece is saying.

His actions were also careless enough that “Mr. McCain acknowledged behaving inappropriately and pledged to keep his distance from Ms. Iseman,” which is a fact that the Times went out of its way to point out was corroborated independently by two different sources.  What “behaving inappropriately” means is for McCain and his advisers to know (I suspect the Times knows it too, but don’t have the evidence to back it up in print).

Although people are naturally focusing on the affair suspicions, the story isn’t really about that.  The story is exactly what the tagline of the piece says, that “John McCain’s confidence in his own integrity sometimes seems to blind him to potential conflicts.”  A hazardous quality for a presidential candidate.