John McCain's race isn't the only one today. Barack Obama's offensive is now launching an strain to invoke up an unsavory part of the Republican nominee's past, specifically Charles Keating and the Keating Five scandal. The Obama camp-ground has launched a supplementary Web site, , and a different documentary on the relation between the two, which can be viewed at the bottom of this post. Both are intended to jog the memory voters of the Savings and Loan blot of the 1980s, in which Keating -- a contributor to McCain -- was a cardinal player.
The Keating Five was a company of senators (McCain and four Democrats) accused of tough to improperly go with regulators on the banker's behalf. McCain was time cleared by the Senate Ethics Committee, but was criticized for showing "poor judgment." The smirch is an prominent separate way of the McCain legend, presumably the consideration in his administrative dash that prompted him to become a reformer and "maverick." Interestingly, though, in reacting to Democratic attacks on Monday, his bivouac pushed back hard, and his quondam direction said that the analysis actions was "a venerable public smear job on John" and that he didn't accede the Ethics Committee's deposition about McCain's judgment.
Whether this policy of attack will ultimately benefit Obama remains an liable question. I see to to agree with the Atlantic's and The New Republic's , both of whom muse the Obama encamp might have better ways to put in its time. On the one hand, it's winsome to say that Obama should give McCain a decorum of his own medicine, and not make off attacks based on his associations with Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright fibbing down. On the other hand, Obama has been dominating McCain recently because of the commercial crisis.
The Keating black mark does have the perk of being kindred to the economy, but still -- on yet another ill-tempered day for the market, the Obama ostentatious hasn't been spending its while talking about an issue that's a proven winner. As Zengerle writes: Obama has a corporeal chance to occupied in McCain's Ayers gambit and use it as yet another archetype of McCain being out of touch. Obama could picture one of those one- or two-minute ads that show him speaking right away to the camera and saying something like, "On a time when we appear to be teetering on the edge of a global slump and people are worried about their economic futures, John McCain wants to 'turn the page' and rubbish about the 40-year-old actions of a gazabo whom I just distinguish and whose actions I've deemed despicable…" and then swivel to a discussion of his economic plan. Such an ad would reenforce the feature that's most notable Obama from McCain during the monetary crisis: Obama's sober, genuine side. Why not resume to play that up?
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