It didn’t take long for John McCain to answer Barack Obama’s tweak on his supposed riches. Team McCain has a bona-fide television spot that will “air in key states” — most likely the same states in which Obama ran his ad. Obama can’t pretend he didn’t set the stage for this:

Barack Obama knows a lot about housing problems. One of his “biggest fundraisers” helped him buy his million-dollar mansion. Purchasing part of the property he couldn’t afford.

From Obama, Rezko got “political favors” including “14 million from taxpayers.” Now, he’s a convicted felon, facing jail.

That’s a housing problem.

Obama opened the door for this in two different ways. First, as noted, he skewered McCain for not knowin how many houses he has. But in attacking McCain’s rather tenuous connections to Ralph Reed earlier this week, he made political associates fair game. McCain didn’t have a corrupt fixer raising money for him as Rezko did for Barack Obama. Rezko raised over $250,000 for Obama over the course of his career in Chicago, a figure about which Obama lied — twice— during the presidential campaign.

The RNC covered this in June, after Rezko’s conviction:

Obama has much closer ties to this convicted felon than any McCain has with Reed, who never got charged with a crime despite McCain’s efforts investigating the Abramoff scandal with the Indian Affairs Committee. Obama made his housing bed, and now he has to lie in it.

Update: Did Obama fall for a classic pincers movement?

Update II: At the request of Nadhmi Auchi’s representatives, I have removed a passage from this post and retract the points made in it.  The newspaper articles on which those allegations got based have been partially retracted by the Times of London since I first posted on Mr. Auchi.