Is this the long-awaited October surprise? In an apparent effort to position opponent John McCain as fundamentally on the wrong side of the economic fight (and maybe also to direct attention away from growing buzz on his association with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers), today the Obama campaign has posted on YouTube a 13 minute documentary on the Keating Five scandal. Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Scandal has been posted on Barack Obama’s official YouTube channel, via which it’s embedded above; I found that the YouTube version took forever to load there, and watched the Quicktime version via KeatingEconomics.com.

The film, which is narrated by former federal banking regulator William Black, alleges that McCain “took much of his policy advice” from shady real estate mogul Keating in exchange for massive contributions to his senate campaign, and then failed to learn the appropriate lessons of the scandal and continued to  support an economic policy based on extreme deregulation, leading to our current economic crisis. Black is the only talking head in the film, which is otherwise comprised of footage of the Senate hearings and b-roll. 13 minutes is just about enough time to explain what the Keating Five scandal was, why it was bad, and why it still matters. At the end of the film, Black says his “motivation” for participating is that he’s “sick of” McCain’s continued support for “perverse systems that allow people to lie.”

What’s most interesting about it is simply the fact that the Obama campaign is selling it as a “documentary” and not an extended campaign ad.

Unless I blinked and missed them, there are no credits on the film or on the website. Who made this film? There are a lot of slow zooms on dramatically lit buildings set to ominous ambient music, which is reminiscent of Alex Gibney’s Enron and the Iraq policy film he produced, No End in Sight, but it seems extraordinarily unlikely that the Obama campaign would contract an Oscar-winning filmmaker and then keep quiet about it. Plus, Gibney might have tried harder. The film is not cheap-looking, but there’s a made-for-YouTube quality to it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but with animated intro graphics that literally spell out a trajectory from Keating and McCain’s relationship to Enron and finally the fall of Bear Stearns and Freddie Mac, it’s not exactly for conossieurs of subtelty.

So if it looks like propaganda, and it talks like propaganda, and it’s released in under the label “documentary” but in a manner consistent with the distribution of campaign propaganda, is it still a documentary at all?