Though controversial to acknowledge among progressive circles, McCain has displayed fleeting flashes of populist courage at times during his career...Obama, in a shorter career, has shown more populist strength, and far more consistently than McCain who has subsequently tacked back to the Royalist Right in the 2008 presidential campaign (more on that below). As opposed to McCain, Obama has backed up his populism with Senate votes, racking up a reliably progressive record on economic issues and sponsoring legislation attempting to curb the influence of lobbyists. He also is far more comfortable publicly championing the cause of regulation than McCain, who during one of the first aftershocks of the credit crisis, initially proposed doing nothing at all. Most often, action and votes like those of Obama's are more important than McCain's mere words. But a presidency is nothing if not a bully pulpit, so it is at least good that both McCain and Obama are talking more tough.
What should worry us the most is how both candidates have decided not only to build campaign warchests with Wall Street cash, but to personally surround themselves with the very insiders who helped create the current financial crisis in the first place. McCain's campaign, for example, employs an army of lobbyists representing the specific companies now helping pull down the American economy. As the Center for American Progress reports, McCain "has the former lobbyists of AIG, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Bank of America on his campaign staff."
Obama is far better than McCain in that he doesn't employ lobbyists who helped create the culture of corruption that compelled Washington to sit idly by as the economy tanked. However he does rely on a cadre of people who may be ideologically opposed to the forceful kind of New Deal populism that is going to be necessary to address the crisis.
McCain's top economic adviser may be UBS vice-president Phil "Nation of Whiners" Gramm, but Obama's economic guru is UBS's Robert Wolf - Gramm's boss...Despite the two candidates sharing similar ties to Wall Street, Obama is nonetheless better positioned to confront the crisis ahead, both because of his party structure, and his own personal history.
The central organizing force of the Republican Party is fealty to Big Business. While corporate front-groups have certainly impacted the Democratic Party, the party's progressive wing is ascendant. If that wing administers real pressure on Obama, it can successfully provide the political space and capital for Obama to pursue the more aggressive regulatory policies needed to quell this crisis.
Likewise, Obama's roots as a community organizer, civil rights lawyer and progressive lawmaker signal that at some deep level, he appreciates the value of confronting corporate power. By contrast, McCain's most famous experience dealing with the financial industry was his involvement in the Keating Five scandal. As the New York Times reports:
"Several former company executives, as well as current and former Senate Republican staff members, said Mr. McCain seemed to avoid matters related to the financial industry after the last major financial crisis -- the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s. He was one of the 'Keating Five' senators investigated by the Senate, accused of interceding with federal regulators for the operator of a failing thrift."
Obama may not yet be as forceful as FDR and may not have yet articulated a New Deal, but McCain and his Keating Five past all but guarantees that the Arizona senator is no Teddy Roosevelt. While both candidates could be better than the current administration (that's not saying much), one is clearly better equipped to tackle this burgeoning emergency.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/mccain-obama-wall-street_b_126613.html
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