×
"At noon Eastern on Monday, October 6th, we're releasing a 13-minute documentary about the scandal called 'Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis,'" says David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, over e-mail. "It will be available at KeatingEconomics.com, along with background information that every voter should know."13-minute documentaries aren't made in a morning. They've been holding this for awhile. Until they deemed it necessary. And then over the weekend, the McCain campaign decided it was time to elevate Ayers and Wright and dark suspicious about Muslim ties from e-mailed understudies to campaign stars. By Sunday night, the Obama campaign was previewing a 13-minute documentary on McCain's relationship with Charles Keating. And a web site detailing the links at more length. This isn't how they normally do attack ads. It's not how they normally do attacks. Which is the point. It's different. Bigger. This isn't an attack made for the air but an attack meant to dominate the new cycle. To ensure that McCain's invocation of Ayers, et al is paired with Obama's assault on Keating and thus folded into a fairly dry process story about the sharp and sadly negative turn the election is taking and that voters should ignore.Is it a good strategy? Maybe. The Obama campaign is doing something very smart and linking Keating not simply to McCain's bad judgment, but to the current financial crisis. Plouffe writes:
it's not just McCain's role in the current crisis that they're avoiding. The backward economic philosophy and culture of corruption that helped create the current crisis are looking more and more like the other major financial crisis of our time.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. 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.Sound familiar?In that crisis, John McCain and his political patron, Charles Keating, played central roles that ultimately landed Keating in jail for fraud and McCain in front of the Senate Ethics Committee. 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 campaign, in other words, has an argument as to relevance. And they've constructed their attack such that they don't have to stop talking about the economy to make it. But we'll see if they're able to keep control of their own message amidst the furor. The subtheme here is that John McCain is going to be very pissed off. Legendarily pissed off. It'll be interesting to see how that plays at tomorrow night's townhall debate...
