Obama campaign launches mini-documentary detailing McCain’s involvement in Savings & Loan scandal

After a weekend that saw John McCain’s top adviser, Greg Strimple, vow to spend the remaining days of the campaign stepping up personal attacks on Barack Obama, the Obama campaign — perhaps learning from John Kerry’s mistake in 2004, of not more aggressively responding (in defense or in kind) to the Swift Boat attack tactics — released a mini-documentary at noon today detailing McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five scandal.

Bloomberg reports on Strimple:

“We are very well-funded, and we are looking for a very aggressive last 30 days,” senior McCain adviser Greg Strimple told reporters yesterday. “We’re looking to turning the page on this financial crisis and getting back to discussing Mr. Obama’s liberal, aggressively liberal record and how he will be too risky for Americans.”

Obama’s campaign struck back today by releasing at noon today a 13-minute documentary about the scandal called “Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis” — available at KeatingEconomics.com, “along with background information that every voter should know.”

Obama campaign manager, David Plouffe, responded to supporters in email yesterday:

Over the weekend, John McCain’s top adviser announced their plan to stop engaging in a debate over the economy and “turn the page” to more direct, personal attacks on Barack Obama.

In the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to change the subject from the central question of this election. Perhaps because the policies McCain supported these past eight years and wants to continue are pretty hard to defend.

But it’s not just McCain’s role in the current crisis that they’re avoiding. The backward economic philosophy and culture of corruption that helped create the current crisis are looking more and more like the other major financial crisis of our time.

During the Savings & Loan crisis of the late ’80s and early ’90s, 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 and 23,000 investors lost their savings. Overall, the crisis required the federal government to bail out the savings of hundreds of thousands of families and ultimately cost American taxpayers $124 billion.

Sound familiar?

In that crisis, John McCain and his political patron, Charles Keating, played central roles that ultimately landed Keating in jail for fraud and McCain in front of the Senate Ethics Committee. 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.

PBS reported on the Keating Five scandal in 2006 in an article detailing a history of various Washington scandals:

In 1978, the Federal Bureau of Investigation embarked on a sting operation, labeled Abscam, in which agents posed as Middle Eastern businessmen offering bribes to senators and congressmen. The FBI targeted 31 government officials in total during the operation, including state officials in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Six congressmen, Democrats John Jenrette of South Carolina, Raymond Lederer of Pennsylvania, Michael Myers of Pennsylvania, John Murphy of New York and Frank Thompson of New Jersey, and Republican Richard Kelly of Florida, and one senator, Democrat Harrison Williams of New Jersey, were convicted of bribery and conspiracy charges in 1981.

Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania also was indicted but not prosecuted because he gave evidence against Murphy and Thompson. Only one lawmaker, Republican Sen. Larry Pressler of South Dakota, refused to take the bribe, saying at the time, “Wait a minute, what you are suggesting may be illegal.”

…

The Keating Five scandal from 1989 implicated five senators in another corruption probe. Democrats Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, Donald Riegle of Michigan, John Glenn of Ohio and Alan Cranston of California, and Republican John McCain of Arizona, were accused of strong-arming federal officials to back off their investigation of Charles Keating, former chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. In exchange, the senators reportedly received close to $1.3 million in campaign contributions.

The Senate Ethics Committee concluded that Glenn and McCain’s involvement in the scheme was minimal and dropped the charges against them. In August 1991, the committee ruled that the other three senators had acted improperly in interfering with the Federal Home Loan Banking Board’s investigation.

George W. Bush also brought up McCain’s involvement in the Keating scandal during the 2000 election primary season, and McCain himself said his involvement in the scandal “will probably be on my tombstone.”

We’ll know in under a month if the Keating Five scandal will cost McCain the White House for yet a second, and probably his last attempt.