Video: New Obama ad, George Will question McCain’s handling of financial crisis

On Tuesday, Bloomberg’s Washington executive editor, Albert R. Hunt, wrote that one presidential candidate showed a “steady hand” in dealing with the crisis in financial markets — and it wasn’t John McCain. It’s a theme that’s getting traction, with Barack Obama running a new ad pointing out McCain’s failings and conservative columnist George Will piling on.

Hunt wrote that McCain “won the soundbite war” on September 15, by decrying corporate greed on Wall Street, but things quickly “went downhill as he stumbled over his record of championing deregulation, claimed the economy was fundamentally strong, and flip-flopped” over the government takeover of AIG. But more telling is that Barack Obama, while less visibly outraged, turned to former Fed chair Paul Volcker and former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers.  McCain called up Reagan economic advisor Martin Feldstein (“ineffective”), Stanford’s John Taylor (who “left few footprints” as undersecretary of the Treasury) and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina (“to put it charitably, Rubin will forget more about financial markets than she’ll ever know”). Hunt characterizes the choices as a towering “mismatch.”

This morning, Will looks at McCain’s grace under pressure and contends that in his response to the crisis McCain is “behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high .” He writes:

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that “McCain untethered” — disconnected from knowledge and principle — had made a “false and deeply unfair” attack on Cox that was “unpresidential” and demonstrated that McCain “doesn’t understand what’s happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does.”

In conclusion, Will wonders if McCain’s “dismaying temperament” can be fixed. He writes, “It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency.”

Naturally, the Obama campaign wonders the same thing. In a new video (above), it looks at an article John McCain wrote for the Sept./Oct. issue of Contingencies magazine that praised Wall Street deregulation and calls for relaxing regulations that govern the healthcare industry (PDF). It closes with a tagline that’s resonant with Will’s wonderment about the Republican’s temperament: “John McCain: A risk we just can’t afford to take.”