Obama Ad Attacks McCain on “Keating Five” Role
By Don | October 6, 2008
Now that the McCain campaign has stepped up the attacks on Barack Obama's questionable associates the Obama campaign has gone back to the "Keating Five" scandal in an effort to tarnish the republican nominee.
From ABC News" Jake Tapper.
On Monday the Obama campaign will start hitting Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on his role in the late 80s/early 90s Keating 5 scandal, despite previous indications by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill, made months ago, that the scandal was not "germane" to the presidency because McCain had apologized for his role.
Coming off two events -- Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin attacking Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., for his controversial associate William Ayers, and Wall Street's financial crisis -- the idea put forward by the Obama campaign is: ‘You want to discuss questionable associates, Sen. McCain? Let’s discuss questionable associates.’
In an email sent to supporters Sunday evening with the subject line "What they don't want to talk about," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe wrote that, "During the savings and loan crisis of the late '80s and early '90s," Plouffe wrote, "McCain's political favors and aggressive support for deregulation put him at the center of the fall of Lincoln Savings and Loan, one of the largest in the country. ...The McCain campaign has tried to avoid talking about the scandal, but with so many parallels to the current crisis, McCain's Keating history is relevant and voters deserve to know the facts -- and see for themselves the pattern of poor judgment by John McCain"
Monday at noon at the website "Keating Economics.com," the Obama campaign will launch a 13-minute film it is calling a “documentary” called "Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis."
A 35-second preview can be seen HERE.
The Democrats have managed thanks to the media to successfully pin the current economic problems on President Bush and thus John McCain though in reality it is the Democratic congress that sowed the seeds of this crisis. At this point attacking McCain for his involvement with the "Keating Five" probably won't do any more damage to McCain than the economic crisis already has. Once again instead of getting out in front of the story the GOP is letting the media and the Democrats control the agenda and the news cycle.
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It is called the “Keating Five” which consisted of 4 Democrats and 1 Republican - John McCain - and the Democrat Special Investigator/Prosecutor that investigated the scandal, came down on all 4 Democrats and said that McCain should be completely exonerated - as he was not part of the problem. And THAT is Obama’s answer to all the corruption and slime he is a part of regularly? Sad part is the MSM will make it look like McCain is the bad guy, and it is all lies.
From Jared Bernstein:
“About a year ago, I had a memorable chat with a high-ranking Republican operative. The presidential primaries were revving up, and he asked me which Republican candidate I feared the most. Without hesitating, I answered McCain.
“My rationale was simple. While he was increasingly out-of-step with the public on the war, so were all the other Republican candidates. But unlike them, McCain had repeatedly stood up to his party on matters economic, especially the Bush tax cuts, and he did so with resonant language.
“In 2001, when the richest one percent of households held 18% of all income, he said he could not ‘in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle-class Americans.’
“In 2003, when we had gone through a recession, were waging an expensive war, and the federal budget had flipped from surplus to deficit, he voted against another round of tax cuts for the wealthiest, this time arguing that ‘At a time of war, at a time of economic stagnation, at a time of rising national debt…one might expect our national leaders to pursue policies calling for shared sacrifice to achieve shared benefits. Regrettably, that is not the case.’
“The most recent data show that in 2006, 23% of all income is held by the richest 1%, the highest level on record but for one year: 1928. Spending on the war has not abated, and the budget deficit is on the rise. Middle-class Americans, who allegedly weighed so heavily on McCain’s conscience circa 2001, are much more squeezed now than they were then.
“The economy is surely in recession. Financial markets are deeply screwed up, and on Friday we learned that the job market contracted by another 159,000 last month, the ninth month of consecutive job losses.
“In other words, if the Bush tax cuts didn’t make sense in 2001 and 2003, they make a whole lot less sense now.
“Yet McCain doesn’t merely want to extend these cuts forever. He wants to expand them dramatically, by cutting the corporate tax rate by about a third, at the cost of $735 billion over 10 years, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center (TPC). As Biden effectively emphasized in last week’s debate, that move delivers $4 billion in annual tax cuts to the Exxon-Mobil’s of the world.
“What happened? How does McCain’s erstwhile good conscience countenance this policy? The answer, or at least the spin, was revealed to me a few weeks ago in a debate I had with his top economist, Doug Holtz-Eakin. When I pointed out that these cuts do nothing to help the middle class, while needlessly raining more wealth on the ‘haves,’ Doug disagreed. Based on the fairy dust of supply-side, trickle-down economics, he asserted that these cuts would lead to more jobs and income for middle-class families. Contrary to McCain’s position a few years back, the campaign now frames a cut in corporate taxation as their middle-class tax cut.
”(Fact check: Data from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office show that middle class people get a mere 3% of their income from corporate sources, compared to 88% for the top fifth, and about 60% for the top 1%. In our new State of Working America, we show that an important factor driving the almost unprecedented level of inequality right now is the double whammy of a) the growth of corporate income, like dividends and capital gains, versus labor market income, i.e., earnings, and b) the increased concentration of corporate income among the richest households.)”
—Even if you put the Keating Five issue aside, there are plenty of reasons to be uneasy at McCain’s economic policies.
For interested readers: over at the Economist, the majority of economic thinkers surveyed favor Obama’s plan:
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12342127
This is what matters now.
Oh great, now the economists at the Economist now want to radicalize our economy like Europe’s. Makes sense to me, their economy has been screwed ever since they socialized it, so hey, that doesn’t work, so lets do it here. Why can’t we just have the economy we had, before greed in corporate HQs gloomed onto it to squeeze what they could and before the Democrats/Socialists got their PC noses into it and socially meddled in it?
Before these American traitors screwed it the American economy was the envy of the entire world; so now lets screw it some more, and let the socialists completely destroy it. And Bush sleeps while on his watch these traitors hurt all Americans, and at the Economist, they want to hurt us more?
”... came down on all 4 Democrats and said that McCain should be completely exonerated ...”
Not exactly. McCain and John Glenn were more or less exonerated: i.e., there was no wrongdoing, just stupidity in the judgment of the Ethics Committee. The other 3 Democrats resigned; Glenn didn’t run for re-election.
Goodis:
The spin in your quotes above is tremendous. It treats economics and wealth as a zero-sum game. It is not!
e.g., ”... The most recent data show that in 2006, 23% of all income is held by the richest 1% ...”
In spin-less language, this means that the wealthiest 1% of Americans CREATED 23% of GDP. That’s damn good production if you ask me.
The rest of the “income gap” crap is just that. The fact is that the poverty level (i.e., the amount of income below which is defined as poverty) has INCREASED at an average yearly rate of around 3.5% for the last 40 years or so. Granted there were several years there in Johnson, Nixon and Carter years where inflation was significantly higher than that, but I’m quoting the annual average increase over those 40 years.
The poor aren’t getting poorer. Everybody is getting richer. Stick that in your altruist pipe and smoke it. :D
“The other 3 Democrats resigned; Glenn didn’t run for re-election. ” -my previous post
That was my recollection from having read the wikipedia article during the run-up to the primaries. The article now says all 5 served out their terms, but only Glenn and McCain stood for re-election.
It also says:
”... After a lengthy investigation, the Senate Ethics Committee determined in 1991 that Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, and Donald Riegle had substantially and improperly interfered with the FHLBB in its investigation of Lincoln Savings, with Cranston receiving a formal reprimand. Senators John Glenn and John McCain were cleared of having acted improperly but were criticized for having exercised “poor judgment”. ...”
I seem to recall it stated that the 3 other than McCain and Glenn were all reprimanded.
Crap! Either my memory is short-circuiting, or the wikipedians have “cleaned” the article up. The talk page shows a bunch of edits and comments from today, but I can’t get an indication of what was changed since I read it last.
While I like wikipedia and find most of the articles useful and factual, it pays to take articles about current controversial people, especially politicians, with a grain of salt and look for other sources to confirm or refute.
“In spin-less language, this means that the wealthiest 1% of Americans CREATED 23% of GDP.”
Right. Thanks for the active verb. It was “created” precisely on the backs of the middle class, which a Friedmanite economy always is.
“The poor aren’t getting poorer. Everybody is getting richer.” Man, you must be voting for McCain—you have the same goofy ideas about the economy, not to mention people’s place in it. In the intervening time prices have RISEN. Meaning that a gap still exists. If your logic worked, the poor would be tooling around in Escalades.
And Jack, our economy wasn’t transformed by Democrats or Socialists (your ire is misplaced here; this isn’t part of a culture war)—it was transformed by the ideas of Milton Friedman. The free market was created by massive deregulation, cuts in social spending, and privatization. Compare what’s happening now to what happened in Chile, Argentina, Brazil or Bolivia, where Friedman’s ideas were allowed to really run wild. In Chile alone, you saw high unemployment and rapid inflation under Pinochet, along with a publically-funded bailout when the economy finally crashed. The same pattern can be seen in nearly every economy in the Southern Cone. A small tier of society gets rich really fast; corporations buy up everything in sight; the rest are left to suffer until the situation crashes—and then must pay their oppressors’ debt. Does any of this sound familiar?
Here in America, notice what Republicans tried to push in the bailout package: even more deregulation, which helped cause this crisis in the first place. McCain’s economic policies will follow the very same Friedmanite scheme under Phil Gramm. Expect more of this insanity if they get into office.
This isn’t a culture war. It’s an economic one. But its terms have been crafted into a debate about culture. As long as we keep arguing about values, we’re going to miss this very central problem.
David, I agree this is an economic war, and believe me if you knew my circumstances over the years, you would understand that I agree that big greedy business is out of control, and in the 70s there was sufficient control over capitalism without adding socialism to the mix. Controlling big business is one thing, but leaving them out of control WHILE in cahoots with them is another, especially when the cahooting politicians are also getting rich and imposing socialism on the economy while they do it.
And that is where the culture war comes in, because I disagree with you, as this is ALSO a culture war. There was a distinct American culture that no longer exists - and the nation is poorer for it - perhaps it needed changes, I will not disagree, but the changes brought have placed groups over other groups, giving them what others are not allowed. Holding Blacks and other groups down was wrong, but every single change has been equally wrong in the way it was accomplished, and this divide and conquer attitude mentality IS what has put us at each others throats.
We are a bunch of warring fragments - all fighting each other, and that aids those that would conquer us, the socialists, the politicians, and the government in general. There was a time we almost eliminated a caste structure in America. There will always be the very very rich, but besides that the middle class was so large that almost all other Americans were all the same and equal and we did not hate each other - it had its problems, and those in the poorer class, many could see that they could rise if they wished, some were held back which I addressed, and that required change, but we had come a long ways towards the “Great Society” and then the socialists got ahold of the culture and American life - and changed it “their” way, and their way has made a real cultural mess, and the greedy got ahold of the economy and allowed greed to go unabated, and the socialists even cahooted. lol They cahooted because they have their eyes on controlling that also, and because Big Business could not control themselves, as they were controlled at an earlier time by us, they got out of control and now we risk that being controlled by the socialists as they control our culture. And that will be a mess also, and certain people will pay heavily for that, and I just happen to be one that falls it seems always into that group.
We are in a War for the very heart of America - and so far we have “ALL” lost, except for those that would control us.
October 6 at 10:58 am | #1 | Link
HA! Obama & Associates are calling out McCain on questionable acquaintances? I think McCain should take him up on this, and bring up Frank Marshall Davis, Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers, and Jeremiah Wright. I think if McCain (or anyone) were to broadcast and inform the American people of Obama’s “acquaintances”, the Obama campaign would be destroyed, especially if people actually researched a little bit on their candidate’s background.