Obama Claps Back With Keating Five

Created: October 06, 2008 11:38 | Last updated: July 31, 2020 00:00

When the McCain campaign announced this weekend that it would start attacking Sen. Barack Obama via guilt by association, peddling smears about people he barely knows, I thought the tack would lead to the Keating Five. But I didn’t know it would happen this quickly.

The Obama campaign swung into action immediately. By the time the Sunday news shows were taping, Democratic surrogates were hitting McCain with opposition research on his associations with extremist, racist groups (Begala) and the Keating Five (Emanuel). Today, of course, camp Obama is pushing a new Keating Economics website, which begins streaming a documentary about McCain’s Keating problem at noon.

Obama’s campaign has never pushed the Keating button before, so this attack carries an original punch–and is clearly salient given the current financial crisis. Because the scandal involved McCain’s actions in public service, it is more likely to arise during the remaining two debates.

McCain’s dredging up of Bill Ayers, in contrast, is not only old news but has no link to anything Obama has done in public life. Patrick Ruffini, a Republican operative who worked on Bush’s reelection campaign, said today that McCain’s Ayers attacks are so old that airing them now “appears desperate.”

Desperate and risky — given the corrupt skeletons in McCain’s closet.

For more on what The Keating Five says about McCain’s candidacy, check out “Did McCain Learn From the S&L Crisis,” a September TWI article by John Dougherty.