For months, John McCain has been telling us that the transcendent, existential, 21st century issue is global terrorism. McCain has essentially built his entire campaign on his foreign policy and national security portfolio. But now, by adding the "Maverick's Maverick" to the ticket, McCain seems to have ground the gears and headed the campaign back to the economy and essentially taken up that old Republican chestnut, the real problem is Washington.
Once again, the subtext of McCain & Palin is that government is an alien presence...a vast structure designed to deny you your big fat slice of apple pie. We're back to the old Reagan rant that government is a malevolent force oozing the sticky goo of corruption, incompetence, and gray bureaucratic alienation as it relentlessy gumms up the works of an otherwise sleek and efficient market-based economy.
If only, if only, we could "get government off our backs." If only we could cut off its oxygen and then drown it in the bathtub. If only we could end this wasteful spending, then the native energy of the American people would be released. "I don't want to tax the rich, I want eveyone to be rich." Oh course, it's baloney.
Yes, of course it's bullshit. What does it really mean to attack our social institutions? It means market-based solutions to shared problems. Not enough troops to invade a country? Hire mercenaries. Too few prison cells to accomodate our rapacious desire to lock up every last miscreant (see: the failed war on drugs, three strikes laws, mandatory sentencing guidelines, etc. The United States now has the highest percentage of its population in prison of any country in the world.) Problem? Why, simply license for-profit prisons whose corporate interests are fueled by high conviction rates. Too freaking bothersome to insure that elections are run well and the results accurate? Privatize voting and let Diebold deploy their magic voting machines. (Don't worry, Diebold can be trusted, even though they do not disclose applications buried deep in the software as they hide behind a fig leaf of property rights. They can be trusted because it is in their interest to be good "corporate citizens.") And we accept this. Just the phrase "corporate citizen" should send a shiver up Chris Matthews' leg and give the rest of us pause.
In a society that pushes the virtue of all and against all, perversely, the corporation becomes a person. The rest of us sacrifice the ties that bind, the shared duty and responsibility, membership in a community that wants to live in a just society. McCain & Palin represent a set of ideas that want to deny even the possibility of such a society. At rock bottom, McCain & Palin represent interests whose well-being relies on the continuance of flawed and dangerous policies justified by specious economics and authoritarian culture. They represent Thanatos and narcissism. This is not how we bulid a good scoiety.
So, what can we expect from the crew of "advisors" who lurk just off-stage at a McCain & Palin pep rally out there on the hustings? Simply put, more "market-based" solutions--read deregulation and privatization. More buccaneer economics behind a scrim of false legitimacy. We can certainly see this in McCain & Palin's health care plan. Privatization means an agenda that surrenders the well-being of the polity to the feral discipline of the market. Everything that is solid, melts into air.
Certainly, at the center of this will be the insistent drumbeat of the tax cuts needed to feed the hoary beast of supply-side economics as it lumbers through your life tearing up your garden. How can we pay for these cuts? McCain assures us that any loss of revenue will be offset by a vigorous rooting out of "pork, pork, and more pork" in the federal budget. Lower taxes, in other words, will be offset by eliminating the inefficiences of government. Oh yea, and for good measure we'll continue to believe the Laffer curve is something more than a doodle on a cocktail napkin.
Of course, this kind of thinking is through the looking glass. McCain & Palin certainly will offer the famous "Bridge to Nowhere" as an example of waste that--once eliminated--will help move toward a balanced budget by 2012(!). (Yes, she was for it before she was against it, but that complication won't puncture the telegenic nature of it all.) Putting aside the paltry sum that all earmarks and pork spending represents--there is a fundamental dishonesty here. Vetoing proposed, or possible, spending does not save money. Cancelling spending already in the budget does. (For example: the horrifically costly and technically flawed ABM "Star Wars" system. Or, how about the war in Iraq?)
But, this kind of economic hocus-pocus is standard operating procedure for a certain breed of beltway types. Consider the Orwellian world that McCain & Palin occupy when it comes to the Bush tax cuts: in McCain & Palin's world, allowing the tax cuts to expire--as legislatively mandated--is recast as a tax increase. (Republicans are very good at this Orwellian feint (ex: the Estate Tax becomes the "Death Tax). Ironically, rhetoric can often be most powerful when it is--intellectually--the most specious.
What kind of simple frames, then, can we expect from McCain & Palin and their advisors?
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Tax cuts (and McCain's health care proposal): "It's the people's money and they know how to spend it better than bureaucrats do."
- Privatization: "The market works efficiently, 'bloated' big government is wasteful." (A tip of the conical hat to Ronald Reagan here).
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Deregulation: "American businesses cannot compete in the global market when they are hamstrung by needless domestic regulation (ex: Sarbanes-Oxley) drafted by (again) bureaucrats who've never had to meet a payroll, pay a supplier, blah, blah, blah, da blah blah.".
The economic message from John McCain is clear: "My friends...you really are on your own...Good luck."
Update: Wow...this diary lasted almost 30 minutes before sliding away. Perhaps I should have put pregnant and Palin in the title as that seems to be the coin of the realm on Kos today.