When people are talking about the presidential campaign and the current Wall Street meltdown, most of them have stated that McCain has always been for less regulation. The Obama campaign has also done the same thing: painting McCain as a doctrinaire free-marketeer.
However, that is not the whole story. Yes, McCain tends to skew towards less regulation (he is a Republican, after all) but the Washington Post notes that he does see a need for it.
In fact, they call Obama and others to task for not telling the whole story. The Post editorial says Obama said this on Thursday in a speech in New Mexico:
“He has consistently opposed the sorts of common-sense regulations that might have lessened the current crisis…When I was warning about the danger ahead on Wall Street months ago because of the lack of oversight, Senator McCain was telling the Wall Street Journal — and I quote — ‘I’m always for less regulation.’ ”
But the Post notes that Obama shared only part of McCain’s quote from an editorial meeting with the Wall Street Journal in March. The Post notes this is what the Arizona Senator said after saying he is always for less regulation:
“But I am aware of the view that there is a need for government oversight. I think we found this in the subprime lending crisis — that there are people that game the system and if not outright broke the law, they certainly engaged in unethical conduct which made this problem worse. So I do believe that there is role for oversight.”
As the Post notes, McCain is someone that is for a light-touch from the government but he has seen a need at times for government to step in. He has called for regulation of tobacco and taking a lead in wake of the Enron accounting scandal among others.
As for the repeal of Glass-Stegal, the Post notes that while, yes, Phil Gramm, a former McCain adviser, was pushing for its repeal, so did former Republican congressman Jim Leach of Iowa who is one of the founders of Republicans for Obama.
Listen, if you want someone who has a very skeptical view of markets, then McCain is not your guy. McCain does tend to believe in free markets, but I think that he is more in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt who did not put up with unfettered greed, than what the devil-may-care free marketeer that Obama is trying to paint McCain as. Here is what McCain said in a speech to the National Press Club in 2002:
“To love the free market is to loathe the scandalous behavior of those who have betrayed the values of transparency, trust, contract and faith that lie at the heart of a healthy and prosperous free enterprise system, and the patriotism that sustains an aspiring and confident free society.”
During that speech, which took place during the Enron scandal, he expressed support for the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, which is a form of regulation.
Indeed, using Google, I came up with this story from the New York Times about the same speech in 2002 with this interesting lead paragraph:
With a biting indictment of ”morally challenged executives,” Senator John McCain put himself at the leading edge of the drive against corporate wrongdoing today, laying out proposals for broad new regulation of business that are far more stringent than those of President Bush and leading Democrats.
In that article, McCain called for the following reforms:
What is interesting is that the media has forgotten all of this. Instead we keep hearing that he is a just for dergulation, as in this Washington Post article from earlier this week. That is part of the story, but not the whole story and the media should be doing its job better.
Crossposted at The Square Deal.