McCain's Truth Troubles

NYT: For better or worse, the candidacy of Barack Obama, a senator-come-lately, must be evaluated on his judgment, ideas and potential to lead. McCain, by contrast, has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen “every part of our economy.” He didn’t, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.

McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.
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For all his fiery calls last week for a Wall Street crackdown, McCain opposed the very regulations that might have helped avert the current catastrophe. In 1999, he supported a law co-authored by Gramm (and ultimately signed by Bill Clinton) that revoked the New Deal reforms intended to prevent commercial banks, insurance companies and investment banks from mingling their businesses. Equally laughable is the McCain-Palin ticket’s born-again outrage over the greed of Wall Street C.E.O.’s. When McCain’s chief financial surrogate, Fiorina, was fired as Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive after a 50 percent drop in shareholders’ value and 20,000 pink slips, she took home a package worth $42 million.

The McCain campaign canceled Fiorina’s television appearances last week after she inadvertently admitted that Palin was unqualified to run a corporation. But that doesn’t mean Fiorina is gone. Gramm, too, was ostentatiously exiled after he blamed the economic meltdown on our “nation of whiners” and “mental recession,” but he remains in the McCain loop. read the whole thing.

McCain's Many Mansions

As we now know, Phil Gramm crafted McCain's economic "plan" of blaming homeowners for the mortgage crisis. McCain's got quite a few nifty houses. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But he shouldn't be calling Obama an elitist and he obviously has no experience living in the real world. Yes, I know. He is a war hero.  

John & Cindy's $12 million home, republican elephants and all. It's on the market.

Phil Gramm is McCain's Best Bud

Phil Gramm, Mr. mental recession, is McCain's best bud - a story in Fortune from Feb. As you recall, McCain banished Gramm. But did he really?: 

But economic conservatives should take heart. McCain's chief economic adviser - and perhaps his closest political friend - is the ultimate pure play in free market faith, former Texas Senator Phil Gramm. If McCain follows Gramm's counsel, and most of his current positions are vintage Gramm indeed, his policies as president would represent not just a sharp departure from the Bush years, but an assault on government growth that Republicans have boasted about, but failed to achieve, for decades.

Since retiring from the Senate in 2002, Gramm - a former economics professor at Texas A&M - has been circling the globe as an investment banker at UBS (UBS). In July, McCain called on his old friend to salvage his floundering campaign.

"The campaign was structured on the belief that McCain would be the prohibitive front-runner, so he'd have no problem raising money," Gramm told Fortune. But McCain's support among voters and contributors collapsed when the "surge" in Iraq, which McCain championed, got off to a shaky start.

Gramm: All Our Poor People Are Fat

The ugliness of Phil Gramm, McCain's economic adviser, and McCain's long-standing ties to the man:

NYT: “We’re the only nation in the world,” Mr. Gramm once said, “where all our poor people are fat.”

During one of the many Republican assaults on Social Security, the issue of cutting back benefits for the elderly came up in the Senate. “They are 80-year-olds,” howled Mr. Gramm. “Most people don’t have the luxury of living to be 80 years old, so it’s hard for me to feel sorry for them.”

John McCain, whose Straight Talk Express ran out of gas long ago, tried to paper over the implications of Mr. Gramm’s unseemly outburst this week about the very real suffering that has descended on millions of Americans. “Phil Gramm does not speak for me,” said Senator McCain. “I speak for me.”

But the truth is that Mr. Gramm, a close friend of Senator McCain’s for many years, has had a very loud say in the economic policies of the McCain presidential campaign. And those policies are an extension of the G.O.P. orthodoxy that is threatening to sink the ship of state, even as the very wealthy are dancing mindlessly to the music of another Gilded Age.

Columnist Bob Herbert goes on to slam Obama for not taking full advantage of Gramm's lameness. I think the point Herbert's trying to make, at the expense of Obama, is democrats should be taking the message to the streets -- that a republican economy doomed us and will do further harm if McCain and his crew are elected. Agreed. 

I think Obama's been doing a pretty good job at getting his message out. Though, I don't think he has a lot of backup from the democrats.

In fact, from what I've seen, the democrats are really still sleeping. It's kind of like Obama is out there on his own, forging his way, the only man with a voice. If the democrats actually got behind him, McCain wouldn't stand a chance. But McCain, with his bumbling campaign, is actually making inroads. 

I don't know why the democrats are so meek. Perhaps it's that Jesse Jackson Jealousy thing. But that is a whole other blog post. Perhaps, many are still pining for Hillary, which goes to show, politicians don't really care about "the people." 

Americans need to hear the economy message loud and clear. It's why we have a whole new class of super rich, who are displacing the millionaires. Before long, the middle class will be invisible because there won't be one. The poor? Who knows.

Phil Gramm has a long history of being ugly.

Vintage Gramm

The real Gramm

Dr. Phil Gramm Video