McCain’s Suspension Bridge to Nowhere
WHAT we learned last week is that the man who always puts his “country first” will take the country down with him if that’s what it takes to get to the White House.
For all the focus on Friday night’s deadlocked debate, it still can’t obscure what preceded it: When John McCain gratuitously parachuted into Washington on Thursday, he didn’t care if his grandstanding might precipitate an even deeper economic collapse. All he cared about was whether he might save his campaign. George Bush put more deliberation into invading Iraq than McCain did into his own reckless invasion of the delicate Congressional negotiations on the bailout plan.
By the time he arrived, there already was a bipartisan agreement in principle. It collapsed hours later at the meeting convened by the president in the Cabinet Room. Rather than help try to resuscitate Wall Street’s bloodied bulls, McCain was determined to be the bull in Washington’s legislative china shop, running around town and playing both sides of his divided party against Congress’s middle. Once others eventually forged a path out of the wreckage, he’d inflate, if not outright fictionalize, his own role in cleaning up the mess his mischief helped make. Or so he hoped, until his ignominious retreat.
The question is why would a man who forever advertises his own honor toy so selfishly with our national interest at a time of crisis. I’ll leave any physiological explanations to gerontologists — if they can get hold of his complete medical records — and any armchair psychoanalysis to the sundry McCain press acolytes who have sorrowfully tried to rationalize his erratic behavior this year. The other answers, all putting politics first, can be found by examining the 24 hours before he decided to “suspend” campaigning and swoop down on the Capitol to save America from the Sunnis or the Shia, or whoever perpetrated all those credit-default swaps.
To put these 24 hours in context, you must remember that McCain not only knows little about the economy but that he has not previously expressed any urgency about its meltdown. It was on Sept. 15 — the day after his former idol Alan Greenspan pronounced the current crisis a “once-in-a-century” catastrophe — that McCain reaffirmed for the umpteenth time that the “fundamentals of our economy are strong.” As recently as Tuesday he had not yet even read the two-and-a-half-page bailout proposal first circulated by Hank Paulson last weekend. “I have not had a chance to see it in writing,” he explained. (Maybe he was waiting for it to arrive by Western Union instead of PDF.)
Then came Black Wednesday — not for the stock market, which was holding steady in anticipation of Washington action, but for McCain. As the widely accepted narrative has it, his come-to-Jesus moment arrived that morning, when he awoke to discover that Barack Obama had surged ahead by nine percentage points in the Washington Post/ABC News poll . The McCain campaign hastily suited up its own pollster to belittle that finding — only to be drowned out by a fusillade of new polls from Fox News , Marist and CNN/Time , each with numbers closer to Post/ABC than not. Obama was rising most everywhere except the moose strongholds of Alaska and Montana.
That was not the only bad news raining down on McCain. His camp knew what Katie Couric had in the can from her interview with Sarah Palin . The first excerpt was to be broadcast by CBS that night, and it had to be upstaged fast.
But even that wasn’t the top political threat McCain faced last week. Bigger still was the mounting evidence of the seamless synergy between his campaign and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage monsters at the heart of the housing bust that set off our current calamity. Most of all, it was the fast-moving events on that front that precipitated his panic to roll out his diversionary, over-the-top theatrics on Wednesday.
What we were learning — through The New York Times , Newsweek and Roll Call — was ugly. Davis Manafort, the lobbying firm owned by McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, had received $15,000 a month from Freddie Mac from late 2005 until last month. This was in addition to the $30,000 a month that Davis was paid from 2000 to 2005 by the so-called Homeownership Alliance, an advocacy organization that he headed and that was financed by Freddie and Fannie to fight regulation.
The McCain campaign tried to pre-emptively deflect such revelations by reviving the old Rove trick of accusing your opponent of your own biggest failings. It ran attack ads about Obama’s own links to the mortgage giants. But neither of the former Freddie-Fannie executives vilified in those ads, Franklin Raines and James Johnson , had worked at those companies lately or are currently associated with the Obama campaign. (Raines never worked for the campaign at all .) By contrast, Davis is the tip of the Freddie-Fannie-McCain iceberg. McCain’s senior adviser , his campaign’s vice chairman, his Congressional liaison and the reported head of his White House transition team all either made fortunes from recent Freddie-Fannie lobbying or were players in firms that did.
By Wednesday, the McCain campaign’s latest tactic for countering this news — attacking the press, especially The Times — was paying diminishing returns. Davis abruptly canceled his scheduled appearance that day at a weekly reporters’ lunch sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor, escaping any further questions by pleading that he had to hit the campaign trail. (He turned up at the “21” Club in New York that night, wining and dining McCain fund-raisers.)
It’s then that Angry Old Ironsides McCain suddenly emerged to bark that our financial distress was “the greatest crisis we’ve faced, clearly, since World War II” — even greater than the Russia-Georgia conflict, which in August he had called the “first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the cold war.” Campaigns, debates and no doubt Bristol Palin’s nuptials had to be suspended immediately so he could ride to the rescue, with Joe Lieberman as his Robin.
Yet even as he huffed and puffed about being a “leader,” McCain took no action and felt no urgency. As his Congressional colleagues worked tirelessly in Washington, he malingered in New York. He checked out the suffering on Main Street (or perhaps High Street) by conferring with Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the Hillary-turned-McCain supporter best known for her fabulous London digs and her diatribes against Obama’s elitism. McCain also found time to have a well-publicized chat with one of those celebrities he so disdains , Bono, and to give a self-promoting public speech at the Clinton Global Initiative.
There was no suspension of his campaign. His surrogates and ads remained on television. Huffington Post bloggers, working the phones, couldn’t find a single McCain campaign office that had gone on hiatus. This “suspension” ruse was an exact replay of McCain’s self-righteous “suspension” of the G.O.P. convention as Hurricane Gustav arrived on Labor Day. “We will put aside our political hats and put on our American hats,” he declared then , solemnly pledging that conventioneers would help those in need. But as anyone in the Twin Cities could see, the assembled put on their party hats instead, piling into the lobbyists’ bacchanals earlier than scheduled, albeit on the down-low.
Much of the press paid lip service to McCain’s new “suspension” as it had to its prototype. In truth, the only campaign activity McCain did drop was a Wednesday evening taping with David Letterman. Don’t mess with Dave. Picking up where the “The View” left off in speaking truth to power, the uncharacteristically furious host hammered the absent McCain on and off for 40 minutes, repeatedly observing that the cancellation “didn’t smell right.”
In a journalistic coup de grâce worthy of “60 Minutes,” Letterman went on to unmask his no-show guest as a liar. McCain had phoned himself that afternoon to say he was “getting on a plane immediately” to deal with the grave situation in Washington, Letterman told the audience. Then he showed video of McCain being touched up by a makeup artist while awaiting an interview by Couric that same evening at another CBS studio in New York.
It’s not hard to guess why McCain had blown off Letterman for Couric at the last minute. The McCain campaign’s high anxiety about the disastrous Couric-Palin sit-down was skyrocketing as advance excerpts flooded the Internet. By offering his own interview to Couric for the same night, McCain hoped (in vain) to dilute Palin’s primacy on the “CBS Evening News.”
Letterman’s most mordant laughs on Wednesday came when he riffed about McCain’s campaign “suspension”: “Do you suspend your campaign? No, because that makes me think maybe there will be other things down the road, like if he’s in the White House, he might just suspend being president. I mean, we’ve got a guy like that now!”
That’s no joke. Bush has so little credibility he can govern only through surrogates (Paulson is the new Petraeus). When he spoke about the economic crisis in prime time earlier that same night, he registered as no more than an irritating speed bump en route to “David Blaine: Dive of Death.”
It’s that utter power vacuum that gave McCain the opening to pull his potentially catastrophic display of economic “leadership” last week. He may be the first presidential candidate in our history to risk wrecking the country even before being voted into the Oval Office.
Republican Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin may have campaigned for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (population 6 thousand at the time) as a “fiscal conservative”, but according to residents, during Palin’s 6 years as Mayor, she increased general government expenditures by over 33%. Decreased taxes on businesses, and raised taxes on residents.
And similar to a certain President we know, Palin inherited a budget surplus and squandered it. Palin left Wasilla $22 million in debt.
What a great VP Pick McCain! Gooooo Republicans! Idiots.
Sarah Palin’s speech at the Republican National Convention tonight highlighted the Alaska Governor’s complete incomprehension of the crisis our country is in.
Our economy is tanking. Our environment and transportation sector are held hostage by Big Oil. Our monopolies on innovation, technology and hope are crumbling. Our military is spread so thin that we have no way to check Iranian and Russian aggression, let alone catch Osama bin Laden. Our poverty and unemployment rates are increasing. Our middle class is evaporating. Our housing market is worse than it was during the Great Depression. Americans are homeless, jobless and penniless.
Did Palin mention ANY of this tonight? NO!
Palin offered nothing of substance except that parents of special needs kids would have an advocate in the White House in her.
Palin stuck to her already tiresome narrative of PTA meglomaniac.
And let’s call it like it is: Palin did not oppose the “bridge to nowhere” until she realized that Alaskans weren’t interested.
Palin has an abominable economic background, as the governor of the only state bordering two foreign countries, she has never engaged her neighbors in trade or sought to build economic partnerships — she’s never even visited her neighbors Canada and Russia.
And Palin has fought hard to make sure that Alaska doesn’t tap into its human resources and only exploits its natural resources even as pools of melted Artic water wash over her boots.
And just one more thing on this note — Palin has served as the governor of less than 700,000 people all of whom rely on Washington handouts to survive for less than two years. Barack Obama has represented at least 3.5 million Americans who live in the second most important city economy in the US and the fourth most important city economy in the world: Chicago — for six years at the state level and two on the national. And Obama doesn’t have to beg Washington for anything because his constituents do it themselves.
Palin as a Vice Presidential candidate is a joke. But it’s the Republican party who will end up having the last laugh if they’re able to pull the wool over voters eyes and move this circus into the White House.
Republicans — the party of Abraham Lincoln — should be mortified that McCain picked Palin to be his running mate. Mortified and ashamed. Deeply and incredibly ashamed.
Choosing Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate speaks volumes about the real John McCain — a man who places his political ambitions in front of what’s good for the country.
Given McCain’s health and age and Palin’s lack of a resume should be enough of a signal that McCain is not thinking about what’s best for the country in this election. McCain simply wants to go to the Oval Office before he’s thrown in the grave. And he foolishly thinks an inexperienced, unqualified backwoods political player like Palin will be his meal ticket simply because she has t and a.
Don’t get me wrong … Palin is known as a reformer and rightly so. She makes a fine Governor of Alaska. And given time, no doubt Palin will rise to national prominence. But, bringing her to Washington now is like taking the bread out of the oven before it’s done baking.
McCain is making a mockery of the American public with Palin as his running mate. This move is reckless and incompetent and is not befitting a would be leader of the free world. Palin is simply not qualified — yet — to be our president (which is exactly what a vice presidential must be).
John McCain is not the simple POW maverick who’s story we’ve been forced fed over the last 20 plus years. He is proving himself to be a dangerous politico bent on becoming leader of the free world
But what the Republicans need to do is nominate someone else. McCain is not fit to serve. And his nomination is dangerous … dangerous for the country.
Palin is an exciting candidate to many marginalized voters …. and the Republican party should bring her back in eight years.
But for the next four, McCain can not, can NOT become the President of the United States.
I’ve been really concerned about Wright from the beginning. He was a hard pill for me to swallow. He makes me think twice about Obama.
And this is mostly because my father is a Methodist minister, I grew up around and attended many black churches, and my family even traveled to Israel with our African-American Bishop. Not one of the black preachers or churches I had contact with or attended as a youth preached Black Liberation Theology, no pulpit expressed anti-American notions or radical conspiracy theories. And most don’t! Wright is a fringe preacher. An extreme fringe.
(But, not on the South Side of Chicago.) … (And I didn’t grow up on the South Side of Chicago.)
And I know what it means to be a member of a church and sit Sunday after Sunday through sermon after sermon. I know that if you don’t agree with the sermon or the preacher then you move on and try the church next door (or try to get the preacher moved or fired). That is simply how it works.
And if you feel a certain connection to the congregation, but not to the preacher, then you continue on with the congregation and put distance between yourself and the preacher. This is just how it works.
(But, Obama is a politician first.)
However, after watching Wright on television yesterday and over the weekend on Bill Moyers, I have to say that he ain’t so bad.
This isn’t to say that he isn’t overly-suspicious of government and the democratic process. He is. You could even argue that he is hostile to democracy. But, his is a dissent which has been dissented since the formation of our country. And does not every man have a right to his opinion and to speak his mind? Of course.
But, the argument goes: “Do we want a man hostile to democracy counseling the future president of our nation?” Probably not.
But, if you actually take the time to listen to an entire sermon or speech or have Wright express his views in full, the anti-democracy quips are taken out of context. Not way out of context, but out of context all the same. Wright is merely trying to make a point with a couple too many ill-thought metaphors.
Wright waxes long and hard about the injustices done to African Americans - trying to make sense of it through sometimes far-fetched conspiracies. But again, he is simply trying to understand the pain and suffering of his congregation. He is not forward thinking, but backward thinking. Mining the past to make sense of the present. And the present state of many African-Americans makes his blood boil. And many times, instead of turning to God, Wright prefers to point the finger.
Wright comes from a specific generation of Black Liberation Theologians. It was a short burst of radical thought in the overall history of the African-American Christian Church in the early 1970s. Wright’s is such a fringe sect at this point that I would argue he is completely irrelevant in the broader context of the African-American church.
But, I’ve buried my lead: Wright is not a bad man. He is a passionate preacher with very specific views and a very distinct world view - which his congregation shares. Wright makes sense in his church in his neighborhood in Chicago. Full stop. And if you don’t live in the South Side of Chicago, and if you aren’t open to Black Liberation Theology then you aren’t going to “get it”.
I would argue that Wright is in no way anti-American. No way. If you listen to his sermons, read his speeches, then it is plain and clear that Wright is fully aware that he has the right to speak his mind and preach his preach because he is American. He cherishes America. He believes in freedom. He believes in justice. And many of his sermons seem angry because he doesn’t think that America is living up to its full potential - that our constitution has been trampled on throughout our history.
Americans should not be concerned that Obama attended his church or had Wright conduct his marriage ceremony or baptize his children.
I think that Obama was simply trying to get to know the people he hoped to represent in the South Side of Chicago. And in the process Obama was introduced to Christianity. That’s the story. It’s plain and it’s simple. And something that Americans should not be afraid of.
Columnist Anatoly, you get it all wrong.
Race is an issue, but it is not the issue. And if anything, the fact that McCain is an old-rich-white-guy is going to hurt his chances at getting elected more than Obama’s blackness.
Obama has stepped up onto a platform that was born into the public’s conscience when Will Smith started headlining movies. A platform that was conceived during Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches. We have a long history of African-American men and women leading us and teaching us and showing us how to manifest the true American spirit. A history that spans our entire 231 years.
America is ready for a black president.
