Two fuses were lit this past week that could eventually explode later in John McCain's campaign -- a housing-banking crisis exposing Republican anti-regulation orthodoxy and the senator's penchant for falsehoods that gives new meaning to Bush III.

First, the modern anti-regulation crusade began officially in 1978 with enactment of Prop-13 in California limiting property taxes and the defeat of the federal Consumer Protection Agency in Congress as "more big government." And then of course Reagan rode this deregulatory movement -- "Government is not the solution... Government is the problem" -- to the White House two years later.

Now cut to 1995 when two events combined to start a counteraction: Speaker Newt Gingrich's unpopular shut-down of the federal government during a budget battle with President Clinton and the attack in Oklahoma City by domestic terrorists who killed people precisely because they were federal workers. Responded Clinton, "I'll never criticize 'bureaucrats' again."

When Barack Obama first met Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation magazine, he
said, "Remember, the perfect is the enemy of the good." So in a week when the
conversation is rising about what the left should properly do when the presumptive
nominee appears to emphasize his moderate side, I'd like to excerpt at greater length
than usual in our weekly 7 Days in America blog an interesting conversation about
this with John Kerry -- it's always instructive when the '04 Democratic nominee
analyzes the '08 Democratic nominee -- and with the ubiquitous two leading ladies of
the left, Arianna and Katrina.

Three points first.

*The two most successful Democratic politicians on the past century, the only two to
win the presidency more than once, were renowned for their ability to keep options
open with strategic ambiguity. FDR and Bill Clinton often infuriated their supporters
and staff. But they figured out how to win and govern in a country more to the right
than our European parents.