Senator Barack Obama said today that a scandal from Senator John McCain’s past – the Keating Five – was just as relevant to the presidential campaign as questions about who Mr. Obama has associated with over the years. In a news conference here, Mr. Obama was asked whether his campaign intended to raise the banking scandal from the 1980s, which Mr. McCain has apologized for. Every piece of every candidate’s public record, Mr. Obama said, is “germane to the presidency.” “I was just asked previously about a whole host of issues and associations that are a lot more flimsy than John McCain’s relationship to Keating Five,” Mr. Obama said. “What I said, I can’t quarrel with the American people wanting to know more about that and me having to answer questions about it.”

Obama today was asked if he believes McCain’s association with Keating Five is fair game. “Congressman DeFazio obviously delivered a speech that wasn’t my speech,” Obama said instantaneously, trying to separate DeFazio’s comments from his own.

In the mid 1980s Mr. Keating had engineered $1.3 million in campaign contributions to the five lawmakers. In return he expected the senators to lean on federal bank regulators to back off from their investigation into his shaky institution, which was crippled by poor junk-bond investments and real-estate speculation. The central event came in April 1987, when the senators met twice with Federal Home Loan Bank Board examiners, who charge that the senators pressured them to leave Lincoln alone. Sensing impropriety, Senators McCain and Glenn quickly withdrew (as Mr. Bennett recognized when he recommended last September that they be dropped from the probe). Senators Cranston, DeConcini, and Riegle, however, continued to press Mr. Keating’s case. Eventually the government was forced to seize Lincoln anyway, at a bailout cost to taxpayers of $2 billion.