On Saturday I remarked that John McCain's apparent decision to try to smear Barack Obama by linking him to controversial Chicagoans (such as William Ayers) would backfire because it...
...practically invites Obama to respond by raising an issue he has so far assiduously avoided: John and Cindy McCain's close association with the late felon Charles Keating. Keating is the elephant in the room neither campaign wants to mention.
Sarah Palin's repeated attacks this weekend on Obama for "palling around with terrorists" have shown that McCain is indeed turning to the tactic of guilt-by-association. And just as predicted, the Obama campaign announced that on Monday it will respond by making an issue of John McCain's part in the Keating Five scandal.
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Monday will launch a multimedia campaign to draw attention to the involvement of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the “Keating Five” savings-and-loan scandal of 1989-91, which blemished McCain’s public image and set him on his course as a self-styled reformer.
Retaliating for what it calls McCain's “guilt-by-association” tactics, the Obama campaign is 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 overnight 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.”
Clearly Obama intends to justify bringing up Charles Keating by tying McCain's abuse of power as a Senator in the 1980s to the anti-regulatory zeal he's shown throughout his career. It may be a wise precaution to insulate Obama from any allegations that he's stooping to the level of McCain and Palin, as long as that doesn't get in the way of telling the full story about the entire range of tawdry dealings between the McCains and Keating. The scandal of McCain and 4 other senators intervening with bank regulators to help quash the investigation of Keating's crooked bank is important and revealing about John McCain's character and credibility. But it's a scandal that operated on several levels.
McCain was in Keating's pocket not just because of his large campaign donations during all of McCain's elections. As the Arizona Republic revealed when the scandal broke, McCain tried to suppress information about the further connections he had to Keating: Cindy McCain was actually in business with Keating, and the McCains had repeatedly taken free vacations using Keating's jet.
McCain made a critical error.
He had adopted the blanket defense that Keating was a constituent and that he had every right to ask his senators for help. In attending the meetings, McCain said, he simply wanted to make sure that Keating was treated like any other constituent.
Keating was no ordinary constituent to McCain.
On Oct. 8, 1989, The Arizona Republic revealed that McCain's wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators.
The paper also reported that the McCains, sometimes accompanied by their daughter and baby-sitter, had made at least nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard the American Continental jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay.
McCain also did not pay Keating for some of the trips until years after they were taken, after he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln. Total cost: $13,433.
When the story broke, McCain did nothing to help himself.
"You're a liar," McCain said when a Republic reporter asked him about the business relationship between his wife and Keating.
"That's the spouse's involvement, you idiot," McCain said later in the same conversation. "You do understand English, don't you?"
He also belittled reporters when they asked about his wife's ties to Keating.
"It's up to you to find that out, kids."
There's no need for Democrats, while focusing on his anti-regulatory zeal, to go easy on John McCain about all these embarrassing details. It's a good thing for the public to be reminded of them – or learn about them for the first time – before we elect a new president. That's especially the case in as much as McCain has convinced many journalists that he bestowed absolution on himself for his own part in the Keating scandal.
And as Ben Smith points out, Obama is in fact taking the high road in striking back at McCain's attacks by releasing the Keating Bomb. It's not at all a matter of 'guilt by association' to raise the question of McCain's connections to Charles Keating.
It's guilt by guilt. McCain's problem isn't that he knew Keating in activities unconnected to his wrongdoing; it's that Keating, in the course of his wrondoing, gave McCain money and tried, with a bit of success, to use him to influence regulators.
If Obama were to join McCain in the game of guilt-by-association, it would look rather more like this statement by Paul Begala Sunday morning on Meet The Press.
I think Governor Palin here is making a strategic mistake. This guilt by association path is going to be trouble ultimately for the McCain campaign. You know, you can go back, I have written a book about McCain, I had a dozen researchers go through him, I didn’t even put this in the book. But John McCain sat on the board of a very right-wing organization, it was the U.S. Council for World Freedom, it was chaired by a guy named John Singlaub, who wound up involved in the Iran contra scandal. It was an ultra conservative, right-wing group. The Anti-Defamation League, in 1981 when McCain was on the board, said this about this organization. It was affiliated with the World Anti-Communist League – the parent organization – which ADL said “has increasingly become a gathering place, a forum, a point of contact for extremists, racists and anti-Semites.”
Now, that's not John McCain, I don't think he is that. But you know, the problem is that a lot of people know John McCain’s record better than Governor Palin. And he does not want to play guilt by association or this thing could blow up in his face.
Yes, it now looks like it will blow up.
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