John McCain has more gimmicks than a bad sales pitch. After picking Sarah Palin in a move that was as purely political as possible, McCain decided to “suspend” his campaign to work with Congress on the bailout plan. Is this the same McCain who just months ago told us that he really didn’t know all that much about the economy? What, then, does he have to contribute to such a convoluted situation?

McCain worked on economic issues in the past. The problem is that he spent his time on these issues arguing for deregulation of just about everything. Deregulation is probably the single largest contributor to the current financial debacle we find ourselves in, not to mention a number of scandals, such as Enron and WorldCom, that were largely the result of deregulated markets. In the case of Enron and WorldCom, the markets were energy and telecommunications. In the current situation, the deregulation of financial markets is largely to blame. Fannie and Freddie are now being probed by the FBI in potential mortgage fraud cases. What have been the benefits of the deregulation McCain argued for?

Now McCain has backed away from his deregulation stance, but if he’s just figuring it out now, at 72 I have to say that he’s an extremely slow learner. Despite this change of heart, he still advocates a tax policy that would probably sound the death knell of our economy. We don’t need another president who figures out the right way to do something after he’s already done it wrong.

Joshua Cyr

Bangor