General

Obama Fights Fire With Keating 5

Filed under: John McCain, 2008 President, Investigations

The Corner:

The Obama campaign’s response to the question appears to be to raise John McCain’s connection to the Keating Five scandal. It is by no means out of bounds to raise the issue. McCain received campaign funds from Keating, his wife’s company had been involved in investment ventures with him, and he once met with federal regulators about Keating’s bank - though the Senate Ethics Committee found that unlike three other senators involved in the scandal, “Senator McCain’s actions were not improper.” The committee said only that he had exercised bad judgment by being involved with Keating at all and not seeing what others were doing. In fact, Bob Bennett, who was the Democratic lawyer selected by the committee to investigate the Keating Five, says in his book that he recommended that McCain’s name be dropped from the investigation because there was no evidence against him but, for political reasons (the other Senators were all Democrats), McCain’s name was left on the list.

McCain’s response to that scandal should certainly be compared with Obama’s Ayers explanations. McCain has spoken and written about every detail of the Keating mess, has expressed open contrition for allowing himself to be drawn into it even tangentially, and devoted years of his career to combating corruption as a result. He even badly overreacted and pushed for vastly excessive regulation of campaign financing. He has said (in a book in which he details his and others’ actions in the matter) that merely the appearance of impropriety involved makes his involvement with Keating “the worst mistake of my life.”

Anyone paying attention and following politics knew this was going to come up. The Obama campaign even had a 13 minute documentary and a website ready to go. Wow were they thinking ahead or what? (end snark). McCain hasn’t had a lot of breaks, but flushing this issue out now is one of them. It’s just not going to dominate the news cycle in the middle of the 1929 crash part II. Not that that helps McCain either, but take the breaks as they come!

Oh and on the Keating five, yes McCain was one of them, definitely an issue an informed voter should know about. But it was investigated by a Democratic congress and McCain came out surprisingly well and spent the next part of his career making amends and leading a reform agenda on campaign finance, as the article above points out. The documentary linked to here is good as propaganda but the Wikipedia article has the basic facts you need to know and won’t take 13 minutes of your life.

 

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