John McCain: No Al Gore

Sure, it's fun to rip the McCain campaign because his economic adviser said he helped create the Blackberry, which happens to be a device invented in Canada. And it's maddening to remember all the bullshit Al Gore had to deal with when he made the same basic claim about the Internet. But the situations are different in a couple telling ways.

On the one hand, McCain didn't actually say this. Doug Holtz-Eakin did. So McCain, unlike Al Gore, could plausibly walk away from it.* But he likely won't have to. Because unlike Republicans who in the aftermath of the Al Gore comment talked relentlessly about his 'exaggerations', Democrats will go meta. Instead of creating a controversy, they'll marvel at how ironic it is that the press isn't holding McCain to the Gore standard--failing to realize that the media is a reactive beast and was responding in Gore's case to the Republicans' cooked-up outrage.

On a more substantive level, though, the Democrats have plenty to work with here if they want to. I know that when Al Gore was on the chopping block, the Republicans thought it was worth misinforming the American public about the way its government and regulatory systems work, but as senior senators, both Gore and McCain did/do have more power than most mere mortals to influence the direction of markets and so on. And, of course, it turned out that Al Gore really did play a significant role in creating a policy framework that brought the Internet into homes across the country.

So it bears asking, as Senate Commerce chair from 1997-2001, what were John McCain's major contributions to the country's often-backward and behind-the-times telecommunications infrastructure and industry norms, and how did his experience there affect his understanding of our financial markets?

*=aaaand the McCain campaign just walked away from it.