What happened to that whole bull line about sticking only to the issues and how all of these character/history investigations are simply distractions? Don’t be surprised if you still see Obama play it (which the media will gladly allow him to do unchecked) while he attacks McCain on Keating Five.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Monday will launch a multimedia campaign to draw attention to the involvement of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the “Keating Five” savings-and-loan scandal of 1989-91, which blemished McCain’s public image and set him on his course as a self-styled reformer.

Pushing back against what it calls McCain’s “guilt-by-association” tactics, the Obama campaign is e-mailing millions of supporters a link to a website, KeatingEconomics.com, which will have a 13-minute documentary on the scandal beginning at noon Eastern time on Monday. The overnight e-mails urge recipients to pass the link on to friends.

The Obama campaign, including its surrogates appearing on radio and television, will argue that the deregulatory fervor that caused massive, cascading savings-and-loan collapses in the late ‘80s was pursued by McCain throughout his career, and helped cause the current credit crisis.

Obama-Biden communications director Dan Pfeiffer said: “While John McCain may want to turn the page on his erratic response to the current economic crisis, we think voters will find his involvement in a similar crisis to be particularly interesting. His involvement with Keating is a window into McCain’s economic past, present, and future.”

How did Keating Five end for McCain? He and Sen. John Glenn (D-OH) (yeah, that one) were cleared of all charges by the Democratic-controlled Senate Ethics Committee. While both were criticized for “poor judgment”, neither was found to have acted improperly.

The media will, of course, happily eat up Obama’s talking points. I eagerly await CNN’s expose into the scandal while still concluding that Obama didn’t pall-around with terrorists simply because he launched his career in the living room of and spent years associating with terrorists.

This should give the green light to Team McCain & others to begin attacks based not only on Ayers & Rezko but on Wright & Pfleger. What do they have to lose?