The general co-chairman of John McCains presidential campaign, former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), led the charge in 1999 to repeal a Depression-era banking regulation law that Democrat Barack Obama claimed on Thursday contributed significantly to todays economic turmoil.A regulatory structure set up for banks in the 1930s needed to change because the nature of business had changed, the Illinois senator running for president said in a New York economic speech. But by the time [it] was repealed in 1999, the $300 million lobbying effort that drove deregulation was more about facilitating mergers than creating an efficient regulatory framework. \n\nGramms role in the swift and dramatic recent restructuring of the nations investment houses and practices didnt stop there. \n\nA year after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed the old regulations, Swiss Bank UBS gobbledup brokerage house Paine Weber. Two years later, Gramm settled in as a vice chairman of UBSs new investment banking arm. \n\nLater, he became a major player in its government affairs operation. According to federal lobbying disclosure records, Gramm lobbied Congress, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department about banking and mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006. ad, biden, democrat, gramm, mccain, obama, palin, republican