"Deregulation. This is what got us into trouble in the first place."---Bill Clinton, in an Obama ad.
Bill Clinton's earnest testimony on behalf of the president in a widely seen television ad cannot be faulted for its veracity. Indeed, deregulation lead directly to the Great Recession in which we are mired still. But it takes "brass", in Clinton's own words, to excoriate Republicans on deregulation when it was he himself and his gang of Wall Street cronies, led by Robert Rubin and Phil Gramm, who overturned the Glass-Steagall Act and kicked the door wide open for the banking industry's unobstructed plundering of Americans' savings accounts, a treasure chest bankers had coveted since FDR forbade them from plundering ever again, or at least FDR thought. Glass-Steagall was enacted to address what was considered to be the core abuse that led to the Great Depression--the unregulated use of savings, pension funds, and municipal bond funds to fuel monetary speculation and crony-driven capital ventures. President Clinton was aware of the logic of FDR's landmark legislation, and he had vocal opponents to his intentions (a precious few, for sure); still, he was not deterred by argument, logic, or history. A decade later his willingness to do high-finances' bidding bore its poisonous fruit. I'm sure he would parse his culpability today in a way only Clinton could: He didn't have sex with that woman, and his actions did not have anything to do with that recession. But history will not be kind to Clinton, and neither will I. Even though it won't deter me from voting for Obama, it will still make me sick to my stomach every time I watch that ad.