Keating Economics

Keating Economics: John McCain & The Making of a Financial Crisis is a 13 minute campaign video that describes the role of U.S. Senator and Republican nominee for President John McCain in the Keating Five scandal of the early 1990's and compares the historical episode to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008.

The thirteen-minute documentary was produced by the campaign of Barack Obama and promoted to supporters by e-mail.

The documentary shows snippets from 1991 of Senator McCain testifying before the Senate Ethics Committee investigation of corruption allegations regarding the Keating Five interspersed with images of the 2008 financial crisis. In the video, William Black, former deputy director of the FSLIC states that Senator McCain "has not learned the lessons from the Keating Five scandal and has continued to follow policies that are going to produce a disaster."

Even prior to the release of the full documentary, it became the subject of intense interest by the press with over 3,700 news articles on the internet specifically referencing the video by name in the morning prior to the release of the full video. During the day of its release, the phrase "Keating Economics" was reported to at one point be the #2 most popular search term on Google. Approximately 24 hours after its release on YouTube, the video had been viewed on that site more than 750,000 times.

Several media sources suggested that the Obama campaign timed the release of the video as a counterattack against the McCain campaign, which in the days prior had reasserted the association of Barack Obama with William Ayers.

In response to the documentary, the McCain campaign held a conference call for reporters with McCain's lawyer, John Dowd, who also appears in the film. In that conference call, Dowd took the position that McCain had done nothing wrong, and that McCain's involvement with the Keating Five ethics investigation was only the result of "a political smear job" by Democrats. However, this assertion appeared to run contrary to McCain's own previously stated opinion of the episode, having called his involvement "the worst mistake of my life." When this was pointed out, Dowd replied "I'm his lawyer and I have a different view of it."

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