The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

The Tennessee Senator & [former Chattanooga mayor] was at the NewsChannel9 studios Tuesday morning for a satellite interview with the Fox Business Channel; we interviewed him briefly after that, & though I was not the “main interviewer,” I did manage to get some questions in.

In your conversation with Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne back in May, you warned your party against making personal attacks against the Democratic presidential nominee, saying it actually hurt your 2006 Senate campaign. Do you still stand by that warning?

SENATOR CORKER: What I was warning against is these third-party groups that get involved, & they think they’re assisting you, OK? In our case it was the Republican National Committee that ran ads at the end of our race, uh, quote “trying to help us.” & instead over a 6-day period, they knocked us down by 10 points. & what I was saying is, that, you know, that in these campaigns you need to ask your friends not to run any kind of negative ads about your opponent, because they have unintended consequences. If the campaign itself wants to draw distinctions, I think that’s something the campaign should do, but again, these 3rd-party groups can do things that just totally adversely affect your campaign. It’s one of the results of McCain-Feingold. & I think it’s just totally out of control. I think certainly Tennessee’s not a battleground state, OK? & we’re not seeing a lot of ads here - it’d be a total waste of money in the state. But I’m sure that in the other states like Ohio & places that are battleground states, they’re having all kinds of 3rd-party ads run in those states, that have by the way all kinds of unintended consequences. & so, what I talked about to E.J. Dionne, & what I’ve talked about to others is the fact that these 3rd-party ads can be very detrimental.

Is free-market fundamentalism dead?

SENATOR CORKER: No, not at all. Look, you know, if you think about what happens every day in our banking system, the Federal Reserve opens the window if you will, & banks in essence put up collateral, & receive monies from the Fed, & so, every day there’s intervention, if you will, there’s a coordinated effort from central banks to keep our financial systems operating. This is a very exacerbated situation where excesses occurred, I don’t think people understood that there was potentially $55 trillion dollars of these derivatives that were getting ready to bring the system down. What we need to do is implement what happened properly & then come back in January & put in place reforms. I think most people understand there needs to be appropriate regulation. There was not appropriate regulation as it relates to these derivatives. I think we’ll get that straightened out over the course of this next year. I do not think that ‘free-market fundamentalism’ if you will is gone at all, I think we’ve always had it, whether it’s the airline industry, the fact that we have the F-A-A that coordinates people landing, there’s always a certain amount of government involvement. Hopefully it stays limited & as an advocate of limited government I certainly want to see that be the case. But today we had a very exacerbated problem that to me needed to be solved, our whole way of doing business was gonna come down. As you know I’ve supported that & have been very involved in negotiating taxpayer protections & oversight if you will that have come into play in this case & then I hope we can move very quickly away from this active involvement towards a regulatory regime that keeps this from happening again. But great question. Thank you.