QOTD

From John Berlau in Reason magazine:

In the presidential debates, Obama charged that McCain "believes in deregulation in every circumstance" and claimed, "That's what we've been going through for the last eight years."

And as a contrast to the last eight years, Obama said in a speech that his administration would go back to the "shared prosperity...when Bill Clinton was president." When campaigning for the first time with Bill Clinton at a Florida rally in late October, Obama gushed that, "in case all of you forgot, this is what it's like to have a great president."

But now that he has won the presidency and must, as the cliché goes, shift from campaigning to governing, Obama and his economic team will have to face up to a paradox that most of the media overlooked during the campaign. Namely, the Obama campaign's twin messages of bashing deregulation and embracing the Clinton years were inherently contradictory. Bill Clinton signed nearly every deregulatory measure that John McCain backed--the same measures that are now being blamed (wrongly) for helping cause the current crisis. What's more, Clinton administration officials have credited these policies for contributing to the ‘90s economic boom--the very "shared prosperity" that Obama says he wants to go back to.

(via Instapundit)