The Keating 5 Expose

Keating 5 Expose: Monday at Noon

Straight after Karl Rove’s heart: Here is a website from the Obama campaign that will be posting a documentry on the Keating 5 tomorrow.  If you go to the website, review it, and then pause and think about it – the Obama campaign didn’t put this together in five minutes.  It’s taken some planning.  I’ve heard the term rope-a-dope several times tonight on different strategies within the Obama campaign.  Did they choreograph all this over the last month?  Wow – talk about staying in front of issues!  I suspected they’d be ready for McCain – but not THIS ready.  It’s like McCain walked right into their trap.

I do caveat though – they need to be careful.  What they don’t need is to look like the aggressor and give McCain ammo to say that Obama doesn’t want to talk about the issues.  That could sinificantly hurt them, if they don’t play this right.

http://www.keatingeconomics.com/

Quick Hit of the Night #2 – McCain’s Nasty Associations

There is a lot of very interesting news out there right now.  Another hit from a Daily Kos diary.  I am including it for a lot of reasons.  But one major reason is they use my all time number one favorite political term:

“Mutual Assured Destruction” – or MAD.  It was utilized in a Daily Kos diary written Billary Redux.  Basically stating, if McCain is going to be bringing up associations like Ayers, Wright, and Rezko -Obama’s team could bring up some very damaging relationships too that would basically destroy McCain.

As I mentioned in my smears post from yesterday, I posted that when the time was right and McCain went significantly negative – Obama would hit back with associations that would make McCain look bad (particularly the Keating 5).  Paul Begala, one of my favorite Democratic operatives and I always believe is one of the straightest shooters out there, was on Meet the Press this morning.  He was discussing one of McCain’s associations.  I thought he’d go the Keating 5 route – NOPE.  He produced a relationship much worse than the Keating 5.  Quoting Begala, “John McCain sat on the board of the extremist “U.S. Council for World Freedom” an ultra-conservative right wing organization which was affiliated with the “World Anti-communist League” which the Anti-Defamation League said “has increasingly become a gathering place, a forum, a point of contact for extremists, racists and anti-semites.” Begala went on to say that he didn’t believe that this represented who John McCain is, but by bringing up Obama’s assocations, the Democrats would do the same.

To further this philosophy  Rep. Rahm Emanuel, a Chicago Democrat and Obama supporter, warned against McCain’s strategy. “If we are going to go down this road, you know, Barack Obama was eight years old, somehow responsible for Bill Ayers,” he said. ” At 58, John McCain was associating with Charles Keating. If we really want to talk who is associating with who, we will,” Emanuel said. “The American people will lose in that transaction.”

Representative Emanuel makes it clear that this is not the path that Obama wants to go down. They’d rather talk issues, but they will not shrink away from the attacks.