Predictable: Team Obama launches “Keating Five” offensive against McCain

Continuing to prove that they’re hell bent on holding the “most dishonest campaign in modern history” title for decades to come, Team Obama has launched a 13 minute web-vid on McCain’s “role” in the Keating Five scandal. The Politico reports:

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Monday is launching 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.

Pushing back against what it calls McCain’s “guilt-by-association” tactics, the Obama campaign overnight began 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 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 Γ’β‚¬Λœ80s 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.”

This isn’t exactly a complete surprise considering, as Mary Katharine Ham points out, earlier this year Obama said every piece of a candidate’s public record is “fair game.” Except for his record, of course.

Karl at Patterico’s blog points out just how dishonest this latest attack from Team Obama is, and makes a strong point at the end that if McCain doesn’t hit back and hit back hard at Obama on his and his party’s role in enabling the economic crisis that has forced Congress to pass a bailout bill, then he doesn’t deserve to win. I agree. The facts about Democrats and how they turned a blind eye to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are too important to gloss over with inflated rhetoric about “greed” and slams on the free market that are undeserved. The McCain campaign released an ad a week or so ago that hinted around as to the Democrats’ role, mentioning Obama’s name, but it didn’t go into very much detail about Obama’s role nor Dodd’s and Frank’s.

Fortunately, as Ed Morrissey writes here, there is a 527 group hitting Obama and Democrats on this very issue. Hopefully they’ve got the resources to repeatedly air this ad in every battleground state from now until the election.

The RNC is not shying away from this issue, either, as they are running a minute and a half web-based ad going off on Democrats for their significant head-in-sand-role in the years leading up to the FM/FM collapse. Too bad they haven’t condensed it to 30 seconds and put it on TV.

With one month left before the election, it’s time for McCain to put up or shut up. Either he wants to win or he doesn’t. He’s allowed Obama to routinely blame him for the economic crisis and it’s time McCain stops trying to be “bipartisan” and set the freaking record straight. Not only does this election depend on it, but the wavering confidence of the American people in the free market depends on it, too.

Read more, via Memeo.

Related: JammieWearingFool posts about how the liberal LAT has launched its own attack on McCain this morning … on his military record, while Gateway Pundit writes about how the LAT is covering for the Chosen One by refusing to publish a video before the election of Obama praising a former PLO operative by the name of Rashid Khalidi. Read more about Kalidi here.

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