http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/24/mccain-actually-blocked-c_n_128830.htmlTo those who express doubts about his economic acumen, John McCain has a simple answer: "I was chairman of the Commerce Committee, which oversights all of the commercial aspects of America's economy," he said in a "60 Minutes" interview that aired Sunday.
It's a bit of an exaggeration -- the Senate Commerce Committee doesn't have primary jurisdiction over the financial services industry, which is at the heart of today's economic crisis -- and it's also a more complicated story than McCain's declaration might suggest. ...
One thing is certain: McCain's tenure is not as simple to encapsulate as McCain's economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, tried to make it seem last week, when he held up a BlackBerry and credited its invention to McCain's work on the committee. In fact, McCain voted against key legislation that paved the device's way.
FULL ARTICLE HERE:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13822.html“Being the chair of that committee is very, very important,” said former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt, who served for nine months with McCain at the helm of Commerce and now advises the Obama campaign. “And if it were true that John McCain had championed the opening up of new markets or technology, that would be a good thing. It just is not true.”
BlackBerry creation is not the only questionable claim the McCain campaign has made about his work on the committee.
“Under John McCain’s guiding hand,” his website states, “Congress developed a wireless spectrum policy that spurred the rapid rise of mobile phones and Wi-Fi technology.”
But a former FCC senior staffer, who would talk candidly only if not quoted by name, called this a serious overstatement, noting that the nascent wireless spectrum was first made available in 1985, and that the FCC increased its size for “unlicensed national information infrastructure devices” in January 1997 — just as McCain was assuming the chairmanship.
Experts who have worked with the committee or follow its deliberations paint a picture of McCain’s tenure as unremarkable and sometimes contradictory — and often (but not always) fueled by a deregulatory bent.
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“He tended not to be a leader, strangely enough,” said the Heritage Foundation’s James Gattuso, who covers regulatory issues for the conservative think tank. “You had a lot of initiatives where it would be George Allen or
John Sununu or some other Republican taking on a particular issue. Maybe he was picking his battles carefully, but he wasn’t out front, which was strange.”
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