For All the Marbles

Okay, let's roll up our sleeves and look at what each side is saying about the candidates' track records, starting with the left. Josh Marshall:

"Let me get this straight. John McCain's top economic advisor, former Sen. Phil Gramm, is the guy who authored the deregulation law that most agree is the ultimate cause of today's financial meltdown. Tomorrow's and probably next week's too. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. John Thain, CEO of Merrill Lynch, which swirled into brokerage oblivion today, is one of McCain's top economic advisors too. And now McCain says he's going to clean up the mess by putting in tighter regulations and oversight even though he's always supported lax oversight and his top economics guy is the one who loosened the rules in the first place."

Josh must be part of Gramm's "nation of whiners."

At Time's Swampland, Joe Klein weighs in:

"McCain has been a happily orthodox Republican when it comes to financial regulation these past 26 years. He's against it. He's against Washington telling you how to run your business. The unseen hand of the market and all that...

"This has been the long-standing Republican bait and switch--scaring small businesses with the threat of new regulations if the Democrats win, commiserating with larger businesses about the evils of environmental and plant safety rules, while lifting as many regulations as possible governing the financial titans whose credit should be at the heart of new economic development. But that hasn't been happening: the financial titans have been going for the quick buck rather than the sound one. Money and creativity have been redirected during the Reagan-Bush era away from substantive loans to real businesses into a Ponzi scheme of borrowing by investment bankers, so they could engage in the most irresponsible, if lucrative (for them) speculative lending imaginable."

Time now to turn it over to the right. Pejman Yousefzadeh at Red State:

"This problem now has a political dimension to it, with Barack Obama claiming that this situation is directly the result of Republican economic policies and that it represents the worst fix since the Great Depression. Of course, one strains to figure out how it is possible that the Bush administration can be responsible for the fact that various investment banks decided to try to get a piece of the subprime mortgage pie, but under the leadership of the 'reality-based community,' we are supposed to believe that the government has the power to influence private sector investments -- or that it should. Amusing.

"On the 'Great Depression' point, perhaps Obama has forgotten the Carter years, when inflation, unemployment and interest rates were in double digits. But then, since every Republican president is accused of being a latter-day Herbert Hoover -- really, don't they have a macro for this accusation by now? -- this latter non-substantive talking point should come as no surprise whatsoever."

At Pajamas Media, Rick Moran says the left is overdramatizing the bad news:

"Obama-supporting websites had access to an online thesaurus or two which they were able to comb for exactly the right apocalyptic language that would freeze the blood while getting the point across that John McCain was at fault by reason of his association with George Bush and that it was time to make sure the windows on those Wall Street skyscrapers were suicide-proofed . . .

"I suppose a little hyperbole can't be helped when the situation is unprecedented. But to read some commentary by partisans on the left, one would think the apocalypse is upon us and it's just a matter of time before Mr. Potter takes over the Building and Loan while we're all thrown out on the street with nary a farthing to our name."