WPost on McCain’s History of Support for Deregulation

Expect to hear a lot about this from the Obama campaign over the next few weeks.

See the front page article at today’s Washington Post, detailing McCain’s reaction to the Wall Street bailout. As the article reports, before McCain was for regulation and “reforming Wall Street,” he was a leader against it.

In 2007, he told a group of bloggers on a conference call that he regretted his vote on the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, which has been castigated by many executives as too heavy-handed.

In the 1990s, he backed an unsuccessful effort to create a moratorium on all new government regulation. And in 1996, he was one of only five senators to oppose a comprehensive telecommunications act, saying it did not go far enough in deregulating the industry.

As chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee for more than a decade, McCain did not have direct oversight of the financial sector. But he sat at the center of arguments between telephone, cable and satellite companies, almost always pressing for more competition.

“I’m always for less regulation,” he told the Wall Street Journal in March. He added: “I’d like to see a lot of the unnecessary government regulations eliminated.”