Yeah.  That’ll work.

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.

Retaliating for 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.

First, this happened seventeen years ago.  And guess what?  McCain’s still in the Senate.  He was almost the Republican nominee for President in 2000.  He is the Republican nominee for President in 2008.

Nobody cares about Keating any more.

As for the idea that deregulation caused the current credit crisis, let’s keep in mind that it was the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - two government sponsored entities that gave more money to Barack Obama than any other politician in America over the last 20 years - that sparked the credit crisis.  It was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that held or secured 51% of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage industry.  It is government regulation after government regulation that forced banks to give loans on low-value homes to people with questionable credit.

It is government regulation that makes home sellers and buyers have to spend two hours signing their names at closing.

The credit crisis isn’t a problem with deregulation.  The credit crisis is a problem with government interference in the markets and no amount of obfuscation and water-muddying from the Obama campaign is going to change that.