The "K" word being "Keating," as in the Keating Five Scandal. It did so in an email from Obama communications chief Bill Burton responding to Steve Schmidt's charge that the NYT is biased toward Obama. While Burton counts "more than 40" "probing stories" about Obama's past that have appeared in the Times during this campaign, he counts a goose egg when it comes to the
# of stories the NY Times has written over the course of the campaign about the last major financial regulatory crisis, resulting in a huge bailout, and which John McCain was centrally involved in with his political godfather Charles Keating
Last May, after an Obama surrogate raised the Keating Five issue, the campaign initially seemed to disavow the remark before Obama reversed course by saying that "I was just asked previously about a whole host of associations that are a lot more flimsy than John McCain’s relationship to Keating Five." But then, after declaring the Keating Five fair game, the Obama campaign didn't mention it for four months. Now with all this talk about federal regulators and banks, I guess they figure the time is right.
--Jason Zengerle