Obama, Biden, McCain, and the Deregulation as Disaster Theme

The Democratic ticket is hitting John McCain’s inadvisable comments in the most recent issue of Contingencies where in an article he wrote in that magazine on page 30 he says:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking (italics mine), would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

Barack Obama hit McCain’s imprudent policy proposal hard in a speech that he gave yesterday in Daytona, Florida. He noted:

We’ve seen three of America’s five largest investment banks fail or be sold off in distress. Our housing market is in shambles, and Monday brought the worst losses on Wall Street since the day after September 11th.

He then went on to observe that John McCain has “called himself ‘fundamentally a deregulator’ when deregulation is part of the problem.” Obama quoted the text from Contingencies and wondered, “So let me get this straight – he wants to run health care like they’ve been running Wall Street.”

Joe Biden campaigned yesterday in Castlewood, Virginia, a small town of about 2,000 people in the southwestern section of the Old Dominion. Here is video from his speech:



I believe there are three interrelated takeaway messages from the campaign’s behavior yesterday:

1. The campaign wants to educate the American people that deregulation is at the root of the country’s current financial crisis;

2. The campaign wants the people to understand that John McCain has defined himself as fundamentally a deregulator who stands at the center of the current disaster; and

3. John McCain not only has failed to learn the lesson of the current crisis, but he wishes to extend the same kind of ideological dogmatism to other areas of the economy, putting them also in jeopardy.

I think we should lend the campaign a hand and drill these points home.