Rove tries to defend McCain's lobbyist pals on H&C with his typical "Obama has them too," routine. Colmes does a good job of pointing out the fact that McCain used to be a maverick when it came to lobbyists, but not anymore. And he didn't forget about naming Rick Davis either.

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Colmes: You have John McCain come out hard against Russia, his chief foreign policy advisor got lobbyists money. John McCain has talked about not taking lobbyist money and being a different kind of candidate back when he was a maverick. And then now he has all these lobbyists working for him.

I wouldn't get in there and start throwing mud at McCain over lobbyists associations without then realizing what kind of lobbyist associations there are among Democrats, particularly among congressional Democrats.

I think McCain is running for president and not the congress. Rove tries to say that Obama has plenty of them working for his campaign like McCain, but of course that's false. We've posted many stories on C&L about McCain's Army of Lobbyists. Here are but a few:

The John McCain Institute of Lobbyists

McCain Campaign Manager’s Alleged Russian Mob Ties

McCain Caught Off-Guard About Campaign’s Lobbyist Problems

McCain makes a distinction between good lobbyists and bad

And of course this big one: McCain: The Anti-lobbyist just loves lobbyists

Now the Washington Post follows that up with this:

In McCain’s case, the fact that lobbyists are essentially running his presidential campaign — most of them as volunteers — seems to some people to be at odds with his anti-lobbying rhetoric. “He has a closer relationship with lobbyists than he lets on,” said Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The problem for McCain being so closely associated with lobbyists is that he’s the candidate most closely associated with attacking lobbyists.”

Public Citizen, a group that monitors campaign fundraising, has found that McCain had more bundlers — people who gather checks from networks of friends and associates — from the lobbying community than any other presidential candidate from either party. By the group’s current count, McCain had at least 59 federal lobbyists raising money for his campaign, compared with 33 working for Republican Rudolph W. Giuliani and 19 working for Democrat Clinton..read on