21st
& 22nd July, 2008
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Photo by Jay Hagan,
7/12/08 Burbank, CA
A Thought for Today
If getting there is “half the fun” does
that mean going back is the other half?
TO BEGIN WITH
Frank Rich is one of the most concerned journalists we have and he never
hesitates to tell it the way he believes it is. Here’s his POV from this
past Sunday.
POINT OF VIEW
IT’S THE ECONOMIC STUPIDITY, STUPID
By Frank Rich
Published: New York Times, July 20, 2008
Frank Rich
THE best thing to happen to John McCain was for the three network
anchors to leave him in the dust this week while they chase Barack Obama
on his global Lollapalooza tour. Were voters forced to actually focus on
Mr. McCain’s response to our spiraling economic crisis at home, the
prospect of his ascension to the Oval Office could set off a panic that
would make the IndyMac Bank bust in Pasadena look as merry as the Rose
Bowl.
“In a time of war,” Mr. McCain said last week, “the commander in chief
doesn’t get a learning curve.” Fair enough, but he imparted this wisdom
in a speech that was almost a year behind Mr. Obama in recognizing
Afghanistan as the central front in the war against Al Qaeda. Given that
it took the deadliest Taliban suicide bombing in Kabul since 9/11 to get
Mr. McCain’s attention, you have to wonder if even General Custer’s
learning curve was faster than his.
Mr. McCain still doesn’t understand that we can’t send troops to
Afghanistan unless they’re shifted from Iraq. But simple math, to put it
charitably, has never been his forte. When it comes to the central front
of American anxiety — the economy — his learning curve has flat-lined.
In 2000, he told an interviewer that he would make up for his lack of
attention to “those issues.” As he entered the 2008 campaign, Mr. McCain
was still saying the same, vowing to read “Greenspan’s book” as a
tutorial. Last weekend, the resolutely analog candidate told The New
York Times he is at last starting to learn how “to get online myself.”
Perhaps he’ll retire his abacus by Election Day.
GRAMM CRACKER
Mr. McCain’s fiscal ineptitude has received so little scrutiny in some
press quarters that his chief economic adviser, the former Senator Phil
Gramm of Texas, got a free pass until the moment he self-immolated on
video by whining about “a nation of whiners.” The McCain-Gramm bond,
dating back 15 years, is more scandalous than Mr. Obama’s connection
with his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Mr. McCain has been so
dependent on Mr. Gramm for economic policy that he sent him to newspaper
editorial board meetings, no doubt to correct the candidate’s numbers
much as Joe Lieberman cleans up after his confusions of Sunni and Shia.
Just two weeks before publicly sharing his thoughts about America’s
“mental recession,” Mr. Gramm laid out equally incendiary views in a
Wall Street Journal profile that portrayed him as “almost certainly” the
McCain choice for Treasury secretary. Mr. Gramm said that the former
chief executive of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, was “probably the most exploited
worker in American history” since he received only a $158 million pay
package rather than the “billions” he deserved for his success in
growing Southwestern Bell.
But no one in the news media seemed to notice Mr. Gramm’s naked
expression of the mind-set he’d bring to a McCain White House. And few
journalists have vetted the presumptive Treasury secretary’s post-Senate
history as an executive at UBS. The stock of that banking giant has lost
70 percent of its value in a year after its reckless adventures in the
subprime lending market. It’s now fending off federal investigation for
helping the megarich avoid taxes.
CARLY CLUELESS
Mr. McCain made a big show of banishing Mr. Gramm after his whining
“gaffe,” but it’s surely at most a temporary suspension. When the
candidate said back in January that there’s nobody he knows who is
stronger on economic issues than his old Senate pal, he was telling the
truth. Left to his own devices — or those of his new No. 1 economic
surrogate, Carly Fiorina — Mr. McCain is clueless. Even Arnold
Schwarzenegger, a supporter, said that Mr. McCain’s latest panacea for
high gas prices, offshore drilling, is snake oil — and then announced
his availability to serve as energy czar in an Obama administration.
The term flip-flopping doesn’t do justice to Mr. McCain’s
self-contradictory economic pronouncements because that implies there’s
some rational, if hypocritical, logic at work. What he serves up instead
is plain old incoherence, as if he were compulsively consulting one of
those old Magic 8 Balls. In a single 24-hour period in April, Mr. McCain
went from saying there’s been “great economic progress” during the Bush
presidency to saying “Americans are not better off than they were eight
years ago.” He reversed his initial condemnation of mortgage bailouts in
just two weeks.
In February Mr. McCain said he would balance the federal budget by the
end of his first term even while extending the gargantuan Bush tax cuts.
In April he said he’d accomplish this by the end of his second term. In
July he’s again saying he’ll do it in his first term. Why not just say
he’ll do it on Inauguration Day? It really doesn’t matter since he’s
never supplied real numbers that would give this promise even a patina
of credibility.
Mr. McCain’s plan for Social Security reform is “along the lines that
President Bush proposed.” Or so he said in March. He came out against
such “privatization” in June (though his policy descriptions still
support it). Last week he indicated he isn’t completely clear on what
Social Security does. He called the program’s premise — young taxpayers
foot the bill for their elders (including him) — an “absolute disgrace.”
Given that Mr. McCain’s sole private-sector job was a fleeting stint in
public relations at his father-in-law’s beer distributorship, he comes
by his economic ignorance honestly. But there’s no A team aboard the
Straight Talk Express to fill him in. His campaign economist, the former
Bush adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, could be found in the June 5 issue of
American Banker suggesting even at that late date that we still don’t
know “the depth of the housing crisis” and proposing that “monitoring is
the right thing to do in these circumstances.”
Ms. Fiorina, the ubiquitous new public face of McCain economic policy,
adds nothing to the mix beyond her incessant display of corporate
jargon, from “trend lines” to “start-ups.” Before she was fired at
Hewlett-Packard, its stock had declined 50 percent during her five-plus
years in charge. She missed earning projections — by 23 percent in one
quarter — much as she now misrepresents both the Obama and McCain
records. This month she said Mr. McCain wanted to require insurance
plans to cover birth control medications along with Viagra, when in fact
he had voted against it.
PACKARDING IT IN
Ms. Fiorina received a $42 million payout (half in cash) from H.P.,
according to a shareholders’ subsequent lawsuit. With this inspiring
résumé, she now aspires to be Mr. McCain’s running mate. So does the
irrepressible Mitt Romney, who actually was a business whiz before
serving as Massachusetts’s governor. Beltway wisdom has it that the
addition of such a corporate star will remedy Mr. McCain’s fiscal
flatulence.
But Mr. Romney, while more plausible than Ms. Fiorina, is hardly what
America wants at this desperate time. His leveraged buyout dealings as
co-founder of Bain Capital induced plant closings, mass layoffs and
outsourcing. If Mr. McCain truly intends to “put our country’s
interests” above politics and reach across the aisle to move the nation
forward, as he constantly tells us, why not go for a vice president
who’s the very best fit for the huge challenges at hand?
The obvious choice would be Michael Bloomberg — who, as a former
Republican turned independent, would necessitate that Mr. McCain reach
only halfway across the aisle, and to someone who is his friend rather
than a vanquished rival he is learning to tolerate.
Romney vs. Bloomberg is not a close contest. Bloomberg L.P. has roughly
three times the revenues and employees of Bain & Company, where Mr.
Romney ultimately served as chief executive. Mr. Romney rescued the Salt
Lake City Olympics while running it in 2002, but Mayor Bloomberg
revitalized New York, the nation’s largest metropolis, after the most
devastating attack in our history. The city he manages has more than
twice the budget of Mr. Romney’s state.
ROMNEY REDUX?
Yes, Mr. Bloomberg is a closet Democrat and an alpha dog who doesn’t
want to be a second banana. And his views on gay civil rights and
abortion would roil the G.O.P. base. But Mr. Romney shared some of those
same views before he flip-flopped, and besides, these are not ordinary
times. Millions of Americans are losing their homes and jobs. Whole
industries are going belly up. The national crisis at hand, not
yesterday’s culture wars, should drive the vice-presidential pick.
Mr. McCain reminds us every day how principled he is. That presumably
means he’d risk a revolt by his party’s dwindling agents of intolerance
and do everything in his power to persuade Mr. Bloomberg to join his
ticket in the spirit of patriotic sacrifice. The politics could be
advantageous too. A Bloomberg surprise could impress independents and
keep the television audience tuned in to a G.O.P. convention that will
unfold in the shadow of Mr. Obama’s address to 75,000 screaming fans in
Denver.
But this is fantasy political baseball, not reality. Mr. McCain, sad to
say, hung up his old maverick’s spurs the day he embraced the Bush tax
cuts he had once opposed as “too tilted to the wealthy.” And Mr.
Bloomberg? It’s hard to picture a titan who built his empire on computer
terminals investing any capital, political or otherwise, in a chief
executive who is still learning how to do, as Mr. McCain puts it, “a
Google.”
©Copyright 2008 by Frank Rich & The New York Times. All Rights Reserved.
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