BUSH HOPING TO TURN THE ECONOMY OVER TO ANOTHER "WARTIME PRESIDENT" WITH NO INTEREST IN IT

4 more years?

I'm sure you'll recall a few months ago John McCain blurting out angrily that he doesn't know (care) anything about economics-- but he could hire some people to take care of that stuff. He implied, strongly, that filthy lucre is beneath his dignity and that he has important wars to start and fight... so get the hell off his lawn. McCain is running for president for a set of reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with any of the problems uppermost in most Americans' minds. He's very much like George Bush-- except Bush inherited his disregard for economics; McCain married into his.

In this morning's NY Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg points out that in these calamitous and dramatic days for the economy, Bush, Coolidge-like, is largely offstage. Nor is he even backstage. He's flying around the world annoying national leaders with his sagging and failed agenda. Forget the glaring error in her first 3 words; her main point hits the nail on the head:

The first hint that President Bush might be detached from the nation’s economic woes was in February, when he conceded that he had not heard about predictions of $4-a-gallon gasoline.

Then Mr. Bush went to Wall Street to warn against “massive government intervention in the housing markets,” two days before his administration helped broker the takeover of the investment bank Bear Stearns.

While the Senate is hammering out a bill to ease the housing crisis, despite Bush's and, even more so, McCain's, laissez faire approach and while Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was finally admitting that the country has "probably" slipped into recession, Bush wa pestering our European allies about Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO. (They turned him down, politely but firmly.)

For a man who came into office as the nation’s first M.B.A. president, Mr. Bush has sometimes seemed invisible during the housing and credit crunch. As the economy eclipses Iraq as the top issue on voters’ minds, even some Republican allies of the president say Mr. Bush is being eclipsed and is in danger of looking out of touch.

You think? He used to style himself the "CEO President," until some actual CEO pals of his started getting indicted, tried and convicted. After that he was always, always, always the "wartime president." McCain is eager to start out that way. The Bush Regime's economic policies-- the greed and selfishness agenda for multimillionaires-- which will also be McCain's economic policies, are the direct cause of what Bernanke called "a rough patch."

To the extent his plans to dismantle the New Deal reforms were successful, the economy has suffered mightily. To the extent his plans to redistribute the wealth of the country upward, there is a seething resentment against Republicans at every level of government. "[B]ecause the public has little faith in Mr. Bush, it may be tough for him to be the point man on the economy, even with a Harvard business degree. Just 25 percent of the public approves of the way Mr. Bush is handling the economy, a figure even lower than his overall job approval rating, a CBS News Poll in mid-March found." More accurate surveys found that only 14% of the public thinks he's doing a satisfactory job on the economy. Despite the fact that the public very much wants a leader right now, he's still resisting "calls from the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, to hold a top-level bipartisan economic meeting to address the growing mortgage crisis." He's like Calvin Coolidge, waiting for Herbert Hoover to come on down and take over.