The Keating Card


Either the Obama campaign works extremely fast or they’ve had this one in their pocket for awhile. At 11 a.m., the campaign will release a 13-minute “documentary” called Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis. The Obama campaign has started a companion website called KeatingEconomics.com.

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe wrote this (in part) in an e-mail to supporters:

Over the weekend, John McCain’s top adviser announced their plan to stop engaging in a debate over the economy and ‘turn the page’ to more direct, personal attacks on Barack Obama.

In the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to change the subject from the central question of this election. Perhaps because the policies McCain supported these past eight years and wants to continue are pretty hard to defend.

But it’s not just McCain’s role in the current crisis that they’re avoiding. The backward economic philosophy and culture of corruption that helped create the current crisis are looking more and more like the other major financial crisis of our time.

During the savings and loan crisis of the late ’80s and early ’90s, McCain’s political favors and aggressive support for deregulation put him at the center of the fall of Lincoln Savings and Loan, one of the largest in the country. More than 23,000 investors lost their savings. Overall, the savings and loan crisis required the federal government to bail out the savings of hundreds of thousands of families and ultimately cost American taxpayers $124 billion.

Sound familiar?

In that crisis, John McCain and his political patron, Charles Keating, played central roles that ultimately landed Keating in jail for fraud and McCain in front of the Senate Ethics Committee. The McCain campaign has tried to avoid talking about the scandal, but with so many parallels to the current crisis, McCain’s Keating history is relevant and voters deserve to know the facts - and see for themselves the pattern of poor judgment by John McCain.

So at noon Eastern on Monday, October 6th, we’re releasing a 13-minute documentary about the scandal called ” along with background information that every voter should know.

The point of the film and the web site is that John McCain still hasn’t learned his lesson.

And this time, McCain’s bankrupt economic philosophy has put our economy at the brink of collapse and put millions of Americans at risk of losing their homes.

It’s no wonder John McCain would rather spend the last month of this election smearing Barack’s character instead of talking about the top priority issue for voters.

One response: “If Barack Obama is so outraged at John McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five scandal, why is John Glenn, another Keating Five member, doing surrogate work for Obama?”

Another: “In the eyes of many, McCain has atoned for his mistakes with the Keating Five by becoming a fierce crusader on ethics, going so far as to push through a campaign finance bill that many members of his party view as unforgivable and an abomination of the First Amendment.”

Posted in Fake Pols, Presidential Poop, Punditocracy   Tagged: Barack Obama, David Plouffe, John Glenn, John McCain, Keating Five   
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