Engaging on Keating

I'd always thought McCain's great strength in defending the Keating affair was that he'd acknolwedged making a huge mistake, and spent his career repenting by recasting himself as a reformer.

So when his campaign puts his lawyer on the line with reporters to contest the details of a congressional inquiry that, largely, let McCain off the hook, doesn't that cloud the sin-confession-atonement dynamic a bit?

In Halperin's account, McCain lawyer John Dowd described McCain's "former relationship with Charles Keating as 'social friends,'" and called the situation a "classic political smear job on John."

Dowd also "thinks that the committee went too far in suggesting that McCain’s intervention with regulators was poor judgment," Halperin writes.

But if so, what's this giant mistake that transformed McCain into a reformer?