When we last left Charlie Black, uber-lobbyist and Beltway crony of John McCain, his candidate had lost the presidential election in 2008.

Since then, McCain has set up a PAC in a sadly lacking attempt to reclaim his moneyed-power base inside the Beltway by catering to "young Republican rising stars."  (That’s a cost-effective short list.)  Note to McCain:  imitating the prune-filled stylings of Fred Thompson?  Not a winning strategery.  

And Black?  He’s revamping his image yet again, this time as party elder strategist extraordinaire:

But despite his love and affection for his father, George W. Bush also believed that there were serious problems with his dad’s administration.

"He felt like his father relied on a lot of the Washington establishment and people who did not necessarily have his interest at heart," said Charles Black Jr., a longtime Republican strategist. "He developed an attitude of anti-lobbyist and anti-Republicans who have been around for years and years and years and worked in other administrations."

Look, is it too much to ask that Charlie Black be identified as one of the deans of the GOP lobbying set? Because he is one.

He’s not just a strategist, although he has worked on GOP campaigns as one of Jim Baker’s acolytes for years. Black’s a strategist who uses his inroads in the halls of power to boost his fees to lobbying clients because proximity to power is everything in that world. And Black is one of the consummate inroads kinda guys.  He’s the guy the GOP-PR machine trots out as a public face when they need corruption cover.  

And he gets paid handsomely for it, too, in contacts and contracts. 

We’ve just finished a political campaign in which John McCain, a man whose image was a carefully crafted sham of mavericity, was surrounded…nay, almost coated with layersof…lobbyists and tainted industry mavens of all sorts. With the fall of Ted Stevens, another layer of spillage popped out:  information about lobbyists who specialize in particular power players on the Hill.

For McCain, those lobbyists were also his political cronies: Charlie Black, Rick Davis…the list is extensive.

So why aren’t the major media outlets honest about that when they mine these well-connected pay-to-play power players for useful article quotes? Access, baby. Inside the Beltway, it’s all about maintaining the illusion of access.

And, in Charlie Black’s case, that apparently also requires the Potemkin Beltway Village illusion that he’s not using his carefully maintained high-power connections to line his own pocketsses.

Riddle me this, though: Doesn’t that sin of deliberate omission in order to maintain access make the media complicit in Black’s routine — a hand in the public till by proxy, so to speak?

(YouTube — uber-lobbyist Charlie Black explains to Chris Wallace why mean Mitt Romney should not say that McCain is surrounded by Beltway insiders and lobbyists. Even though he is. It is to laugh.)


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