The Next Phase

We're less than a month out from the election, and it looks like things are about to ramp up. For some reason, the McCain campaign told the Washington Post on Saturday that they were getting ready to go negative against Obama after Tuesday's debate. It appears that they're not exactly poker players, or they would've held their cards closer to their chests. Obama was ready with a response for Monday, rolling out an ad calling McCain "erratic in a crisis."

Although that sounds like a reasonably good argument, my first thought upon reading that is that Obama is baiting McCain, prodding him in preparation for the debate. McCain seemed unwilling to even acknowledge Obama in the last debate and didn't do much more than that when they met on the Senate floor this week. He seems extremely tightly wound, and some poking from his presidential opponent can't do much to calm things down.

Before I had a chance to write this up, though, word comes tonight that the Obama campaign is really getting ready to play hardball. A new push is bringing McCain's dealings as a member of the Keating Five back into the spotlight. Here's the intro:

During the savings and loan crisis of the late '80s and early '90s, McCain's political favors and aggressive support for deregulation put him at the center of the fall of Lincoln Savings and Loan, one of the largest in the country. More than 23,000 investors lost their savings. Overall, the savings and loan crisis required the federal government to bail out the savings of hundreds of thousands of families and ultimately cost American taxpayers $124 billion.

Sound familiar?

In that crisis, John McCain and his political patron, Charles Keating, played central roles that ultimately landed Keating in jail for fraud and McCain in front of the Senate Ethics Committee. 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 judgment by John McCain.

A new 13-minute video spot will be introduced at noon on Monday (a preview is available now).

From the looks of things, if McCain has been seething already, he'll be in fine form on Tuesday night. We might even get to see one of those infamous blow-ups we've heard so much about.