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The McCain campaign is doing their best to turn the story about the leader of Obama’s VP search committee, Jim Johnson receiving a mortgage loan from Countrywide into a major scandal. The Obama campaign called McCain’s huffing and puffing, “an overblown story about what appear to be completely above-board transactions.”

The McCain campaign didn’t like this so they put out a follow up statement, “There is nothing ‘overblown and irrelevant’ about millions of Americans facing foreclosure and Barack Obama entrusting his most important decision as a presidential candidate to a man who has accepted millions in special loans from a subprime mortgage lender. The Obama campaign’s reaction is even more appalling considering that they were the first to criticize the Clinton campaign for ties to Countrywide and subprime lenders. It might be ‘overblown’ to ask that Barack Obama’s actions match his rhetoric. Apparently, fixing the housing crisis begins with the Obama campaign.”

Through spokesperson Tommy Vietor the Obama camp called McCain a hypocrite, “It’s the height of hypocrisy for the McCain campaign to try and make this an issue when John Green, one of John McCain’s top advisors, lobbied for Ameriquest, which was one of the nation’s largest subprime lenders and a key player in the mortgage crisis. As President, Senator Obama will crack down on fraudulent lenders and bring real relief to Americans struggling in the grip of the housing crisis, the kind of change that works for the American people.”

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It seems that the McCain campaign is grasping at straws here. They are using what appears to have been a legal loan to one of Obama’s advisors to question his character. This criticism is coming from a campaign that barely has a passing interest in the mortgage crisis.

It is also a campaign whose candidate first suggested that the government do nothing and let the market work itself out, so it is hard to take John McCain seriously as a defender of the millions of homeowners who are either at risk, or have already lost their homes. Has the McCain campaign already gotten desperate to take Obama down?

You can read the McCain camp’s statement right here.

You can read the Obama camp’s reply here.