In response to Team McCain’s weekend offense publicizing Obama’s relationship with former (unrepentant) domestic terrorist William Ayers, Team Obama has decided toi stop running around in circles and screaming about how it’s unfair to discuss such things and bring up the Keating Five scandal.
Pushing back against what it calls McCain’s “guilt-by-association” tactics, the Obama campaign overnight began e-mailing millions of supporters a link to a website, KeatingEconomics.com, which will have a 13-minute documentary on the scandal beginning at noon Eastern time on Monday. The e-mails urge recipients to pass the link on to friends.
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.
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.”
Let’s start with a little fact-checking here. The crux of the Keating Five scandal wasn’t deregulation, it was the improper intervention of five senators into the federal investigation of Charles Keating and Lincoln Savings and Loan which he chaired. Trying to link the scandal to deregulation only works only in the most superficial of ways. On top of that, the Senate Ethics Committee cleared McCain of any wrongdoing, however he was criticized by the SEC for his lack of judgement. McCain has often said that his involvement was “the worst mistake of my life”, and he’s never tried to hide or back away from the scandal. ln fact, if Team McCain is smart, they could use this as a way to introduce the idea of some sort of investigation into wrongdoing on the Senate’s part in the current Fannie/Freddie crisis.
As for Charles Keating, he ended up spending 4 1/2 years in the pen for fraud and racketeering. One could hope that some of the players in this financial meltdown face the same fate.
PS – If you want to attack McCain for his role in the Keating Five scandal, it would be wise to not be using one of the other principal players in the scandal as your surrogate.
