What's Important 32

Thirty-second in a series.

This one comes from Harold Meyerson's July 17 column:

Whether Americans are even experiencing a downturn has been a matter of some dispute in the McCain camp, since former senator Phil Gramm, until last week one of McCain's chief surrogates on economic issues, deemed America a nation of "whiners" mistaking subjective insecurity over the economy for an objective economic fact. For McCain, who had the misfortune to be campaigning in Michigan the day that Gramm's remarks dominated campaign news, Gramm's insensitivity was appalling. But McCain has never expressed any concern that Gramm wrote the legislation that enabled the $62 trillion credit default swaps market to remain unregulated, which, as David Corn documented in Mother Jones, meant that banks and hedge funds could accumulate liabilities that they could not cover if the markets -- most particularly, the subprime mortgage market -- went south. To the contrary, McCain has viewed Gramm as one of his economic gurus. "There is no one in America that is more respected on the issue of economics than Senator Phil Gramm," McCain declared in February.

Treasury material, perhaps, even...