POLITICO EXCLUSIVE: OBAMA TO HIT McCAIN ON "KEATING FIVE" SCANDAL

It's about time!

Nice guys finish LAST.

The Obama campaign is going to launch an attack on John McCain and his connections to the "Keating Five" savings and loan scandal that sent hundreds of people to the poor house.

Exclusive: Obama to hit McCain on Keating Five

By: Mike Allen October 5, 2008 11:28 PM EST
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14302.html

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Monday will launch a multimedia campaign to draw attention to the involvement of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the “Keating Five” savings-and-loan scandal of 1989-91, which blemished McCain’s public image and set him on his course as a self-styled reformer.Retaliating for what it calls McCain's “guilt-by-association” tactics, the Obama campaign is e-mailing millions of supporters a link to a website, KeatingEconomics.com, which will have a 13-minute documentary on the scandal beginning at noon Eastern time on Monday.

The overnight e-mails urge recipients to pass the link on to friends.The Obama campaign, including its surrogates appearing on radio and television, will argue that the deregulatory fervor that caused massive, cascading savings-and-loan collapses in the late ‘80s was pursued by McCain throughout his career, and helped cause the current credit crisis.

Obama-Biden communications director Dan Pfeiffer said: “While John McCain may want to turn the page on his erratic response to the current economic crisis, we think voters will find his involvement in a similar crisis to be particularly interesting. His involvement with Keating is a window into McCain’s economic past, present, and future.”

Obama’s offensive comes after McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, spent two days telling voters, donors and reporters that Obama showed poor judgment in his relationship with the former radical William Ayers. McCain’s campaign has vowed to make a major issue of Obama’s Chicago relationships in coming days, with a senior McCain official telling Politico that they are “the vehicle that allows us to question Obama’s truthfulness about his past and his plans for the future.”

The McCain campaign also plans to invoke money launderer Tony Rezko. Officials say they will not bring up Obama's former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, because McCain has forbade his campaign from using that as an attack. But the officials said outside groups supporting McCain might highlight Wright.

Responding to the Keating blast from the past, a Republican official said the Obama team seemed "frantic" at "the mere mention of the word 'Ayers.'"

“The fact that the Obama team is recycling this old garbage 24 hours after Bill Ayers entered the race is a testament to how worried the Obama camp is of an unfettered airing of his associations," the official said. "Obama is a clever enough politician to know that his unexplored relationships with terrorists and felons are a serious liability in a race this close.”