Barack Obama Pulls the Keating Five Card

Barack Obama, stung by criticisms by the John McCain Campaign about his relationship with former terrorist William Ayers, has decided to go negative in turn. The Obama Campaign is starting to hit back with the Keating Five Scandal.

The Keating Five Scandal was a savings and loan scandal in the late 1980s in which five Senators, Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, Donald Riegle, John Glenn, and John McCain were accused of having improperly intervened in the case of Charles Keating, chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. Keating, whose Lincoln Savings had collapsed at the dcost of two billion dollars to the government, was accused of defrauding bondholders and was under investigation by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board.

Eventually Charles Keating was convicted of fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy. Meanwhile, after a long investigation, the Senate Ethics Committee determined that Senators Cranston, DeConcini and Riegal had improperly interfered with the investigation of Lincoln Savings and gave Senator Cranston a reprimand. John Glenn and John McCain were cleared of all wrong doing, but were told that they "exercised poor judgment" in meeting with bank regulators on behalf of Keating.

The Keating Five experience, for John McCain, was a searing one and helped to motivate him to dedicate his Senate career to reform, of campaign finance laws and of the way the Senate deals with earmarks, i.e. pork barrel spending.

Nevertheless, the Obama Campaign seems to feel that the similarities between the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and the current liquidity crisis are too similar not to try to exploit. Barack Obama seems to have prospered so far from the liquidity crisis; he has pulled comfortably ahead in most polls as a result.