I'll See Your Ayers and Raise You a Keating 5

Mike Allen from Politico reported Sunday that Barack Obama will not sit idly by while Sarah Barracuda is unleashed on the public with a series of October surprises meant to smear Obama and shift American's focus away from real issues during the campaign.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Monday will launch a multimedia campaign to draw attention to the involvement of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the "Keating Five" savings-and-loan scandal of 1989-91, which blemished McCain's public image and set him on his course as a self-styled reformer.

Retaliating for what it calls McCain's "guilt-by-association" tactics, the Obama campaign is e-mailing millions of supporters a link to a website, KeatingEconomics.com, which will have a 13-minute documentary on the scandal beginning at noon Eastern time on Monday. The overnight e-mails urge recipients to pass the link on to friends.

The Obama campaign, including its surrogates appearing on radio and television, will argue that the deregulatory fervor that caused massive, cascading savings-and-loan collapses in the late '80s was pursued by McCain throughout his career, and helped cause the current credit crisis.

While many Americans who were paying attention to the Democratic primary process have already heard of Obama's questionable associations in Chicago, many may not be aware of - or remember - McCain's involvement in the Savings and Loan scandal from 1989 - 1991 that nearly derailed his political career.

Watch for the fireworks on a cable TV news station near you. Let's see how NBC's Tom Brokaw - an admitted friend of the McCain campaign - handles this ugly turn in campaign tactics. Who will this blow up on - McCain or Obama?


Here's the teaser for the noon release of "Keating Economics".