So folks are of various minds about the Obama campaign's decision to unveil it's mini-documentary on the Keating 5 scandal. Does bringing up the scandal lower Obama to McCain's level, removing his advantage as the perceived "high road" candidate?
Look: Obama needs to be respond to Palin's "palling around with terrorists" crap and the McCain camp's promise that they're going to get dirty -- doing otherwise is a sign of weakness. They can't ignore McCain's speech today. But how they respond is important. They're not running commercials about Keating and they're not using it, that I've seen, in stump speeches, both of which are sticking to the campaign's successful economic message. Instead, Obama's people put together a website with a documentary and a lot of resources for people to take a look at, a striking contrast with the McCain attack ads that typically include a falsehood, a lot of dark imagery and scary music. Further, they're using it to strike a very timely economic note: McCain's emphasis on deregulation makes his current arguments about the financial crisis ring hollow.
But the target audience for this stuff is not yet the electorate at large. It's the media, high-information voters and the McCain campaign itself, and the message is: Don't get dirty, because we have laid the groundwork to hit back, Obama is not the only presidential candidate with seemingly shady characters in his background. It's already forced the McCain camp into one narrative error: While prior discussion of Keating 5 has been part of McCain's redemption story -- I made a mistake, and learned to be a maverick -- now they're arguing that McCain did nothing wrong. The inconsistency "raises questions," in that delightfully passive little cliche.
I expect that Obama will continue to focus on the economy as part of his major key strategy while this Keating 5 counter-point burbles along in minor key. The former is the most important thing he can do, but not doing the latter would be political malpractice.
--Tim Fernholz
