Can we afford McCain?
By Peggy Sannerud | Winona

It is true that Sen. John McCain’s career in the Senate has given him something Sen. Barack Obama does not have — a reprimand from the Senate Ethics Committee for exercising “poor judgment.”

In the mid-1980s, a savings and loan banker named Charles Keating made generous contributions to McCain’s campaign fund, and provided family vacations and other perks. What did Keating get in return? McCain voted repeatedly against congressional efforts to tighten regulation of savings and loan associations. Keating went to prison for substituting worthless uninsured bonds for his customers’ federally insured savings, and more than 23,000 Lincoln Savings and Loan customers lost their entire savings. Eventually, nearly $125 billion of taxpayer money was spent to bail out the Savings and Loan failures.
As the Los Angeles Times editor Rosa Brooks recently wrote: “The $125 billion seems like small change compared to the $700-billion price tag for the Bush administration’s proposed Wall Street bailout. But the root causes of both crises are the same: a lethal mix of deregulation and greed.”

Deregulation has been one of McCain’s sure bets all this time. It didn’t work then, and it isn’t working now. Can we afford a president who does not learn from his own poor judgment? Can we afford to forget this incident, as we watch it all happen again?

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