The conservative pundidiots are desperate to find a spin that explains the butt-kicking their philosophy got last week. It couldn’t be that Americans woke up and saw what eight years of a greedy, short-sighted know-nothing presidency means to them, could it? There had to be something else.
Charles Krauthammer has just published a piece ("First a meltdown, then a collapse", The Washington Post, November 10, 2008) in which he tries to explain why McCain lost and Obama won. He gives passing praise to Obama’s flawless campaign, and makes mention of what a terrible choice Sarah Palin was for Veep (she made it impossible to hammer Obama on the "experience issue"). But the real problem, he says, was the crash of the economy. Never before had a presidential campaign been run during a financial crisis of such magnitude and immediacy; and such a thing would only be expected to be the inevitable undoing of whichever candidate was associated with the party then holding the White House.
This is the storyline the pundidiots are frantic to cement into our minds. McCain was ahead in the polls until the economy tanked. The standing administration, and its party, gets blamed when Bad Things happen. It’s not McCain's fault this mess occurred, but since there chanced to be a Republican president when the tsunami hit, he got splashed with it, like one of those unfortunate-but-blameless people sitting in the front three rows at Seaworld.
The obvious error in this is the metaphor of the economic meltdown as a natural disaster that was uncaused and couldn’t have been foreseen. In point of fact, to mildly oversimplify, it was the Shrubbian overreaching on deregulation that caused it, the Caligula-scale orgy of profiteering that has been the hallmark of the last nearly-eight years of neocon rule. There were countless economists who saw it coming – Ravi Batra, for one, who nailed it almost to the day.
It was not that McCain had the poor fortune to be distantly associated with the political party that happened to be in charge when the disaster struck. No: see, this was the party that caused that disaster. And it wasn’t a "disaster" so much as an eight-year-long lawless riot, as if the cattle rustlers had swooped into Tombstone, guns blazing, smashing windows, stealing the liquor, raiding the funds from the general store, cleaning out First National, and terrorizing the womenfolk. The neocons had gotten one of their own appointed Sheriff – and an amazingly corrupt Sheriff he has been, making certain that the McJames Gang had keys to all the locks, and that the deputies were all asleep or drunk or equally corrupt during the years of the riot.
The neocons were not caught unaware by a sudden tidal wave no one could have seen coming. That’s the wrong metaphor. Here’s a better one. They were the co-conspirators who unlocked the bank vault and drugged the guards so the crooks could get in, under the assumption they would get a cut of the take. So when the money suddenly vanished, their protestations of "Who could have known?" sounded unconvincing to the ears of the depositors (read: voters).
McCain’s role in this? He’d been a cheerleader and an enabler. Do remember, the day before the news of the collapse hit, McCain had famously said, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong." McCain has supported this criminal orgy of deregulation, and has even threatened to do the same to our insurance industry. McCain wasn’t hurt by having the economic rug accidentally pulled out from under the innocent feet of his political party. He was hurt by having supported – and by continuing to support – the policies that caused the collapse.
Krauthammer does acknowledge that McCain’s response to the emergency was poorly played. The gimmick of supposedly "suspending" his campaign, and then being ineffectual – more to the point, positively harmful – during the negotiations that followed, was all seen for what it was, that is, gimmickry and incompetence. But even these are mere reflections of the ideologically-driven decision-making that got us into this mess. Gimmickry and incompetence are simply the most benign manifestations of the underlying criminal negligence and greedy blindness of neocon philosophy – which McCain has supported right down the line.
And the voters saw it.
That’s why he lost. Well, that’s part of it anyway.
If the economy had not collapsed, as if on queue, perhaps McCain could have survived the election season. Perhaps the neocons and their pundidiot mouthpieces could have still pretended their economic philosophies weren’t leading us over a cliff – that, in other words, "the fundamentals of our economy are [still] strong." But with the meltdown, it became obvious to all but the most blind ideologue that we should stop doing what we were doing – what the Jesse W. James Gang had been doing – and that we should go in a different direction entirely.
The problem McCain had wasn’t that he was unfairly linked to a political party that had the tragically poor fortune to still be in power during an unforeseen economic crisis. The problem he had was not, as the pundidiots want us to believe, that Outside Forces of Chance and Chaos conspired against the poor guy.
No.
The problem was that he is an ardent supporter and advocate of a failed philosophy, one whose repercussions could only have been held off for so long. The rest of us were lucky enough (if you can call it that) to see the effects before the election, and to take them into account.
That’s the part of why he lost that had to do with the meltdown. There’s more, but I’ll write again another day....
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Edited to give a link to Krauthammer's article