USA: Richard Nixon’s anti-Semitism and Senator McCain

McCain, cartoon

On April 3, Sen. John McCain‘s (R-AZ) 2008 presidential campaign announced [UPDATE August 2008: that page is no longer at the McCain site] that it had hired former Nixon staffer Fred Malek as its national finance co-chairman.

However, as David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation, noted in an April 3 entry on his Capital Games weblog, the McCain campaign’s press release “left out an interesting piece of Malek’s history: when he counted Jews for President Richard Nixon.”

As Corn reported, Nixon suspected that a “cabal” of Jews at the Bureau of Labor Statistics was skewing economic figures to make the administration look bad and assigned Malek to report back on how many Jews were employed at BLS.

When former President George H.W. Bush hired Malek as a top official at the Republican National Committee (RNC) in 1988, revelations in the press regarding Malek’s work for Nixon reportedly led him to resign.

McCain’s hiring of Malek would seem to warrant the same disclosures from the media, but so far, only one news outlet other than The Nation has reported it.

Moreover, as Media Matters for America senior fellow Eric Boehlert documented, Politico senior writer Ben Smith “lean[ed] on lots of innuendo” in a March 13 weblog post in order to report that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has a “Jewish Problem,” but failed to provide evidence substantiating that claim.

Now that McCain has hired Malek, who allegedly aided President Nixon’s attempts to expose the so-called “Jewish cabal” in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, will the Politico investigate “McCain’s Jewish Problem”?