Chellie Pingree and Sen. John McCain once moved in the same Washington world of people interested in campaign finance reform.
Now McCain is the presumptive Republican nominee for president and Pingree is a Democratic congressional candidate from Maine. And with the release of a new book about McCain by a former Pingree aide, evidence of a long-submerged rift between the two political insiders is spilling into public view.
In an interview for this article, Pingree said that people close to McCain tried in 2004 to remove her from her job as the head of Common Cause, the prominent Washington watchdog organization. A spokesman for McCain's presidential campaign denied that the senator took part in an effort to oust Pingree.
Regardless, interviews with people on both sides of the dispute make clear that McCain and Pingree were divided by both partisan politics and a substantive disagreement over campaign finance reform.
After the 2002 elections, Pingree, who had just lost her bid to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins, was hired as president of Common Cause, which advocates on government accountability issues, including campaign finance reform.
At the time, McCain, R-Ariz., was virtually synonymous with the issue of campaign finance reform, having co-authored the McCain-Feingold law of 2002, which overhauled fundraising rules for federal elections.
Pingree's problems with McCain began shortly after she started working for Common Cause.
In late March 2003, Pingree was spotted at a Democratic fundraiser. The next week, she was seen at a book signing attended by numerous prominent Democrats. Because Common Cause bills itself as a nonpartisan organization, those appearances drew criticism.
After an article appeared in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, Pingree met with McCain. According to Jeff Sadosky, a spokesman for McCain's presidential campaign, the Arizona senator was concerned that Pingree's activities were jeopardizing the spirit of bipartisanship on campaign finance reform.
"What happened was he sat down with her at one point and cautioned her against her participation in Democratic Party fundraising," Sadosky said in an interview.
Pingree also remembers the meeting in McCain's U.S. Senate office. She recalled defending her actions, saying that she hadn't participated in Democratic fundraising, and that she had attended the party fundraiser merely to thank people who'd helped on her recent Senate campaign.
"It was a very contentious meeting. And I felt that he was very paternalistic," Pingree said. "And it was hard to get him to listen to my side of the story."
Common Cause had long been a leading advocate for campaign finance reform, and the group played a key role in passing the McCain-Feingold law. But by 2004, Common Cause was shifting its focus to other issues -- most notably, by fighting against media consolidation and supporting public financing of state elections, using Maine's Clean Elections law as a model.
In February 2004, Common Cause broke with McCain by opposing a specific proposal to regulate so-called 527 groups, which are named after the section of IRS code that establishes them. The groups are allowed to raise unlimited sums of money to advocate for specific issues, but not to support or oppose specific candidates. Common Cause expressed concern that the proposed regulations would infringe on the free-speech rights of activists and non-profit organizations.
Pingree recalled getting a phone call at that time from Rick Davis, who in 2000 had managed McCain's presidential campaign and, at the time, was president of the Reform Institute, a group that sided with McCain on the regulation of 527s.
Pingree said that Davis expressed his displeasure with Common Cause's position, but refused to meet with her to discuss the matter.
Davis is now managing McCain's bid for the White House; a spokesman for...
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