Thomas Elias: Democrats ignoring McCain-Keating links

   Maybe it's because the thievery occurred almost 20 years ago. Maybe it's because the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s pales beside this fall's financial collapse. Maybe Democratic campaign managers believe it's just too complex a matter for voters to understand, not easily reduced to sound bites and 30-second TV commercials.

     But even as Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin rips Democrat Barack Obama for his very tenuous ties to two members of the old Weather Underground domestic terror group, Democrats are all but ignoring Charles Keating and his once-tight links to Republican Presidential candidate John McCain.

     Perhaps it's for all the above reasons and because they assume that they've had California sewn up from the start, but California Democrats have said virtually nothing about McCain and what he did for Keating, the symbol of the S&L affair.

     Just as their failure to use the Keating material demonstrates how smug California Democrats have become, the material itself provides insight into what really moves McCain.

     For although he was well aware that his friend and benefactor Keating had bilked thousands of mostly-elderly depositors of his now-failed Lincoln Savings & Loan out of hundreds of millions of dollars, McCain's testimony in Keating's state trial clearly showed this meant little or nothing to him.

     The window on McCain's character opened when Keating attorney Stephen Neal called McCain, then a second-term senator from Arizona, to testify in the Los Angeles courtroom of Superior Court Judge Lance Ito (yes, the Ito of subsequent O.J. Simpson trial fame) on Oct. 25, 1991, almost exactly 17 years ago.

     The testimony came long after federal regulators seized Lincoln, long after it was well known that Keating had essentially stolen at least $200 million from his customers, almost all of them Californians.

     Does he have a friendship with Keating? McCain was asked. "I do…I did consider (Keating) a friend," McCain stammered.

     And what ended that friendship? Turns out it wasn't the fact that Keating was a well-known thief, fraud and Ponzi scheme operator. All that appeared to be OK with McCain, and did not interfere with their relationship, he testified. The relationship had earlier seen Keating donate more than $112,000 to McCain's campaigns and give McCain numerous free rides to campaign appearances on his private jet.

     In return, Keating expected McCain to go to bat for him with banking regulators. Their friendship, McCain said, ended only after he learned Keating had called him a "wimp" because while he did attend meetings on Keating's behalf in Washington, D.C., he would not fly to San Francisco to meet with Western regional bank regulators, too.

     When he next met Keating, McCain testified, "I told him I had spent some time in Vietnam not being a wimp and I resented being called one."

     In short, this was McCain saying he could still be friends with Keating despite his proven thievery, but woe unto Keating if he questioned McCain's machismo.

     In the course of the affair, McCain and four other senators became known as the "Keating Five" for attending multiple meetings with the head of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and others, where there is no question McCain got an earful on Keating's schemes.

     But McCain got cold feet before becoming as involved in trying to shoo regulators away from Keating as fellow Sens. Alan Cranston of California, Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, John Glenn of Ohio and Donald Riegle of Michigan. O f the five, only McCain still is a senator, and that is likely because he received only a reprimand from the Senate for his conduct, rather than being censured like most of the others.

     McCain has said ever after that he learned lessons from this, but his court testimony demonstrated that any learning did not extend to developing new criteria for friendships. One lesson he did say he learned was never again to accept free campaign flights on corporate jets.

     "Questions of honor…in politics…need to be addressed no less directly than we would address evidence of expressly illegal corruption," McCain wrote in a memoir.

     But that lesson apparently was lost on him in his first run for president, in 2000, when newspaper reports that he never denied indicate he accepted dozens of free airplane rides from the client of a lobbyist friend. Later, he wrote letters to a federal agency on behalf of that client, Paxson Communications. If McCain had really reformed, what was he doing on the Paxson jet?

     If California Democrats wanted to maximize their efforts against McCain, they would exploit the feelings here that still run strongly against the senator for his Keating links. "He was an apologist for Keating," former Los Angeles television anchorman Tom Shelley, who lost $7,000 in the Lincoln affair, said last spring. "I'm a Republican and I would have a lot of trouble voting for him."

     Maybe Democrats here and in other states are holding those kinds of sentiments in reserve for use against McCain at the last moment, if needed. But so far, it's clear they have failed to exploit the biggest, most hypocritical flaw in McCain's "straight talk" image.

Thomas Elias writes on California issues. His e-mail address is tdelias@aol.com