With Wall Street reeling and taxpayers on the hook for a $700 billion bailout, the economy has emerged as a key issue in Maine's U.S. Senate race between Rep. Tom Allen and Sen. Susan Collins.

Allen is pumping out campaign ads that blame the Bush administration and its supporters in Congress – including Collins, the Republican incumbent – for plunging the nation into a financial crisis. In an ad of her own, Collins accuses Allen, a Democrat, of voting against financial regulatory reforms.

Economists say that neither candidate is painting a full picture of the problem. They say that there's plenty of blame to go around and that the nation's fiscal problems reflect a long-running free-market orientation at the federal level.

"I think there's been an ideological climate that has been developing for several decades," said David Wihry, a registered Democrat and professor emeritus at the University of Maine's School of Economics. "It started with Jimmy Carter, and even Bill Clinton was that way. ... I think it kind of reached a peak under the Bush administration, but it's tough to point at particular pieces of legislation."

Allen, who trails Collins by about 10 percentage points in the most recent polls, has released three television ads since Sept. 29 highlighting the Bush administration's economic policies. Some of the ads point out that Collins voted for the Bush tax cuts of 2001, 2003 and 2006.

"George Bush and his allies in Congress have crippled America's economy," one ad says. "Susan Collins supported the Bush economic policies that have hurt working Mainers."

David A. Aschauer, an economics professor at Bates College, sees very little connection between the Bush tax cuts and the credit-market problems that are paralyzing Wall Street.

He points to legislation signed during the Clinton administration, in 1999, that overturned a Depression-era law separating commercial and investment banking activities. The move allowed banks to take greater risks.

"One could argue that that contributed to the present situation," Aschauer said. "So it's not balanced to say that it's just Bush."

Another key factor, he said, has been the federal policy of promoting homeownership for as many Americans as possible, which in turn has fed a policy among banks and mortgage companies of liberalized lending.

"That, again, started in the 1990s, so there is shared (political) responsibility there, too," said Aschauer, an unenrolled voter.

David W. Findlay, a Republican who teaches economics at Colby College, said the Bush administration "on a number of different levels" has not been successful. "However, I think it's a mistake to argue that it was Bush administration policies that brought us to this," he said.

Like Aschauer, Findlay sees the roots of the crisis in the climate of deregulation that transcends presidential administrations and political parties. He says some experts have also criticized Federal Reserve policies that drove interest rates to historically low levels in 2001 and 2002, fueling a housing boom and making it much easier for subprime mortgage holders, who might not qualify for conventional loans because of their incomes or other characteristics, to borrow and refinance loans.

Findlay said he understands why Allen, as a Senate candidate, would want to lay the blame at the feet of the Bush administration and Republicans.

"But that's politically expedient, and that's not the prime reason we are where we are," he said.

Collins, in a response to the Allen campaign's move to link her with the financial crisis, released a radio ad last weekend claiming that Allen voted against stronger financial regulation. The ad does not specify what the regulation was, but Collins spokesman Kevin Kelley said the ad refers to the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2005.

Congressional records show that Allen...