Intellectual Property Law

The terms "Keating Five," "Keating Economics," "Charles Keating," and "McCain Keating," hovered among several of the top search terms on Google Monday, as Barack Obama's campaign launched a new 13-minute online video that portrays McCain as someone who hasn't learned from his past bad judgments during critical financial crises.

The term "Keating Five" was the seventh-most searched for term on Google Monday afternoon, right after searches for voter registration information in Texas and Florida, and right before the term "Vote For Change."

"Keating Economics" was the 17th most searched for term, and keatingeconomics.com was the 18th most popular term during that same window of time.

In contrast, searches for terms related to Obama and Sixties radical William Ayers barely made an appearance among the top 100 online searches on Monday -- even as Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin continued to slam Obama during a Florida campaign rally for his "ties" to Ayers, who is now a college professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Ayers was a member of the violent protest group The Weather Underground, which was active in the 1960s. But as commentators have pointed out, Obama was eight years old when the Weather Underground carried out its bombings.      

The online searches suggest that the Obama campaign's strategy of focusing voters' attention on McCain's history in the late 1980s savings and loan crisis is gaining traction.

The Obama campaign's 13-minute video was released online Monday, and features damning testimony from former Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp.'s Deputy Director Bill Black, who was one of the key participants in the meetings with McCain at the time.

Obama's Keating Economics micro-site buttresses its case by providing downloads of some of the original letters that McCain sent to regulators that express his concerns about a proposed rule that would have crimped Keating's business.   

The McCain campaign held a conference call Monday with Akin Gump partner John Dowd, who was McCain's lawyer during the late 1980s crisis.

On Monday, Dowd defended McCain by pointing out that "John had not violated any rule of the senate, or the law of the United States," and that Keating's company American Continental Corp. was a major employer of 2,000 people in Arizona at the time.

Dowd also noted that McCain had resisted Keating's requests to influence regulators' investigation into the company.

Dowd characterized the Obama's campaign's highlighting of the issue as a "classic political smear job."