I don't think the Keating guilt by association documentary is really going to work because I think that it was too long ago and that it only focuses the election on another personality battle.
What I do find interesting though about this video is that it gives me insight into McCain's economic policy. He "drank the Kool-aid" on deregulation. If you don't understand much about the economy, the easiest rule of thumb is to say that regulation is bad and deregulation is good. Then you don't have to think.
In the case of Keating, I think McCain just drank the Kool-aid and wanted to help do what he believed was right. It was illegal, but it was also about 20 years ago, and McCain's already had his hearing. Although the video further pounds into America's mind that McCain has poor judgement on the economy, I think it's a bad idea to start getting back onto the personality bus. I feel like it's "lipstick on a pig" all over again.
To me, the more damning and recent relationship for McCain is Phil Gramm, McCain's economic advisor. You want to talk about guilt by association - this guy is it. The man who McCain takes economic advice from is a bad guy. Here's an excerpt from Harold Meyerson, a Washington Post columnist, called A Pal Around McCain:
But if the McCain people want to rummage through presidential candidates' associations, real or imagined, to turn up figures who threaten to pull down this proud republic, they should begin in-house. Chief among those to whom responsibility attaches for the financial crisis that is plunging the nation into recession is former Texas senator Phil Gramm, McCain's own economic guru.
Gramm was always Wall Street's man in the Senate. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee during the Clinton administration, he consistently underfunded the Securities and Exchange Commission and kept it from stopping accounting firms from auditing corporations with which they had conflicts of interest. Gramm's piece de resistance came on Dec. 15, 2000, when he slipped into an omnibus spending bill a provision called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which prohibited any governmental regulation of credit default swaps, those insurance policies covering losses on securities in the event they went belly up. As the housing bubble ballooned, the face value of those swaps rose to a tidy $62 trillion. And as the housing bubble burst, those swaps became a massive pile of worthless paper, because no government agency had required the banks to set aside money to back them up.
The CFMA also prohibited government regulation of the energy-trading market, which enabled Enron to nearly bankrupt the state of California before bankrupting itself.
The problem with this exercise, of course, is that Gramm's relationship to McCain is not comparable to the relationships that Ayers or Wright have with Obama. The idea that either Ayers or Wright would have any impact on the workings of an Obama administration is nonsensical. But Gramm and McCain do have an enduring political and economic alliance. McCain chaired Gramm's short-lived presidential campaign in 1996; Gramm is co-chair of McCain's current effort. McCain has not repudiated reports that Gramm is on the shortlist to become Treasury secretary if McCain is elected, even after Gramm labeled America "a nation of whiners."
If we are to believe his managers, McCain will charge into tomorrow night's debate seeking to "change the subject" from the economy to Obama's dangerous liaisons. It's not, however, likely to be a winning tactic. Obama will argue that in a time of deepening economic crisis, the public deserves a debate in which the candidates focus on their ideas for recovery rather than tendentious attacks on their rival's presumed associates. If pressed, though, he can mention that it is McCain's senior economic adviser who has diminished American solvency and power beyond the wildest dreams of anti-American terrorists.
Guilt by association should always be recent. Reverend Wright was recent. Bill Ayers is not. Phil Gramm is recent. Charles Keating is not.
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