As chairman, McCain left mixed legacy

By: Daniel Libit

To 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.

McCain wielded the gavel at the Commerce Committee from 1997 to 2001 and again from 2005 to 2007. Supporters credit him with being open-minded and say he ran the committee with a steady, moderate hand during his stints in the chair. But critics who worked with the committee at the time contend that McCain avoided policy debates and sometimes seemed apathetic — and that his staff was too cozy with lobbyists.

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.

“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.

“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 [former Sen.] George Allen or [Sen.] John Sununu or some other Republican taking [the lead] on a particular issue. Maybe he was picking his battles carefully, but he wasn’t out front, which was strange.”

Gattuso described McCain’s approach to issues as principled and flexible. Others say he was a populist deregulator.

“I think his tenure is similar to statements he’s made on the economy,” said Ivan Schlager, a former committee staff director who now is a lobbyist at Skadden, Arps. “He’s a deregulator, but when he sees where government should intervene, or people have gotten greedy, he has a populist streak to him.”

Harold Furchtgott-Roth, who served as FCC commissioner from 1997 to 2001, agrees that McCain has been “more consistent for deregulation than a lot of other politicians.” But he warns against drawing too straight of a line between McCain’s deregulatory bent on the Commerce Committee and his general stance on the idea of regulation.

Michael Powell, who served as FCC commissioner from 2001 to 2005 and now advises the McCain campaign, agrees.

McCain’s “free market philosophies, if I was to make an interpretation, I don’t even think they were always some grand philosophical view,” Powell said. “I think he tended to be skeptical of regulators and their effectiveness. I think he was very strongly bent to putting the burden of proof on government officials.”

With authority over a wide swath of American economic interests, the Commerce Committee is considered one of the less partisan outfits in Congress. Typically, it is made up of members from the more rural states, often those in the West.

“It’s a practical committee,” said former Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.), who relinquished the chairmanship to McCain in 1997. Although Pressler generally supported greater regulation than did McCain, he praised his successor, saying McCain “followed the path of moderation, as far as I could see.”

Although the Obama campaign has gleefully showcased a few McCain gaffes to question his grasp of economics, Pressler said McCain’s experience as committee chairman gave him a good understanding of the economy.

“I think he knows the economy well,” Pressler said. “He has been exposed to all the telecommunication and transportation issues.”

McCain first joined the committee in 1987. Before becoming chairman in 1997, he had a reputation as one of the panel’s irrepressible grumblers. He struck some observers as volatile and irritable.

“He would come in and get angry and, you know, sometimes tongue lash the witnesses or other members, and then he would leave,” said Hundt, the former FCC chairman.

“I remember when he became chair,” said Gattuso, “and it was like, how could anybody imagine John McCain in that position?”

But Hundt and others said elevation to the chairmanship mollified McCain — perhaps to a fault. At times, they said, he seemed aloof.

“He never engaged in policy,” said a former well-placed Democratic Senate staffer. “When he was chairman, everything was voice-voted out of committee and never saw the light of day again.”

Hundt said that at the start of his chairmanship, McCain expressed a willingness to let the FCC chairman operate with relative independence, which Hundt took as an encouraging sign.

“What he didn’t tell me is his staff is buddy-buddy with some of the most well-known lobbyists in town,” Hundt charged, “and they would beat me up. It didn’t strike me as unusual, but it wasn’t Mr. Maverick either.”

Powell disputes Hundt’s characterization and says that McCain never pressured him unfairly.

“He was so cautious about that ever since the Keating Five,” Powell said.

Democrats are apt to give McCain higher marks on consumer safety issues, where they say he tempered his deregulatory instincts.

His most significant piece of legislation as chairman was a tough anti-tobacco bill that he crafted but that was defeated in 1998. In 2000, he pushed through a bill on “digital signatures,” and in 2003, during his second term as chairman, McCain teamed up with Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman — then a Democrat, now an independent — on a bill to reduce carbon emissions. That bill failed to pass the Senate.

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