Obama hits McCain with ‘Keating 5′ documentary

The presidential campaign of Barack Obama is responding to negative attacks by John McCain with a 13-minute mini-documentary detailing McCain’s past as one of the “Keating 5,” highlighting an unsavory aspect of McCain’s past in a way that keeps the focus on the economy.

The documentary, entitled “Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis,” is about the five U.S. senators, including McCain, who worked to reduce regulations on the savings and loan industry in the late 1980s. That industry later collapsed, much like investment banks on Wall Street today, and had to be bailed out to the tune of $124 billion by the federal government. The efforts to reduce regulations on the savings and loan industry were attributed to the close relationships that McCain and the other senators had with Charles Keating, who was chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. McCain ultimately received a reprimand from the Senate Ethics Committee for his role in the debacle.

The video features William Black, the former deputy director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board at the time. Black was interviewed extensively by John Dougherty at the Washington Independent for a piece examining McCain’s approach, or lack thereof, to regulation. Black told Dougherty that McCain was opposed to regulation then, and by all indications continues to hold the same position today:

McCain was elected to the House in 1982, and served two terms before moving on to the Senate in 1986. “McCain was very much in favor of accounting forbearance — to game the accounting system,” Black said. “That was his position in 1983. And here we are 25 years later. And he’s learned nothing.”

Black asserts that McCain’s behavior remains unchanged because of McCain’s call last March for a meeting of the nation’s top accountants to relax accounting rules that would allow financial institutions to delay accounting for the decline in value of assets.

The Obama campaign released the Keating 5 video to counter a new strategy by the McCain campaign to go negative in the coming month, primarily by calling into question Obama’s judgment regarding people he associates with.

Vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin kicked off the theme over the weekend at campaign stops, accusing Obama of “palling around with terrorists” because he’s acquainted with fellow Chicago resident Bill Ayers, a 1960s radical who founded a notorious group called the Weathermen. Palin went on to say that Obama isn’t “a man who sees America like you and I see America.”

New Mexico’s own Heather Wilson echoed these themes on Sunday morning during her appearance on the CBS program “Face the Nation,” when she suggested Obama was unpatriotic for holding a critical view of the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

Palin’s comments elicited a rare commentary piece by Associated Press Editor Douglass K. Daniel, who said they had a “racially tinged subtext”:

But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee “palling around” with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn’t see their America?

In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers’ day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.

Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as “not like us” is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.

Republican strategists, however, say it’s perfectly reasonable to question the people whom Obama has been associated with over the years.