From Politico’s Jonathan Martin:

Asked what work John McCain did as chair­man of the Senate Com­merce Com­mit­tee that helped him under­stand the finan­cial mar­kets, the candidate’s top eco­nomic adviser wielded visual evi­dence: his BlackBerry.

“He did this,” Dou­glas Holtz-​Eakin told reporters this morn­ing, hold­ing up his Black­Berry. “Telecommunications of the United States is a pre­mier inno­va­tion in the past 15 years, comes right through the Com­merce Com­mit­tee. So you’re look­ing at the mir­a­cle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”

The McCain cam­paign, fear­ing an Al Gore moment, quickly tried to explain Holtz-Eakin’s com­ment away as a joke, but ABC News’s Ron Clai­borne told Jake Tapper that it was noth­ing of the kind:

McCain may be making light of it, but it was not joke as told by Holtz-​Eakin. Just the oppo­site, he was seri­ous, emphatic and even a little defen­sive when he said it.