It's a headline that John McCain can't be awfully happy with. MarketWatch tells us "John McCain's Health Care Plan Based on Same Policies That Are Causing Wall Street Meltdown." Ouch. At issue is one sentence, written by McCain, in the obscure actuarial trade magazine Contingencies Magazine:Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.
Obviously, this was written before the market meltdown. In banking, those "innovative products" were subprime mortgages, made possible by deregulation of the market. McCain is now running against the deregulators, despite the unfortunate fact that only moments before he was one of them. In terms of the exact wrong thing to say, that sentence is up there with McCain's assertion that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong."
With taxpayers about to be stuck with a $700 billion bailout, the sort of Republican John McCain used to be last week isn't extremely popular this week. But McCain switches positions as easily as changing pants; Weathervane McCain is now a regulator. So McCain, palavering and obfuscating, reinvents himself for the bazillionth time in his campaign. But old habits die hard and McCain still finds it necessary to defend his now discredited ideology from time to time. Asked on CBS Today if he regretted working to deregulate the markets in 1999, McCain hit a sour note. "No," he said. "I think the deregulation was probably helpful to the growth of our economy." He said it with a straight face. No, really. There's video...
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