The prevalent thought of our economy – free markets and deregulation – has been championed by the Republicans. Their bills have helped precipitate this crisis. F/F benefited from these bills.
But the Dems didn’t create and champion the philosophy – that was the R’s. And McCain was on the side of the R’s for most of his Senate career in this respect. His campaign manager, Rick Davis, was a lobbyist on behalf of F/F for such deregulation.
More on McCain’s lobbyists:
–Senior foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann recently faced scrutiny over his foreign lobbying on behalf of the Republic of Georgia.
–Senior adviser Charlie Black was a foreign lobbyist for dictators in Zaire and Angola in the 1980s.
–Frank Donatelli, the Republican National Committee’s liaison to the McCain campaign, has had clients including Exxon Mobil.
–Economic adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer has lobbied for corporate giants like Koch Industries.
–The final two lobbyists are McCain’s congressional liaison, John Green, and national finance Co-chairman Wayne Berman. They both lobbied for Fannie Mae, the troubled mortgage giant.
Two (embarrassing) former McCain campaigners, Regional campaign manager Doug Davenport and Republican convention chief Doug Goodyear, had both represented the military government in Burma.
Finally, Phil Gramm:
As a U.S. senator, Gramm promoted two bills that curtailed regulation: The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Gramm had a prominent role as sponsor and co-sponsor of these bills, respectively.
Add in the fact that that the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve have frowned on increased regulation in the years since those laws were passed.
Wall Street watchers agree that light regulation allowed irresponsible lending and mortgage fraud to go unchecked.
The Commodity Futures Modernization Act in particular has been singled out for spurring the growth of poorly understood, unregulated securities such as credit default swaps, which have been getting a good portion of the blame for the financial crisis of September 2008.
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Obama’s lobbyist ties are more on the state/local level than the federal level:
–Obama’s national co-chair,South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges, founded the state-based lobbying firm Hodges Consulting Group in 2003.
–Likewise, his New Hampshire co-chair is a state lobbyist for the pharmaceutical and financial services industries.
–Obama has taken $15 million from lawyers/law firms, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and many of those firms employ lobbyists. Clinton has taken slightly more from this group ($15.4 million) while McCain has taken less ($4.2 million).
–Tom Daschle, former SD senator and a national campaign co-chair, is not himself a federally registered lobbyist, but he works at Alston & Bird, a firm that employs federally registered lobbyists and raked in $2.6 million in lobbying fees in 2004.
–A bunch of former lobbyists have helped out—including deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand, Teal Baker, and Emmett Beliveau—who could easily slip back onto K Street once the campaign is over. Obama now has 14 bundlers who are also federally registered lobbyists, but they are currently inactive, according to Public Citizen.
NOTE: McCain has 70 bundler-lobbyists.
While both are tied to lobbyists, McCain’s have been more detrimental to America’s economy than Obama’s.
