Keating Five Member is Obama Surrogate

By Amanda Carpenter
http://www.townhall.com/
October 6, 2008

If Barack Obama is so outraged at John McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five scandal, why is John Glenn, another Keating Five member, doing surrogate work for Obama?


A graphic from an Obama documentary ties Sen. John McCain to Charles Keating.

Obama’s presidential campaign released a scathing documentary on Monday detailing McCain’s ties to the Savings and Loan crisis on the 1980’s. Five U.S. senators were named in the scandal: Sen. Alan Cranston (D.-Calif.), Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D.-Ariz.), Sen. John Glenn (D.-Ohio), Sen. John McCain (R.-Ariz.) and Sen. Donald Reigle (D-Minn.).

"The Keating scandal is eerily similar to today's credit crisis, where a lack of regulation and cozy relationships between the financial industry and Congress has allowed banks to make risky loans and profit by bending the rules," reads a trailer for the video on a website created by the Obama campaign to attack McCain, www.keatingeconomics.com. "And in both cases, John McCain's judgment and values have placed him on the wrong side of history.

But Obama doesn’t seem to have any quarrel with Glenn. The former Democratic Ohio senator introduced Bruce Springsteen at a benefit concert for Obama in Ohio on Sunday, October 5. He's also done other surrogate work for Obama as well. According to Obama's presidential website Glenn held a conference calls with reporters for Obama in August.

A day after Glenn urged people to register to vote for Obama in Ohio, Obama’s campaign began a multimedia campaign to remind the public McCain was one of the “Keating Five” although he was eventually cleared of all charges.

Like McCain, Glenn was also found not guilty of violating any Senate rules.

Attorney John Dowd, who represented McCain during the Senate Ethics investigation, said Senate Democrats conducted a "classic political smear job" on McCain in the Keating Five scandal.

"When it was discovered Keating was pushing too hard, he [McCain] threw Keating out of his office and ended all relations with him," Dowd said.