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Jonathan Martin reports:
Asked what work John McCain did as Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate's top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry."He did this," Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. "Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce committee so you're looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that's what he did."Al Gore, call your office.Attention will be paid here to the fact that John McCain's chief economic adviser is giving him credit for the development of the Blackberry. I think this comes two days after the McCain campaign decided to argue that John McCain's hands were too broken to type, despite the fact that he's often been pictured wielding cell phones and blackberries. They really need to get some intern to draw up a spreadsheet -- or maybe a flowchart -- of the campaign's lies. I'm starting to feel bad for the flacks who have to try and keep it all straight extemporaneously.But folks should also be clear about what Dough Holtz-Eakin is saying: John McCain understands the financial markets because he has worked on telecommunications legislation. Read that again: McCain's understanding of derivatives, security-backed mortgages, and leveraging comes from testimony offered by cable executives who didn't want to be forced into providing a la carte cable offerings or constrained by decency laws. John McCain will, in other words, be ready on day one to crack down on obscenity and nudity on Wall Street.
