The most contentious campaign of the year isn't between Obama and Clinton, it's over the legacy of Alan Greenspan.

The former Federal Reserve chairman is an astute politician. And so, even without a book to promote, he is making another big public push, spinning his view in the wake of the rescue of Bear Stearns and moves by Congress to deal with the housing crisis. In an opinion article in the Financial Times on Monday and in an article based on a series of interviews with Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal, Greenspan defends his record, contending he is being wrongly blamed for the credit crisis.

Critics, he says, are ignoring the factors that led the Fed to cut interest rates under his leadership and are being selective about the record in second-guessing him.

"I was praised for things I didn't do," Mr. Greenspan tells the Journal. "I am now being blamed for things that I didn't do."

Greenspan tells the Journal that he was "wrong about the improbability of a housing bubble."

"Yet he has long maintained that bubbles are an unavoidable feature of a dynamic economy," the Journal says. "No sensible policy, he maintains, could have prevented the housing bubble."

His critics are not being swayed by the latest from the stump. Barry Ritholtz of the Big Picture blog, who describes him as "the grand architect of a Fed era which will forever be known for easy money and nonregulation," says "Alan Greenspan seems to be hell-bent on destroying what little reputation he has left."

The main argument against Greenspan is that the Fed failed in its regulatory oversight at a time when financial institutions' holdings of opaque, over-the-counter derivatives ballooned.

The Institutional Risk Analysts, discussing the failure of Bear Stearns, notes, "by replacing exchange-traded securities with ersatz O.T.C. instruments, Greenspan and the quant economists who dominate the Fed's Washington staff have created vast systemic risk that need not exist at all and that now threatens our entire financial system."