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Rahm Emmanuel is NOT Obama's economic advisor and will not be developing economic policy. The role of Chief of Staff is simply to manage the president's schedule and make sure Cabinet members are functioning as a single unit after policy decisions have been decided upon.

In addition, let's examine McCain's record:
http://andrewspagnoli.newsvine.com/_news/2008/09/2...
"The truth is that contrary to McCain's claims, Obama takes not one penny from Fannie or Freddie Mac. Both McCain and Obama do have small campaign contributions from individual employees as, just as both have gifts from supporters who work for every company out there. Where the campaigns differ is in the big money from top-level executives, and in-house lobbyists who only lobby for Fannie or Freddie Mac. McCain took a staggering $169,000 from the Directors, top executives, and lobbyists who work solely for Fannie and Freddie Mac, while Obama took only $16,000 from this group, less than 9% of McCain's take."

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individu...
"The lobbying firm of the man Republicans say John McCain has chosen to begin planning a presidential transition earned more than a quarter of a million dollars this year representing Freddie Mac, one of the companies McCain blames for the nation's financial crisis. Timmons & Co., whose founder and chairman emeritus is William Timmons Sr., was registered to lobby for Freddie Mac from 2000 through this month, when the federal government took over both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Newly available congressional records show Timmons's firm received $260,000 this year before its lobbying activities were barred under terms of the government rescue of the failed mortgage giant. Timmons, 77, is listed as a lobbyist for Freddie Mac on the company's midyear financial-disclosure form."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/us/politics/22mc...
"Senator John McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, was paid (nearly $2 million) more than $30,000 a month for 5 years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations, current and former officials say.

Last week the McCain campaign stepped up a running battle of guilt by association when it began broadcasting commercials trying to link Mr. Obama directly to the government bailout of the mortgage giants this month by charging that he takes advice from Fannie Mae’s former chief executive, Franklin Raines, an assertion both Mr. Raines and the Obama campaign dispute. Incensed by the advertisements, several current and former executives of the companies came forward to discuss the role that Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager and longtime adviser, played in helping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac beat back regulatory challenges when he served as president of their advocacy group, the Homeownership Alliance, formed in the summer of 2000. Mr. Davis drew Mr. McCain to a 2004 awards banquet that the companies’ Homeownership Alliance held in a Senate office building. The organization printed a photograph of Mr. McCain at the event in its 2004 annual report, bolstering its clout and credibility.

'You can say what you want about free-market distortions, but people like the system because it gets them into houses cheap,' Mr. Davis said to Institutional Investor magazine in 2000."

http://washingtonindependent.com/7169/mccain-advis...
"Last week, though, McCain's trust in Davis was tested again amid disclosures that Freddie Mac, the troubled mortgage giant that was recently placed under federal conservatorship, paid his campaign manager's firm $15,000 a month between 2006 and August 2008. As the mortgage crisis has escalated, almost any association with Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae has become politically toxic. But the payments to Davis's firm, Davis Manafort, are especially problematic because he requested the consulting retainer in 2006—and then did barely any work for the fees.

As to why Davis permitted the Freddie Mac payments to continue, the official referred NEWSWEEK to Davis Manafort, which did not respond to repeated phone calls. One senior McCain adviser said the entire flap could have been avoided if the campaign had resisted attacking Barack Obama for his ties to two former Fannie Mae executives, which prompted the media to take a second look at Davis. 'It was stupid,' the adviser said. 'A serious miscalculation and an amateurish move.'"

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/w...
"Freddie Mac secretly paid a consulting firm $2 million to kill legislation that would have regulated the mortgage finance giant and its sister company, Fannie Mae, three years before the government took control to prevent their collapse. Republican senators and a regulatory overhaul bill sponsored by Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., were targeted by the firm DCI of Washington. DCI's chief executive is Doug Goodyear, whom John McCain's campaign later hired to manage the GOP convention in September.

During DCI's yearlong effort, Mr. Hagel and 25 other Republican senators pleaded unsuccessfully with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., to allow a vote. Unknown to the senators, DCI was undermining support for the bill in a campaign aimed at 17 Republican senators in 13 states. In the end, there was not enough Republican support for Mr. Hagel's bill to bring it up for a vote."

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/20...
"The occasion that prompted McCain’s involvement was the release of a 340-page report from the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight that concluded that Fannie Mae had manipulated earnings and violated basic accounting principles. So, while it’s true that McCain spoke out — after a widely read report drew attention to chicanery at the firms. But the implication in McCain's remarks is that his remarks in 2006 were in some way a warning about the financial markets disaster that struck in 2008. That strikes us as quite a stretch.

First of all, congressional efforts to increase oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac extend back to the early 1990s, making McCain a latecomer to the debate.

Second in his appearances, McCain tries to connect the accounting scandals with the broader meltdown in the mortgage markets. But the current crisis arose because banks and mortgage companies made risky “subprime” loans to people with poor credit histories that were then packaged into securities and sold to institutional investors. As interest rates rose and home prices began to fall, homeowners unable to refinance the loans or sell their properties began to default, unleashing a cascade effect through financial markets. That phenomenon had nothing to do with Fannie and Freddie’s internal problems; in fact, both firms were praised for cushioning the financial free fall and keeping the market afloat by spending billions of dollars to purchase subprime loans.

Third, even if the 2006 effort to strengthen oversight had succeeded, it’s debatable whether it would have averted the subprime crisis. The extent of the problems was not yet fully known, and it’s a leap of faith to suggest that regulators granted expanded power would have noticed a deterioration in Fannie and Freddie’s loan portfolios soon enough and would have sounded an alarm.

We give McCain some credit for weighing in on problems surrounding Fannie Mae, even though he got involved after a comprehensive government report issued a loud alarm to anyone watching. However, his attempts to depict those efforts as some sort of early warning that could have lessened the current credit crisis just don't wash. All McCain was talking about then was the potential fallout of accounting troubles in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He didn't say anything about a freewheeling climate among creditors that had major financial institutions becoming badly leveraged on bad loans. We rule his claim Barely True."

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/99234/mccain_ena...
"John McCain has been a master of the special-interest giveaways to Wall Street that enabled this meltdown. He voted for abolishing all of the significant rules put in place at the time of the Great Depression designed to prevent a repeat. The two main bills accomplishing that, bills which McCain enthusiastically supported, were the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. The Gramm is former Sen. Phil Gramm, who was chair of the Senate Banking Committee when he acted as chief sponsor of both pieces of legislation. The same Gramm that McCain picked to co-chair his presidential campaign.

Gramm proved an embarrassment when he cavalierly insisted there was no real crisis but only the panic of 'whiners,' but even on Monday as his 'Crisis' ad ran, McCain, in person, was still denying that there was one. 'The fundamentals of our economy are strong,' he told NBC's Matt Lauer.

Barack Obama has been way ahead of McCain in grasping the severity of the problem and back in March offered a scorching criticism of the deregulation mania, in particular the Gramm-Leach-Bliley law, which allowed the stockbrokers, insurance companies and banks to merge for the first time since the 1930s, ushering in this era of irresponsibility."

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/campaign-2008/...
"The flip: McCain, a longtime deregulator, supported a 1999 bill authored by Sen. Phil Gramm that stripped away years of stringent banking regulations. Gramm is a longtime McCain friend and economic adviser. The flop: Amid a $700 billion bailout of financial institutions, McCain is calling for more oversight. The bottom line: With 90 votes in the Senate, the banking bill was bipartisan. Times have changed, but McCain's advocacy of deregulation—including a 1990s push for a moratorium on all new regulation—has been consistent."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic...
"A decade ago, Sen. John McCain embraced legislation to broadly deregulate the banking and insurance industries, helping to sweep aside a thicket of rules established over decades in favor of a less restricted financial marketplace that proponents said would result in greater economic growth.

Now, as the Bush administration scrambles to prevent the collapse of the American International Group (AIG), the nation's largest insurance company, and stabilize a tumultuous Wall Street, the Republican presidential nominee is scrambling to recast himself as a champion of regulation to end 'reckless conduct, corruption and unbridled greed' on Wall Street. McCain hopes to tap into anger among voters who are looking for someone to blame for the economic meltdown that threatens their home values, bank accounts and 401(k) plans. But his past support of congressional deregulation efforts and his arguments against 'government interference' in the free market by federal, state and local officials have given Sen. Barack Obama an opening to press the advantage Democrats traditionally have in times of economic trouble.

In 2002, McCain introduced a bill to deregulate the broadband Internet market, warning that 'the potential for government interference with market forces is not limited to federal regulation.' Three years earlier, McCain had joined with other Republicans to push through landmark legislation sponsored by then-Sen. Phil Gramm (Tex.), who is now an economic adviser to his campaign. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act aimed to make the country's financial institutions competitive by removing the Depression-era walls between banking, investment and insurance companies. That bill allowed AIG to participate in the gold rush of a rapidly expanding global banking and investment market. But the legislation also helped pave the way for companies such as AIG and Lehman Brothers to become behemoths laden with bad loans and investments.

McCain now condemns the executives at those companies for pursuing the ambitions that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act made possible, saying that 'in an endless quest for easy money, they dreamed up investment schemes that they themselves don't even understand.'

McCain has usually reverted to the role of an unabashed deregulator. In 2007, he told a group of bloggers on a conference call that he regretted his vote on the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, which has been castigated by many executives as too heavy-handed. In the 1990s, he backed an unsuccessful effort to create a moratorium on all new government regulation. And in 1996, he was one of only five senators to oppose a comprehensive telecommunications act, saying it did not go far enough in deregulating the industry.

'I'm always for less regulation,' McCain told the Wall Street Journal in March. He added: 'I'd like to see a lot of the unnecessary government regulations eliminated.'"

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