Obama digs up Keating Five corpse

I just received the latest email from the Obama campaign and, as they promised, it’s about the two-decades old Keating scandal (click it to read the whole thing);

That’s all they have. I remember getting chastised on LGF and Ace for mentioning that they would drag out that corpse. In fact, I suspect it’s why so many Democrats supported McCain in the 2000 primaries – because he was vulnerable on the Keating Five issue.

Months ago, it looked like Obama could stay above the fight and avoid bringing up that non-event in Congressional history, well, non-event as far as McCain is concerned. Here’s the history from Bloomberg;

During his first Senate term, Arizona senator McCain and four Democrats faced accusations of improperly intervening with federal regulators on behalf of former savings-and-loan executive Charles Keating in the 1980s savings-and-loan industry collapse. The five senators took contributions from the Arizona businessman and while the Senate Ethics Committee reprimanded McCain, it cleared him of wrongdoing.

Ethics Committee Finding

The Senate Ethics Committee, chaired by the late Alabama Democrat Howell Heflin, ultimately found that McCain had “exercised poor judgment.” Since then McCain has worked to reach across the aisle on legislation to strengthen ethics rules and on other issues such as immigration, where he formed an alliance with Massachusetts Democratic Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

The Democrat controlled Congress cleared McCain of wrong-doing. Hmmmm.

And who were the “Keating Five”?

I wonder what that (D-**) means after the names of the other four?

Obama complains that McCain started the mud-slinging, but it actually began with Clinton last Spring. If Obama had answered quests then, Palin wouldn’t be asking them now. And David Plouffe of the Obama campaign has been slinging mud in emails since I started subscribing to their emails.

Other Obama surrogates like Wesley Clark have questioned McCain’s fitness to be commander-in-chief because of his imprisonment at the hands of the North Vietnamese. For the first few weeks of the Obama vs. mcCain campaign, Obama claimed, falsely, that McCain wanted the war in Iraq to continue for a hundred years. Entire ads were made because John McCain didn’t know how many houses he owned.

Is that a campaign that focuses on issues?

They complain that they want to talk about issues, yet when the economic problems hit the country, Obama kept campaiging While McCain stopped campaigning and came to Washington to do the job he’s paid to do. But since Obama hasn’t bothered to do his job since he came to the US Senate, why should he start now?

This is the change we’ve been waiting for, I suppose.

Category: Politics