It's hard to know where to start in dissecting the inane debate on the economic crisis that has dominated the presidential race in recent days.
Commentators, particularly of the cable television variety, have probed Sarah Palin's (suspect) chops for running a Fortune 500 company, recounted John McCain's (nonexistent) role in inventing the BlackBerry and repeated Barack Obama's (nebulous) bleatings about "change."
Armed with these scraps of near-news, horse-race junkies -- like the terminally hopped-up Chris Matthews of MSNBC -- then launched new rounds of soulless palavering.
Can Obama capture economically disadvantaged whites? Is the bloom off the Palin rose? Can Washington veteran McCain sell himself as a populist reformer? Can Jill Biden dance the samba?
OK, no one actually raised that last one. But they might as well have, given the substance-lite quality of the political coverage as the nation faces its most unsettling financial storm in memory.
Here's a shout out to the few news organizations, led by Bloomberg News, that have set aside the blathering long enough to look at what McCain and Obama actually have done in the past.
Bloomberg reporters Alison Fitzgerald and Christopher Stern found that Obama's record on economic reform was "thin" and that McCain now pledged to become a regulator although he "has spent most of his quarter-century in Congress advocating deregulation."
The Bloomberg reporters detailed how the Arizona senator supported deregulation of the financial services industry in 1999 while, at other times, opposing greater controls on derivatives trading and other measures.
While now talking tough about overpaid executives, the reporters noted that McCain just last year opposed a House measure that would have allowed shareholders to take nonbinding votes on executive pay.
As recently as February, McCain called himself a "deregulator" and argued to "keep government out of these issues and policies."
The Bloomberg story does not leave McCain's cupboard bare on the regulation front. It reports that in 2003, the Republican pushed legislation to "create a new supervisor" for the government-sponsored mortgage lenders that are at the root of much of the current crisis.
But McCain clearly needed more to flesh out his stance as the tough new sheriff of Wall Street.
Fred Barnes on Fox News wondered: "John McCain says he's going to regulate. But what does he have in mind?"
