If you are a liberal supporter of Obama, you rarely experience glee on reading the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal. But the clarity, wit and relevance of an article penned by Thomas Frank titled Judgment Day for McCain will have you reassessing the perceived bias of that publication.
Frank, using the ruse of taking seriously McCain’s odd-ball call for a commission to "find out what went wrong" on Wall Street, Frank proceeds to offer McCain advice for his commission. Using sarcasm and satire to excoriate McCain for his hypocrisy, the article starts out by saying,
And Mr. McCain has a special advantage to bring to any such investigation -- many of the relevant witnesses are friends or colleagues of his. In fact, he can probably get to the bottom of the whole mess just by cross-examining the people riding on his campaign bus.
But this is only the beginning. If you want to see McCain's reputation turned into the speed bag in a gym, link to the article, or read below the fold.
With mock earnesty, the article suggests that McCain use his commission to find out why the government allowed the blatant misconduct that generated the bad debt, and why the public was fooled by a laissez faire philosophy that government should keep its hands off of business, and let markets run their course? The article then raises the Keating 5 scandal, and with delicious insincerity, rehearses McCain's sordid history of seriously undermining the very regulation he now pretends he just invented:
Maybe the McCain Commission on Deregulation can kick off with a statement from the candidate himself. It will be helpful for the public, if painful for the senator himself, to hear about Mr. McCain's own close brush with one of the towering figures of financial deregulation, Charles Keating, the master of Lincoln Savings and Loan. Keating had a special, urgent interest in getting Big Brother off our backs: in 1986 some meddlesome agency suspected him of massive violations of S&L regulations. Keating fought back by recruiting a handful of legislators, including Mr. McCain, to pressure S&L regulators to leave his S&L alone. A few years later, Lincoln became one of the largest financial failures in U.S. history.
The article next reminds us of the sins of McCain's chief financial adviser, Phil Gramm, and suggests that he should be witness number one to testify at McCain's commission, observing about Gramm,
It was this very fellow who, as a senator, co-authored the Financial Services Modernization Act, largely trashing the old financial regulatory structure and allowed banks, insurance companies and investment houses to merge into what Mr. Gramm called "a supermarket for financial services" -- supermarkets whose lousy decisions are now the wonder of the world and whose losses we will be underwriting for years to come.
For good measure, the article wonders if his wife, Wendy Gramm, should also testify, making the wry observation,
Mrs. Gramm headed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where her tenure is best remembered by a decision to allow certain kinds of energy trades to go unregulated. A company called Enron turned out to be the greatest beneficiary of the decision -- there isn't space here to recall the statesmanlike things they did with their newfound freedom -- and they appointed Wendy Gramm to their board of directors just weeks after she stepped down from her government job.
There are additional insights that make the article worth reading in full, and indeed, sharing.