I’m not about to write a paean to Nixon. I watched him quit in a bar in Bolinas, Calif.; I can still hear the cheer. But even his tortured, sleazy nature betrayed some essential seriousness about the fate of the United States. By contrast, the Bush crowd has gambled the future of this country with abandon.
So write Roger Cohen today in his New York Times op ed piece entitled Nixon, Bush, Palin. Perhaps it seems odd that he would find it necessary to make that remark bout not praising Nixon, but he had just finished reminding is readers that in 1971, in the middle of the long bear market, Nixon had urged people to buy stock and the market had soared. Cohen wondered what might happen had Bush taken a similar approach, and opined that he reckoned
the market could tank in ways that would make this week’s one-day 777 point plunge look paltry.
What a start!
I of course immediately remembered the time Bush gave a speech in somewhat earlier time of economic distress, and as I watched on the split screen the longer he talked the further the market dropped. Perhaps Cohen is right about that. Ultimately, however, he is using the comparison as a method of leading us to a deeper set of observations that are well worth considering. After all, Nixon resigned, memory of which lead Cohen to inquire whatever happened to the notion of shame, falling on one's sword, an act of honor that might be as he notes appropriate also for a cabinet member, "a Wall Street C.E.O., the inventor of credit-default swaps" . . .
Cohen examines the various gambles Bush has made, from an unnecessary war that has so far cost about $700 billion (which leads him to ask if that number sounds familiar), to the unfettered and unregulated capitalism that saw the explosion of the derivatives market.
Cohen's column has many - how shall I say it? - to the point remarks. About the financial markets, he writes
Bush, who often seemed to need directions to the Treasury, opted to allow an opaque derivatives market to grow into the trillions without supervision, regulation or information. The market knew best. Turns out that what the market knew best was how to turn capitalism into a pyramid scheme for trading worthless paper.
while reminding us how lucky we are because
Bush wanted to throw Social Security into the casino, too, by privatizing it!
Cohen explores the cost of what our fiscal recklessness has been, with the loss of trust in the U.S. dollar and our economy, which given the dollar's role replacing gold as the reserve in wake of the 1971 collapse of Bretton Woods has provided a great deal of international stability. Here I might note that absent that role as the reserve, our economy might now well be in far worse shape, because we would not have been able to finance our expenditures without the willingness of other countries to hold our debt in dollars.
The focus of Cohen's column is of the risks of gambling, whether it is that an unfettered market and lax or n on-existent regulation can only lead to profits and not financial collapse, or that we could fight a war of choice without raising taxes and not have it damage our economy. And it is through this idea that he gets to the third name in the title (his and mine), by going through the real gambler. That is, he talks about the gamble represented by McCain 's having "rolled the dice on Sarah Palin" (interesting reference to the Senator's craps addiction) as his running mate.
His running mate and possible successor. Cohen notes the actuarial chance of McCain's dying during a first term as being one in 6 or 7, which givs us the same odds of Palin thus becoming president should McCain win the election. Cohen puts it in what I think is the appropriate context in two very brief paragraphs. The first reads:
That’s the same odds as your birthday falling on a Wednesday, or being delayed on two consecutive flights into Newark airport. Is America ready for that?
An examination of the trends in polling as people have gotten to Palin indicates the answer to the question just posed is an ever increasingly loud NO!
And to ensure we grasp the seriousness, Cohen then writes
The lesson of the last eight years is this: when power is a passport to gamble, people can end up seriously broke or seriously dead.
seriously broke or seriously dead
broke from the impact of unregulated greed, or the cost of an unnecessary war of choice, or the impact of uninsured medical catastrophes . .
dead from the costs of an unnecessary war of choice, or from the the lack of access to affordable healthcare or . . .
will we begin to see a spike in suicides among those losing jobs and homes as a result of this crisis as we have among those who have served in the war of choice that has so damaged this country in so many ways?
Cohen uses the soberness of Secretary of Defense Gates to disabuse any reader paying attention of the notion that this administration's approach to the Iraq war was anything but a gamble. Gates dismisses the notion that the enemy could be subdued by "shock and awe" but rather must be confronted house by house, block by block, in a much more conventional - and deadly - application of force.
That leads Cohen to these, his final words:
In short, he lambasted the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Bush war effort for its gambler’s irresponsibility. The financial equivalent of reckless "Shock and Awe" has been "Sub and Prime."
And people’s houses across America really did go up in smoke.
And fear stalked the land.
The financial equivalent of reckless "Shock and Awe" has been "Sub and Prime. An interesting comparison, an initial action which was supposed to bring only success but instead brought suffering and exploding costs.
And people’s houses across America really did go up in smoke. And not only their houses, but their interest rates, their businesses, their 401Ks. The ability of municipalities to finance their communal needs, as simultaneously the cost of borrowing went up while the value of the real estate from which their taxes derived sank. Up in smoke seems an apt description.
And fear stalked the land. Ordinary people decreasingly trust the government to act in a way that benefits them. The president now has a job disapproval worse than that of Nixon just before that worthy resigned.
Nixon, Bush, Palin
Connect those names, and remember the implied connection between Bush and Palin is John McCain.
And people’s houses across America really did go up in smoke.
And fear stalked the land.
And the answer of the Republican nominee is to select as his running mate and possible successor someone who has no knowledge of other nations, little intellectual curiosity, and for whom the only documentation of publications that she reads is a picture of her with a publication by the John Birch Society.
Craps is a sucker's game. You have no control over the outcome. The danger is that once having one big one may well be addicted, in the hope of another big score. We know from the NY Times story that McCain has experienced such large success, in a Native American Casino. And he may well have felt that he had nothing to lose by picking Palin, because absent shaking up the race Obama would, in an environment favorable to Democrats, otherwise defeat him. Hence McCain's pick of Palin, to shake up the race.
He might have had nothing to lose - except what few remnants of respectability, integrity, and reputation he still had. But for the rest of us?
Nixon, Bush, Palin
What does that mean?
And people’s houses across America really did go up in smoke.
And fear stalked the land.