Chicago, USA- June 12, 2008 – IRS/NYT - Mr. Obama is deprived of Mr. Johnson, his old friend, the most experienced accessed to Washington power best powerful influential people, suddenly resigned on Wednesday, a great loss to him at this stage.

Mr. Johnson’s departure from Mr. Obama is a very bad news since he was the person who has been a fixture in Washington political and legal circles for the last three decades and led the  of decades of experience and access to Washington’s power elite.

Mr. Johnson has been a fixture in Washington political and legal circles for three decades, and led the vice-presidential search team for Senator John Kerry, the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 2004.

His resignation, at the start of a general election contest in which the candidates have pledged to run issue-based campaigns, came after days of intense scrutiny from the news media and attacks from Senator John McCain and Republican Party officials over mortgages Mr. Johnson, a former chief executive of Fannie Mae, received on favorable terms from the Countrywide Financial Corporation, the mortgage company that was a central player in the sub prime lending crisis.

 Mr. Johnson also faced questions about his role on compensation committees that awarded large payouts to corporate executives.

His resignation highlights the difficulties for Mr. Obama’s campaign in trying to live up to his promises to remain independent of the Washington establishment and the special interests that populate it.

In a statement issued by his Chicago campaign headquarters, Mr. Obama said Wednesday afternoon that “Jim did not want to distract in any way from the very important task of gathering information about my vice-presidential nominee, so he has made a decision to step aside that I accept.”

Mr. Obama had defended Mr. Johnson as recently as Tuesday, saying that he had only a “tangential” role and that the campaign would not hire people to, as Mr. Obama put it, “vet the vetters.”

But as questions about Mr. Johnson grew, Mr. Obama felt he had to move quickly to rid the campaign of a man who had come to symbolize the Washington fixers that Mr. Obama was running against, aides said.

One aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said that Mr. Obama, a relative newcomer to Washington, had little loyalty to Mr. Johnson, a major presence in Democratic politics for more than two decades.

But the loss will carry some costs for the Obama team. The controversy is the latest example of the demonization of so-called Washington insiders, who both profit from the political system and bring irreplaceable experience and insight to it.

Mr. Johnson, in a statement issued Wednesday afternoon, said he was leaving the campaign not because he had done anything wrong but to save Mr. Obama further grief.

“I believe Barack Obama’s candidacy for president of the United States is the most exciting and important of my lifetime,” he said. “I would not dream of being a party to distracting attention from that historic effort.”

He added: “I am extremely proud of my service to Fannie Mae and in other important dimensions of public service. This withdrawal should in no way imply that I accept the blatantly false statements and misrepresentations that have been written about me in recent days.”

Mr. McCain and national Republican officials, who had seized on the questions being raised about Mr. Johnson, gloated over his departure on Wednesday.

“The American people have reason to question the judgment of a candidate who has shown he will only make the right call when under pressure from the news media,” Tucker Bounds, a McCain spokesman, said in a statement.

Mr. Obama’s spokesman, Bill Burton snapped back a few minutes later in an e-mail message: “We don’t need any lectures from a campaign that waited 15 months to purge the lobbyists from their staff, and only did so because they said it was a ‘perception problem. ”
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