As I write this, I am in Maine on vacation and have not been paying close attention to the news over the last week. But I saw some news last night that included several clips of McCain pressing the issue of Bill Ayers. He is defending a vicious automated call campaign that has a lot of people scratching their heads. I heard about this on the local news in Bangor. A Republican senator from Maine, Susan Collins, is urging McCain to stop the “robo” calls that say Obama has worked closely with a terrorist whose organization bombed the Pentagon and other federal buildings.
McCain’s point is that it is important to get all the facts about Obama’s past associations. This is really bizarre. Nobody, especially John McCain, believes for a nanosecond that Obama as president would surround himself with terrorists. McCain strongly insinuates that Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers is closer than he will admit. Then he presses even harder suggesting that Obama wants to buddy up with America’s enemies instead of disposing of them.
A big problem for McCain is that nobody is buying the assertions that are implied or stated in these insinuations except for the people who are already dead set against Obama and looking for any rock they can throw. Obama’s numbers have gone up since the ads came out suggesting that maybe McCain is getting hammered for so desperately grasping for straws.
But the deal-killer for McCain is that in a pissing match of past associations, McCain has some major exposure from the last major financial crisis – involving the meltdown of major savings and loan organizations. A personal friend of McCain’s, Charles Keating, headed up a couple of the S&L corporations that failed and which Keating admitted to looting when failure was imminent. Keating was convicted of fraud, racketeering and conspiracy (his conviction was eventually overturned but he pled guilty to lesser charges and was sentenced to time served). Senator McCain made calls “asking” regulators to back off when investigations started homing in on Keating. He is on the record as admitting that the calls could have been interpreted as pressure on behalf of his friend. In response to a question from the press, Keating helpfully stated that he sure hoped that his campaign contributions influenced McCain and four other senators to apply pressure.
McCain ultimately escaped censure from the Senate Ethics Committee but that does not vindicate his judgment. When McCain has been pressed about this, he has said, essentially, that those mistakes were in the past. But he has opened the door wide for a discussion about past mistakes in judgment. In fact, he is insisting on it and counting on it to stop the Obama juggernaut. So far, Obama has graciously (or calculatingly) absorbed the blows without retaliating on a personal level since releasing a viral video on the Keating association the first week of October. I have a feeling that if McCain pushes much harder, he will get exactly what he wishes for, except the part about it hurting Obama.
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