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Frankly, I was shocked to see this story so prominently placed in today's paper. By contrast, Palin's mention of Ayers did not generate it's own story. McCain blasted for 'Keating Five' roleAround 1991, the conventional wisdom in Arizona was that Sen. John McCain's involvement in the "Keating Five" scandal effectively had ended his presidential ambitions.
In the immediate aftermath of the Senate Ethics Committee's conclusion in February 1991 that McCain had shown "poor judgment" for intervening with federal thrift regulators on behalf of disgraced financier Charles H Keating Jr., even McCain's 1992 Senate re-election was in doubt.
But a chastened McCain salvaged his political career and transformed himself into a crusader for campaign-finance reform. Keating largely had been forgotten when McCain sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2000.
On Monday, the story roared back to life as a fresh liability for McCain.
As the struggling McCain campaign stepped up its hits on Democrat Barack Obama for his connections to a former leader of a radical terrorist group, Obama's campaign launched an all-out assault on McCain over his now-distant ties to Keating, a politically connected Arizona developer and McCain campaign contributor.
The slugging comes as McCain and Obama meet today in Nashville for the second of three debates. With 28 days until Election Day, McCain is sagging in the polls. Voters say Obama is more prepared to deal with the nation's economic crisis.
A new Web site, Keating Economics.com, features a 13-minute video linking McCain's activities with Keating during the savings-and-loan debacle of the late 1980s and the ongoing Wall Street financial meltdown. Keating headed the American Continental Corp., which acquired California-based Lincoln Savings and Loan in 1984.
"During the savings and loan crisis of the late '80s and early '90s, McCain's political favors and aggressive support for deregulation put him at the center of the fall of Lincoln Savings and Loan, one of the largest in the country. More than 23,000 investors lost their savings," David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, wrote in an e-mail to supporters.
"Overall, the savings and loan crisis required the federal government to bail out the savings of hundreds of thousands of families and ultimately cost American taxpayers $124 billion. . . . The McCain campaign has tried to avoid talking about the scandal, but with so many parallels to the current crisis, McCain's Keating history is relevant and voters deserve to know the facts - and see for themselves the pattern of poor judgment by John McCain."
The Obama attack came after the McCain camp increased its attacks on Obama's relationship with William Ayers, a former leader of the 1960s and early 1970s group called the Weather Underground Organization, or, more colloquially, "the Weathermen."
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain's running mate, in recent days has made several references to Obama "palling around" with a domestic terrorist. Obama's career intersected with Ayers at various times in Chicago between 1995 and 2005, but his campaign insists the two never were close. Obama has repudiated Ayers' past violence.<SNIP> DeConcini, a three-term senator who served from 1977 to 1995, disputed Dowd's claim.
DeConcini told The Republic that McCain should not have joined the other senators in meeting with the regulators because of his more complex relationship with Keating. The rest of the group didn't know that McCain and his family had vacationed at Keating's Bahamas retreat or that his wife and father-in-law had invested nearly $360,000 in a Keating development, said DeConcini, whose "aggressive conduct" was deemed "inappropriate" by the Ethics Committee.http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2008/10/07/20081007keating1007.html |
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