Yes folks, there is a possibility that flip-flopping Mitt Romney could jump back into the Presidential race.

Crazy as it seems, to understand this, you'd need to take the entire GOP Presidential picture (which is a complete trainwreck) into perspective. To guide you through this difficult maze, we need to go back to the beginning of McCain's troubles.

Aides to Sen. John McCain confronted a telecommunications lobbyist in late 1999 and asked her to distance herself from the senator during the presidential campaign he was about to launch, according to one of McCain's longest-serving political strategists.


John Weaver, who served as McCain's closest confidant until leaving his current campaign last year, said he met with Vicki Iseman at the Center Cafe in Union Station and urged her to stay away from McCain. Association with a lobbyist would undermine his image as an opponent of special interests, aides had concluded.

Members of the senator's small circle of advisers also confronted McCain directly, according to sources, warning him that his continued relationship with a lobbyist who had business before the powerful Commerce Committee he chaired threatened to derail his presidential ambitions. ...

The aide said the message to Iseman that day at Union Station in 1999 was clear: "She should get lost." The aide said Iseman stood up and left angrily. ...

Concern about Iseman's presence around McCain at one point led to her being banned from his Senate office, according to sources close to McCain. ...

Now, it's VERY, VERY to ignore the Right-Wing spin surrounding the story and remember the one person who was directly quoted in both the New York Times and Washinton Post article, John Weaver.

New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks knows Weaver and lays out the scenario that could spell disaster for John McCain's straight talk express.

The staff of the McCain campaign had a rude awakening last Jan. 25th. They opened The Washington Post and found a front-page story linking McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, to the Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska. Who, some wondered, was feeding damaging information about Davis to the press?

Speculation inevitably settled, as it must in McCain World, upon John Weaver. For nearly a decade, stories about the inner workings of the McCain apparatus inevitably involved the Weaver-Davis rivalry. These two McCain advisers share a mutual hatred, one McCainiac told me Thursday, that is total, absolute and blinding.

The tensions, which divided the McCain presidential campaign until Weaver was forced out last summer, exist on many levels. First of all, there is a personal contest for the attention and love of John McCain. But there are broader issues as well.

Davis is a creature of the political mainstream. He is even-tempered and charming. He is a lobbyist and a friend of lobbyists. He is a good manager. In policy terms, his tastes tend toward the Republican center.

Weaver is a renegade. He has a darker personality. He’s not a member of elite Washington circles and resented the way McCain would occasionally get pulled into them. Weaver is a less effective bureaucrat, but his policy instincts are more daring and independent.

The Davis-Weaver rivalry has lasted for so long because John McCain has a foot in each camp. McCain is, on one level, a figure of the Washington mainstream. He admires Alan Greenspan and Henry Kissinger. He appreciates a steady manager like Davis.

But McCain is also a renegade and a romantic. He loves tilting at the establishment and shaking things up. He loves books and movies in which the hero dies at the end while serving a noble, if lost, cause. He loves the insurgent/band-of-brothers ethos that Weaver exudes.

McCain was loyal to each camp in a house divided. But the poisons emanating from the rift have spread outward. They are the background for the article my colleagues at The New York Times published Thursday.

Now that you have a better understanding of the rift in McCain's camp, you can better understand Brook's concern.

At the core of that article that began on the front page are two anonymous sources. These sources, according to the article, say they confronted McCain in 1999 with their concerns that he was risking his career by interacting with Vicki Iseman. As a columnist, I’m an independent operator, speaking for myself alone. I have no idea who those sources are. But they are bound to come from the inner circle of the McCain universe. The number of people who could credibly claim to have had a meeting like that with McCain in early 1999 is vanishingly small. I count a small handful of associates with that stature, including Davis and Weaver. There is nobody in that tight circle unaffected by the hostilities that emanate from the rift.

Now the doomsday scenario...

At his press conference Thursday, McCain went all-in. He didn’t just say he didn’t remember a meeting about Iseman. He said there was no meeting. If it turns out that there is evidence of an affair and a meeting, then his presidential hopes will be over. If no evidence surfaces, his campaign will go on and it will be clear that there were members of his old inner circle consumed by viciousness and mendaciousness.

But lingering over everything is the bitterness of the rift, which has caused duplicity and anger to seep into the campaign of this fine man. The poisons have yet to be drained.

McCain has serious problems...real serious problems, and here's why.

At his press conference last Thursday McCain denied everything, but as each day goes by, more news reports are coming out that are directly contradicting his statements.

Let's go back to the only person who was quoted on record, Weaver, and examine what he had to say about his quotes in the Post and Times.

The only on-the-record source the New York Times used in their John McCain story says he gave his quote to the paper in December and immediately shared it with the Arizona senator's top strategists.

John Weaver, formerly McCain's top strategist, tells Politico that after hearing repeatedly from Times reporters working on the story, he asked for written questions and then provided an e-mail response.

"They asked about the Union Station meeting and so I answered their questions," Weaver says. "I forwarded it to Steve, Charlie and Mark within minutes of sending it to the Times."

Steve Schmidt, Charlie Black and Mark Salter are all top advisers to McCain.

Now that you know who Weaver is and the fact that he confirmed his statement to the press, next up to bat, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff who's caught a MAJOR contradiction in McCain's comment.

A sworn deposition that Sen. John McCain gave in a lawsuit more than five years ago appears to contradict one part of a sweeping denial that his campaign issued this week to rebut a New York Times story about his ties to a Washington lobbyist.


On Wednesday night the Times published a story suggesting that McCain might have done legislative favors for the clients of the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, who worked for the firm of Alcalde & Fay. One example it cited were two letters McCain wrote in late 1999 demanding that the Federal Communications Commission act on a long-stalled bid by one of Iseman's clients, Florida-based Paxson Communications, to purchase a Pittsburgh television station.

Just hours after the Times's story was posted, the McCain campaign issued a point-by-point response that depicted the letters as routine correspondence handled by his staff--and insisted that McCain had never even spoken with anybody from Paxson or Alcalde & Fay about the matter. "No representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC," the campaign said in a statement e-mailed to reporters.

But that flat claim seems to be contradicted by an impeccable source: McCain himself. "I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue," McCain said in the Sept. 25, 2002, deposition obtained by NEWSWEEK. "He wanted their approval very bad for purposes of his business. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint."

While McCain gets hit with the left hook, the Washington Post came out with another front page story which hits him with the right cross and exposes his deep ties to lobbyists.

[W]hen McCain huddled with his closest advisers at his rustic Arizona cabin last weekend to map out his presidential campaign, virtually every one was part of the Washington lobbying culture he has long decried. His campaign manager, Rick Davis, co-founded a lobbying firm whose clients have included Verizon and SBC Telecommunications. His chief political adviser, Charles R. Black Jr., is chairman of one of Washington's lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has represented AT&T, Alcoa, JP Morgan and U.S. Airways.

Senior advisers Steve Schmidt and Mark McKinnon work for firms that have lobbied for Land O Lakes, the UST Public Affairs, Dell and Fannie Mae. [...]

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.

Bundlers...hmm, where have I heard that term used before?

Anyway, onto the Romney connection.

With more reports contradicting McCain hitting the press, people in Romney's inner circle are smelling blood, which is why this strategic tidbit from his son is making it's way around the press today.

Josh Romney, one of former Gov. Mitt Romney's five sons, says it's "possible" his father may rejoin the race for the White House, as a vice presidential candidate or as the Republican Party's standard-bearer if the campaign of Sen. John McCain falters.

The 60-year-old Romney, who "suspended" his campaign for the GOP nomination after a disappointing showing on Super Tuesday and a week later endorsed McCain, was taking a break from politics this weekend on a skiing vacation in Utah with his wife, Ann, according to his 32-year-old son.

The elder Romney, who was unable to assemble sufficient conservative support to thwart McCain, has made no public comment since the McCain camp was rocked ...

... by a controversial article in the New York Times last week first revealed in December in a posting on the Drudge Report.

The article, which was criticized even within journalism circles and by the newspaper's own ombudsman for its anonymous sourcing and lack of documentation, implied that the 71-year-old presumptive Republican presidential nominee had an improper relationship with a female lobbyist and did favors for her corporate clients.

McCain and the lobbyist have unequivocally denied the charges, and numerous conservatives, once hesitant to support the more moderate senator, have flocked to his support, at least against the liberal Times.

However, subsequent published reports have contradicted some of McCain's denials of meetings with corporate executives while he chaired the Senate Commerce Committee, and if further revelations occurred, it could raise questions about the Arizonan's viability as the GOP nominee.

Because he suspended rather than terminated his campaign, Romney still retains control of the nearly 300 delegates he's already won. Another former governor, Mike Huckabee, remains in the race and is nearing Romney's delegate totals, though few give him a realistic chance of catching McCain, with more than 900 delegates.

Will the wheels off the McCain straight talk express fall off? Only time will tell but with Romney's camp throwing hints out in the press, maybe Mayor Boughton should have held off jumping on McCain's bandwagon until AFTER the Republican National Convention. On second thought, seeing that Boughton was co-chair of Romney's team in Connecticut and couldn't get a single WARD IN DANBURY to vote for his anti-immigrant buddy, I don't think Romney's losing any sleep over anything Mark does at this point.