It's likely to make McCain look far worse than Obama.

I disagree. The McCain campaign is not stupid. They know they must change the subject off the economy and other real issues. They will continue to try to do so. Hollow, phony non-issues are the McCain staple and have been fairly successful to date. Obama needs to continue hammering on the economy and McCain as Bush 3.

Keating 5 anyone?

You know what else I hear? Obama's also linked to Al Capone, Frank Nitti and the Goat Curse that keeps the Cubs out of the World Series because Obama lives in Chicago. Shhhhhh!

Yeah, it's not like McCain ever hung out with a guy who called himself the CFO of the Vatican and the guy was later found out to be a big con artist who bilked dummies, uh, financial corps and big spenders out of millions so he could bankroll a jet set lifestyle including dumb impressionable actresses. Yeah, the pure as yellow snow John McCain has NEVER hung out with characters like that at all.

Who needs the Keating 5, when you have Bush,Cheney, Rove, Abramoff, andCunningham?

If Drudge, Limbaugh, or the Cornerites mention it, the McCain campaign will try it.

Adjusted for inflation the $2 million that Davis got is close to the $100K McCain got to protect the S&Ls

I agree with scottap. Time to unveil those Keating Five ads I know the dems have in the bag. As the Sean Connery character said in "The Untouchables," - "You wanna know how you do it? Here's how, they pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way, and that's how you get Capone! Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that?"

actually, ckelly, the mccain campaign is stupid.

in general, btw, when the gop candidate has george will thinking he doesn't look presidential, there's not much hope. thankfully.

...have been fairly successful to date.

That's all over now. The days of post-convention-bounce, Palinmania, Drill-Baby-Drill, Obama-is-scary are gone. This will be a more sober electorate going forward.

I just don't see this ad getting a lot of attention at the moment. It's not like we're looking at a news vacuum this week. Coverage is likely to be dominated by the bailout.

I'll be surprised if there's much mention of this ad by the talking heads, aside for them pointing out that McCain's desperate to change the subject or (even better) has begun to PANIC.

It doesn't matter that it isn't true and that it's stupid; what matters is the degree to which people will listen. McCain keeps sticking shady characters onto Obama, while Obama hits McCain with substance, with genuine toxicity his policies have wrought. One is characters with faces, the other is abstraction and logic and numbers. Which of the two sticks more concretely in the mind of the typical American voter? "Stories" are always more compelling than discourse. That's what scares me.

This is the prelude to Ayers then Wright. They've got to be saving Wright to go nuclear. I'd imagine its coming if McCain loses he debate this Friday.

BTW, they've succeeded in hiding Sarah until election day. Early voting starts in the next week.

Where is this ad running? No one outside of the state of Illinois even knows who these characters are; it's not like they are household names and they aren't presently working with Obama (unlike McCain's bevy of lobbyists who are currently running his campaign).

This is indeed distraction, but more like the distraction of a mosquito when you are trying to get out of the way of a 16 wheeler.

I'm just surprised they didn't use Franklin Raines' picture in the ad.

Charles Keating, George Bush, Richard "The Big Dick" Cheney, Joe "Israel Comes First" Lieberman, Lindsey "They're just whining" Graham...Other than there just being too much to hit McCain on, why isn't this just the stock response from the Obama campaign on these issues? They want to play the guilt by association game? Fine, let's play. Most people don't know or care who Rezko or Jones are. They damn sure know who's been trickling down on them for the last 8 years.

Sorry. I'm just at the point where I want to smack people in the face for playing around with this trivia, and not being willing to look at what's really at stake here. John McCain doesn't have a plan to fix the economy. He doesn't have a plan to take care of health care. He doesn't have a credible plan (beyond "Let's win Iraq!") for foreign policy. And still, STILL, the media are treating him as a credible candidate.

Yeah, Obama's campaign slogan has been "Change," but he's also supplied a list of what he wants to change and how. McCain's campaign has been incoherent. He's an old man who answers substantive in non sequiters who picked a beauty queen, who doesn't know what the central guiding philosophy of our current foreign policy is, as his running mate. And still, they act like he's some experienced elder statesman and she's a plucky little gal with big plans. It's insulting, and it's nauseating, and I, for one, have had it.

If there's anyone who knows how to grease the wheels of catastrophic financial deregulation, it's John McCain.

It all started with the Keating 5, where John McCain cut his baby teeth on screwing taxpayers.

And then, there's Rick Davis = Fannie Mae (in order to "get to" John McCain)

And now, there's Phil Gramm = UBS (yes, the lobbyis of a foreign bank now seeking to be bailed out by US taxpayers could be your next Secretary of the Treasury!)

I understand Sarah Palin's church recently hosted a speaker who said that attacks on Israel show God's judgment. Do you think Jews living in Florida might not benefit from knowing that?

I don't know if Reverend Wright is going to have much impact at this point.

I am usually against Obama running attack ads, but to repeat my favorite mantra

WE are Obama's surrogates.

We can post flyers around our neighborhoods, or even do a simple YouTube post. Simply combine headlines from the papers on the crisis, under the heading:
"Headlines you have seen recently."

Then below "The headline you DON'T want to see"

And, copying as close as possible to the typeface you've used:

"VP Sarah Palin takes oath of office to succeed President McCain."

Simple and absolutely deadly.

(Just be sure to put a line on the flyer or in the video saying that this was not supported by or approved by the Obama campaign.)

We can be our own 527s, as long as we don't want the tax breaks for the miniscule excpense.

McCain's father-in-law, the man on whose wealth his lifestyle now depends, was a convicted felon. Maybe the American public needs to be apprised of that fact.

It's always been interesting to me that McCain wasn't taken into the Family Business -- I guess because he's got NO management skills at all -- except as a VP for "public relations," which means that McCain was nothing but a guy in a penguin suit, shilling for the Arizona Bud distributorship, and married to his golden cheerleader only after the nbenefit of a prenuptial agreement that kept his hands off the family fortune.

What a putz.

Well, you say that I'm an outlaw,
You say that I'm a thief.
Here's a Christmas dinner
For the families on relief.

Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.

--Woody Guthrie

Cindy McCain can take a marketing lesson from the logic of her husband's campaign:

You know what causes people to drink beer? Sand. That's right -- ever notice when people go to the beach they drink more beer? It's the sand.

Your welcome, Cindy.

Note: Saudi Arabia excluded.

Photo of Phil Gramm: voice over: Phil Gramm: He calls Americans "whiners" for being concerned about the economy.

Video: Tucker Bounds refusing to rule out Phil Gramm as Secretary of Treasure in a McCain administration.

Photo of Gramm. Voiceover: he authored the legislation that deregulated the financial markets. His wife was a Director of Enron during the energy crisis. (Slide Enron E and text: xxx number of people lost their retirement savings due to the fraud at Enron.

Video of McCain: "The fundamentals of our economy are strong." Then the flip-flops on bailing out AIG.

Photo of McCain and Keating with caption "McCain and Charles Keating" Voiceover: McCain was one of the Keating Five, who took action to help one of the criminals behind the Savings and Loan crisis in the 1980s.

Final text: $700 BILLION of taxpayer money to the fat cats of Wall Street.

and voiceover: He takes his advice from those who created financial collapse in the savings and loan and banking industries.
He was wrong about the economy then.
He's dangerously wrong about the economy now.

Obama '08

Off thread, but WTF.

HOW can we allow people to start voting this far in front of the election?

It's likely to make McCain look far worse than Obama.

I disagree as well. I spent a weekend with moderate-to-conservative friends and family, and this comes up constantly. No one has heard of the Keating Five. Obama's ties to Rezko and the Chicago political machine, however, are viewed with extreme prejudice-- by non-Illinois people, too.

The Republicans are masters at distraction. it's all about,"Look! There's a shiny penny." Ridicule, I think, is the proper response. Reason and facts are great, but mockery can go a long way toward countering the distraction and putting it in its proper context -- as foolish and childish.

The problem is, with republicans all the links and connections in the world just makes them look like republicans. However, the links like Rezko and Wright are links to Obama specifically. This is how they do it. The links [even the K5] are too vague for the uninformed. But Rezko and Obama are two guys with funny names. "I don't know what they did, but it musta been bad!"

You know what else I hear? Obama's also linked to Al Capone, Frank Nitti and the Goat Curse that keeps the Cubs out of the World Series because Obama lives in Chicago. Shhhhhh!

Posted by: Former Dan on September 22, 2008 at 10:45 AM

Nonsense to the last charge. Obama's a South Sider, a Sox fan.

Rezko...this didnt stick a while back.

How about we talk about McCain and convicted con-man Fiorelli?

Once again, we're seeing McCain throwing red meat to his base, while independent voters sick of sleazy Republican politics will likely greet the campaign with a "meh."

The only strategy that makes any sense to me is either that McCain's polling shows a massive break of independents toward Obama, and he's trying to stem some of that by sowing Fear, Unchertainty and Doubt, or his polling shows the Reptiles are doomed in '08, and he's trying to whip up the dead-enders into such a frenzy that the nation is ungovernable.

Get ready for "Obama Derangement Syndrome" -- this time for real, not just a sleazy strategy to pre-empt criticism of Bush.

I thought SNL's opening last Saturday did a good job of planting seeds of disbelief in regards to MCain negative ads.

Former Dan, don't forget curse of the Cigarette Smoking Man on the X-Files who swore that the Buffalo Bills would never win the Super Bowl as long as he was alive. Obama must have been hip-deep in that one, too. ;)

Obama's ties to Rezko and the Chicago political machine, however, are viewed with extreme prejudice-- by non-Illinois people, too.

When they bring it up, don't forget to mention Rezko's other good buddies, Karl Rove and Dennis Hastert, who promised to try and get Patrick Fitzgerald fired from Rezko's trial.

The Repubs must be getting desperate, because Rezko has an enormous potential to backfire on them since he also had strong ties with Illinois Republicans.

What if this McCain-co-sponsored bill hadn't been blocked by the "affordable housing" democrats in 2005?

joanne, who was the majority party in both the Senate and the House in 2005?

The only point of this Rezko ad is to head off the inevitable link up of the current financial meltdown and the Keating Five. It's Moral Equivalency 101: Yes, it's true that I'm a scoundrel but, hey look, so is my opponent! So if we talk about the Keating Five, we also MUST talk about Rezko. It's only fair!

"With friends like that ..." -- McCain t.v. ad

We're on the verge of another Great Depression II and John McCain wants to talk about something else.

John McCain. He's not interested in Americans, the economy, Wall Street or anything he doesn't have experience with.

WE can't afford the risk of John McCain.

Bizarrely, this should make Obama more attractive to your typical Republican thug. It takes one to know one.