McCain: Witness for the Prosecution

For the 9/11-like Commission he wants to study the Wall Street collapse, John McCain could well be the star witness about failure of government regulation to prevent chaos in the financial industry.

His actions as a member of the Keating Five in the 1980s, which the Senate Ethics Committee later labeled "poor judgment," were the start of two decades of McCain opposition to controlling the excesses he is now denouncing on the campaign trail.

Like the Washington insiders he is now promising to rein in, McCain took heavy campaign contributions from Savings and Loan operator Charles H. Keating, accepted free trips to Keating's Bahamas vacation retreat and saw his family turn a profit from an investment his wife and father-in-law made with Keating.

In return, McCain worked hard to delay and divert government action against Keating, who later went to jail for fraud and whose S&L bailout cost taxpayers more than $124 billion.

Now here he is in 2008, promising to reform what he was so deeply involved in and expecting voters to believe that he and Sarah Palin will ride in as mavericks to clean it all up.

In 2000, the Bush-Rove gang used a push poll about the Keating Scandal in the South Carolina primary to blemish McCain's straight-talk campaigning. Obama won't stoop to that, but voters with short memories should remember McCain's own record on corruption before swallowing his promises to shake up the way Washington does business.

Beyond the Bailout

The Republican mantra--government bad, free markets good--is taking a beating in the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailout as both presidential candidates approve the Treasury's action to keep the housing and financial markets from going over a cliff but, in this personality-driven election, voters won't pay much attention to the issue.

Barack Obama is understandably reluctant to talk about the Bush Administration's and Congress' lack of oversight that led to the fiasco for fear of being attacked as a proponent of Big Government. John McCain, with his Keating Five background, will avoid the subject and keep pounding away at "business as usual" in Washington.

But behind all the clichés, the bailout should prompt some serious thinking about the balance between freedom and responsibility in a capitalist system that has made the nation prosperous but can cause chaos when all regulation is seen as bad and the cowboys of the financial world are free to do whatever they want.

Only the oldest of American generations now remembers the bank closures and panic of the 1930s even as the FDIC's problem bank list grows larger each month. The others don't know what a run on the local bank looks like, except from watching Jimmy Stewart in "It's a Wonderful Life."

At some point, in the presidential debates about change, the candidates should be pressed for straight talk about the role and size of government needed to keep Americans both free and secure.