The Keating Five Narrative: How McCain Turns Scandal Into Campaign Fairy Tale

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

One could argue that Sen. John McCain has been campaigning for president for a decade. McCain never quite got over having his run bulldozed by the Bush/Rove machine in 2000. On his second run through, McCain learned he needed a narrative, a story about himself to sell to the American people. He had to take everything that could be construed as a negative in his past and spin it into a positive chapter in his long political history.

When scandal shows up on your Wikipedia page, you'd better start spinning fast. Thus, the Keating Five scandal became for McCain a turning point, where he supposedly learned an important lesson in ethics.

To sum up, as the Savings and Loan crisis bubbled, McCain and four other senators met with government regulators, asking them to go easy on Charles Keating, a major campaign contributor to the five lawmakers. But McCain's connections to Keating went further than the others.

Of the five, McCain was the only one to have a direct financial conflict of interest. His wife Cindy had a major interest in a Keating real estate development. He was also the closest of the five senators to Keating on a personal level. The McCains flew down to Keating's vacation home in The Bahamas on his private jet multiple times.

In the end, the risky investments of Keating's company led to a massive taxpayer bailout. Pensioners and others lost their life savings when Keating's company went under. Keating spent four years in prison. The financial scandal went down in history as one of, if not the, worst in the history of the Senate.

McCain got off with a mild rebuke from Congress. He said he entered that meeting telling regulators that he didn't want to ask for any special favors, or to do anything that would seem inappropriate. But who goes into a meeting saying he doesn't want to come out of it looking bad? Someone who has questions about his own guilt, I'd say.

McCain uses this episode in his narrative. He calls it a turning point, at which he realigned his moral compass. But did he really learn his lesson?

In a word, no. He kept pushing for more and more deregulation. In fact, all the way up until last month, he was calling himself "fundamentally a deregulator."

This deregulation (particularly that pushed by McCain advisor Phil Gramm) allowed the subprime housing crisis to unfold, bringing the nation to the brink of economic collapse.

McCain has surrounded himself on all sides with lobbyists in his campaign. He even hired the same lawyer who "investigated" him during the Keating scandal to fend off accusations of impropriety with lobbyist Vicki Iseman.

This past Sunday, The New York Times Magazine published an insightful piece by Robert Draper titled "The Making (and Remaking) of McCain." After months of following the campaign and speaking with senior aides, Draper identified six different narratives for the candidate, just over the past year or so. That's right: Six separate identities created by McCain's handlers to explain to the American people who McCain really is.

It's clear McCain's talk about the Keating scandal as a turning point is just another one of these narratives, cooked up special for the American voter by the McCain campaign.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS