A good portion of the Left has been begging Obama to satisfy their hunger for “red meat” by bringing up the Keating 5. While it would be gratifying to watch McCain relive his biggest political embarrassment, next to getting punked by George W. in 2000, until recently it could have been extremely dangerous for Obama to invoke it.
Democrats want to use the Keating 5 scandal to attack McCain’s character and call into question his ethical center. In any other election, this would be fair and reasonable, but McCain is probably immune to the Keating virus. He has already survived by being re-elected to the senate three times (!) since the scandal broke. He only received a slap on the wrist from the Senate Ethics Committee, he confessed his mistakes and begged the voters of Arizona for their forgiveness, and they forgave him three times over.
As a character assault, the Keating 5 provides little traction for Democrats. McCain knows this. He is at his best when the political climate allows him to be pugnacious and confrontational, and bringing up the K5 would give McCain the freedom to dominate the news cycle with Reverend Wright, Tony Rezko, and William Ayers, rather than addressing our current economic crisis.
McCain would win the game of character assassination because these attacks play off the racial stereotypes that blacks are militant, untrustworthy, and violent. Wright and Ayers are especially damaging because they allow Obama to be seen as a radical. And, in Middle America, radicals with black skin are far more frightening than criminals with white collars.
That is why McCain has recently been trying to bait Obama, daring him to bring up the Keating mess. When Obama briefly mentioned the Savings and Loan crisis of the 80’s in his comments about the current crisis, McCain released an ad, basically a warning shot, that tries to connect Obama to the disgraced former CEO of Fannie Mae, Frank Raines. There is no connection between Obama and Raines other than their skin color (well, Raines is more amber hued, while Obama is a burnt cedar). McCain most recent ad features Rezko and Daley, Jones, and Blagojevich (three dudes no one has heard of outside of Illinois). Count them up; that’s five, The Obama 5.
Race.
Race is what ended McCain’s 2000 presidential bid, not the Keating 5. The Rove rumor that McCain fathered a child with a black prostitute didn’t sit well with the voters of South Carolina. Race is why Keating was potentially off limits for Obama.
I say ‘was’ because the current meltdown has given the Keating 5 a new relevance, and made market regulation sexy again. Democrats want to show McCain looking scared for his life during those senate hearings, with his bad comb-over flopping around, but they need to forget about the sensational aspects of the scandal and focus on the fact that John McCain is a puppet of deregulators. Aggressive deregulation led to the S&L crisis and John McCain’s Keating problem, and it has led to the mortgage crisis and John McCain’s Phil Gramm problem. Why is it that whenever our economy is driven over a cliff John McCain is in the passenger’s seat?
Wisely, Obama has resisted the Left’s cravings for the red meat of personal attacks, and has given them the tofu of regulation instead. Eat it. Tofu is good for you.
TAGS: 2000, attack, economy, election, free, John McCain, mccain, NSA, obama, political, Race, war
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September 24th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Yes! Mr. Harrison nails it again, as does Obama. Tofu is good for you (so funny) and we can still be the first to cross the finish line minus the bloody animal carcass that is right wing politics. It’s moments like these, when Barack is able to maintain his calm and cool sense about him, that reassure me (like I needed it) that we have made the right decision with Barack Obama. A fucking class act, that one.