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Past could haunt them

Compiled by Juliann Vachon

October 7, 2008

Obama and '60s radical

GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin recently attacked Barack Obama for his ties to 1960s radical Bill Ayers. Ayers was a founding member of the Weather Underground, an anti-Vietnam War group that took credit for bombings of the Pentagon, U.S. Capitol and other federal buildings in the early 1970s. Obama and Ayers, now an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, first met in the mid-1990s when Ayers and his wife hosted a get-together for Obama's first senatorial campaign. The two live in the same Chicago neighborhood and served on the board of the not-for-profit Woods Fund of Chicago at the same time. Obama said he knows Ayers, but the two were never close associates. He has described Ayers' radical actions as "detestable."

McCain and 'Keating Five'

The Obama campaign has launched new attacks questioning John McCain's involvement with the "Keating Five" scandal during the savings and loans crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. McCain was one of five senators accused of helping Charles Keating, chairman of Lincoln Savings and Loans, during a federal regulatory investigation of the company. The company collapsed, and Keating, who had donated more than $100,000 to McCain's U.S. Senate campaigns, was later convicted of securities fraud. The Senate ethics committee investigating the senators cleared McCain of all charges, but said he "exercised poor judgment in intervening with the regulators."