On the eve of the second presidential debate, Democrat Barack Obama on Monday challenged Republican John McCain’s integrity as their campaign mud-slinging plumbed new depths.
Obama, responding to his portrayal by McCain’s campaign as a crony of ”terrorists”, fought fire with fire by highlighting the Republican’s embroilment in a devastating 1980s financial scandal.
Obama rolled out a new broadcast and email onslaught recalling McCain’s connection to jailed tycoon Charles Keating, the collapse of whose savings and loan firm wiped out the savings of many elderly retirees.
”If Senator McCain wants to have a character debate, I am happy to have that debate,” the Illinois senator told African-American radio host Tom Joyner less than a month from election day on November 4.
He vowed not to be distracted from the pocketbook pain of Americans fearful of losing their jobs and healthcare, and said that far from being a ”maverick”, McCain ”relies on lobbyists for big oil and big corporations” for advice.
The Arizona senator ”makes decisions oftentimes based on what these lobbyists tell him to do”, and that was more relevant to United States voters than ”somebody who’s tangentially related to me”, Obama said.
He was referring to Chicago Professor of education William Ayers, a bomb-throwing radical against the Vietnam War whose ties to Obama were raised by McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, for the third day running on Monday.
”I’m afraid that this [Obama] is someone who sees America as ‘imperfect enough’ to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country,” the Alaska governor said at a rally in Florida.
”This, ladies and gentlemen, has nothing to do with the kind of change anyone can believe in — not my kids, not your kids,” she said.
Emerging line of attack
Tempers are hot heading in to Tuesday’s ”town hall” clash, the second of three debates between Obama and McCain, in Nashville, Tennessee.
The Democrat’s camp said the Republican, who is behind in the polls, was desperately trying to divert attention from his ”erratic” handling of the US financial crisis by resorting to character assassination.
A new McCain advertisement, called ”Dangerous”, used a remark by Obama, out of context, that US troops in Afghanistan were ”just air-raiding villages and killing civilians”.
”How dishonourable,” the narrator said, accusing Obama and ”liberals” in Congress of risking troops’ lives by voting to cut off war funding. ”Obama and congressional liberals. Too risky for America.”
The ad hinted at an emerging line of attack from McCain, that voters should think twice before electing both a Democratic president and Congress and so leaving Washington in the grip of one-party rule.
As part of its offensive, the McCain campaign is hammering away at the Ayers connection. He sat on the board of a Chicago education charity with Obama and hosted a political event at his home when Obama was starting out in politics.
The Obama campaign insists the pair were only loosely connected, and is hitting back with a 13-minute online documentary recapping the Keating affair, the worst scandal of McCain’s political career.
McCain was part of a group of lawmakers known as the ”Keating Five”, who received gifts and favours from the businessman and intervened with regulators to insist his company was in good health before it collapsed.
McCain escaped with a formal censure by the Senate in 1991 but spoke of the searing embarrassment caused by the scandal and went on to become a crusader for ethics reform. Overall, the US government had to spend $124-billion to bail out the entire savings and loan industry.
”Sound familiar?” Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said in an email to supporters, after Congress last week passed a $700-billion bailout for Wall Street.
”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 judgement by John McCain,” he said.
McCain spokesperson Brian Rogers said the Republican had been ”open and honest about the Keating matter”, while Obama ”has been fundamentally dishonest about his friendship and work with the unrepentant terrorist, William Ayers.” — AFP
