Harold Meyerson says that McCain’s ties to Phil Gramm are more troubling than Obama’s to Ayers.
Gramm’s piece de resistance came on Dec. 15, 2000, when he slipped into an omnibus spending bill a provision called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which prohibited any governmental regulation of credit default swaps, those insurance policies covering losses on securities in the event they went belly up.
The provision of the bill at issue came out of a Clinton administration working group on financial regulation. The idea that Gramm sprang it on an unsuspecting administration that accidentally signed the bill is pure invention. Meyerson also, naturally, repeats the long-discredited canard that Gramm is responsible for setting Enron free to wreak havoc. The Washington Post had to run a correction on this claim years ago; I hope it does so again.
Meyerson’s defense of Obama’s ties to Ayers, meanwhile, is that the connection was made only because Obama joined the political establishment of his city. Not much of a defense, I should think: If your city’s establishment includes crooks and unrepentant terrorists, joining it is not a morally neutral act.