Echoing the Keating Five Message

For the last few weeks, I've been publishing newspaper columns [1], making television appearances [2] and writing blog posts [3] pointing out that John McCain's formative economic experience was intimidating federal regulators on behalf of banking executive Charles Keating, during the eponymous Keating Five scandal. Many others have been doing the same and now - finally - the Obama campaign is following suit [4]:

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.

Pushing back against 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.

This is great news. Though the Politico tries to draw an equivalency between talking about McCain's Keating Five record and the GOP trying to liken Obama to a terrorist sympathizer [5], there is no equivalency at all.

While the attacks on Obama are absurd extrapolations, it is undeniable that McCain was formally rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for his involvement in a financial scandal most analagous to today's economic crisis.

While both Obama and McCain bowed down to Wall Street in supporting the recent bailout bill, only one of them - McCain - has displayed a zealous fervor for deregulation, and the Keating Five scandal is about as a good an example of that fervor as there can be.

The progressive movement needs to echo Obama's Keating Five message, because we can expect a lot of media pushback. Just watch this recent clip of me on Fox News to see what I mean:

The media will do whatever it can to pretend McCain wasn't formally rebuked when, in fact, that's part of the historical record [3]. We have to fight through the inevitable media blowback and make sure as many Americans as possible know that record.