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. …Read more