Obama to Go After McCain on “Keating Five”
Senator Obama will launch a multimedia campaign on Monday, Politico reported, in order to draw attention to Senator John McCain’s involvement in the “Keating Five” savings-and-loan scandal of 1989-91. This scandal did, indeed, happen 17 years ago. Not only did it happen 17 years ago, however, McCain actually learned from it and became a self styled maverick reformer after it.
Nonetheless, the Obama campaign will spare no dime to go after McCain on it.
The multimedia offensive comes in response to McCain’s campaign charge that Obama is “palling around with terrorists.” Shortly after Governor Sarah Palin made the now (in)famous remark, the Obama campaign sent out e-mails to supporters instructing them to visit a website, KeatingEconomics.com, which will have a 13-minute documentary on the scandal beginning at noon Eastern time on Monday. The e-mail went on to ask supporters to forward the e-mail to friends, relatives and colleagues.
‘The Obama campaign, including its surrogates appearing on radio and television, will argue that the deregulatory fervor that caused massive, cascading savings-and-loan collapses in the late ‘80s was pursued by McCain throughout his career, and helped cause the current credit crisis,’ the Politico report said.
Obama-Biden communications director Dan Pfeiffer said: “While John McCain may want to turn the page on his erratic response to the current economic crisis, we think voters will find his involvement in a similar crisis to be particularly interesting. His involvement with Keating is a window into McCain’s economic past, present, and future.”
A Republican official reacted immediately to the new multimedia strategy by saying that the Obama team seemed “frantic” at “the mere mention of the word ‘Ayers.’”
“The fact that the Obama team is recycling this old garbage 24 hours after Bill Ayers entered the race is a testament to how worried the Obama camp is of an unfettered airing of his associations,” the official said. “Obama is a clever enough politician to know that his unexplored relationships with terrorists and felons are a serious liability in a race this close.”
Interesting about the “Keating Five” case is that independent researchers have concluded that “it soon became evident that at least two, McCain and former astronaut John Glenn of Ohio, were far less culpable, if they were culpable at all,” in the words of one of them.
It is fascinating to see the man who said he represents a new kind of politics, a post-partisan one, is going after John McCain on such a grand scale, and on something that happened so long ago. Unlike Obama, McCain has actually been pretty honest about his mistakes, and has learned from them.
Expect the race to get nastier still; McCain will have to strike back hard, meaning that he will have to take Obama to task for his connection with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives and lobbyists, and of course his relationship with Rev. Wright.
McCain has previously promised to run a clean campaign as well. Why does he get a pass because he isn’t the "post-partisan" guy.
McCain has just about lost me with this Ayers stuff. If Obama brings up Keating, he’s lost me too.
Correction: Obama HAS brought up Keating.
Game over.