Financial Markets And Economic Policies Confuse And Annoy McCain... So He Just Makes Stuff Up

McCain's head must be exploding. All he wants to do is fight wars and he's been dragged down into complicated discussions of macroeconomic policies that he doesn't understand or care about. His economic policy advisors-- Phil Gramm, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Carly Fiorina-- have gotten him into trouble again and again. At any given time at least one or two of them have been given "time outs" by McCain for boneheaded remarks that are killing his campaign. And then there's Sarah Palin, a two-legged embarrassment and a walking indictment of McCain's judgment and his commitment to the most basic well-being of our country. If McCain wants boneheaded comments, he doesn't need Gramm, Holtz-Eakin, Carly Fiorina or Palin; he's got himself-- and I'm not just talking about him forgetting the differences between Sunnis and Sh'ia, Iran and Iraq or even Spain and Bolivia.

Even his base-- the mainstream media-- is stunned how he has been stumbling around blindly and stepping all over his own (very mixed and mixed up) message since the financial crisis exploded onto the front pages of every newspaper in the country on Sunday, leaving the Palin phenomena where it always belonged-- on the cover of the National Enquirer.

As McCain watches the Palin bounce evaporate and as Bush prepares to come out of McCain-friendly hiding and address the nation on the financial meltdown his policies have caused, McCain is trying to remember what he's for and what he's against. Yesterday he tried negating decades of clear anti-regulatory voting records and statements by claiming that he and Palin would regulate, regulate, regulate. Today, when Obama was basking in the glory of an endorsement by equal pay heroine Lilly Ledbetter (in contrast to the endorsement that McCain had trumpeted yesterday by some decadent, snobbish, social-climbing baroness), McCain seems to have forgotten that he's been a relentless and vociferous opponent of equal pay for many years. Coming from an era when no one could find voting records-- and never having adapted to the computer age-- McCain is utterly unaware that when he makes statements, people can contrast them to his votes.

Yesterday he was trying to combat the embarrassment of the endorsement by the stinking rich, and much detested Lady de Rothschild by claiming that he supports equal pay for equal work too. He never has in the past-- never. It's just more hopeless McCain flip-floppingYesterday: "I want to assure you, that we not only have a role model, but we will hire people and we will make sure people come to our administration wherever there is discrimination. We will eliminate it, we will fight it, and if necessary we'll TAKE THEM TO COURT. We'll do those things."

Yet the last time McCain had a chance to do something about unequal pay (April 23) he skipped the Senate vote [HR 2831, Vote #110] on, ironically... the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. The next day the A.P., a news organization extremely biased in McCain's favor, ran this headline: "McCain opposes equal pay bill backed by rivals" and reported that "he opposes a Senate bill that seeks equal pay for women because it would lead to more lawsuits." The day before he said pay disparity was due to education and job training, proving he lacks a basic understanding of the problems regular women-- not like Cindy and Carly and Baroness de Rothschild-- face in the workplace. Back on July 17, 2000 McCain voted to impose a Budget Act point of order tabling a Harkin amendment to "provide more effective remedies to victims of discrimination in the payment of wages on the basis of sex." That was consistent with a couple of votes in 1985 against passage of the bill to establish a commission to oversee a study of the federal workforce to determine whether differences in pay and classification have arisen because of discrimination on the basis of sex, race or national origin." And yet his response to the financial meltdown this week, catastrophic for so many American families: "let's start a commission to study it." I'd suggest he read today's Wall Street Journal instead, and then get out of the way for someone prepared to deal with the crisis.

The financial crisis that began 13 months ago has entered a new, far more serious phase.

Lingering hopes that the damage could be contained to a handful of financial institutions that made bad bets on mortgages have evaporated. New fault lines are emerging beyond the original problem -- troubled subprime mortgages -- in areas like credit-default swaps, the credit insurance contracts sold by American International Group Inc. and others. There's also a growing sense of wariness about the health of trading partners.

The consequences for companies and chief executives who tarry -- hoping for better times in which to raise capital, sell assets or acknowledge losses -- are now clear and brutal, as falling share prices and fearful lenders send troubled companies into ever-deeper holes. This weekend, such a realization led John Thain to sell the century-old Merrill Lynch & Co. to Bank of America Corp. Each episode seems to bring government intervention that is more extensive and expensive than the previous one, and carries greater risk of unintended consequences.

Expectations for a quick end to the crisis are fading fast. "I think it's going to last a lot longer than perhaps we would have anticipated," Anne Mulcahy, chief executive of Xerox Corp., said Wednesday.

"This has been the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. There is no question about it," said Mark Gertler, a New York University economist who worked with fellow academic Ben Bernanke, now the Federal Reserve chairman, to explain how financial turmoil can infect the overall economy. "But at the same time we have the policy mechanisms in place fighting it, which is something we didn't have during the Great Depression."

How can McCain be expected to understand it? He was just a small child riding around on a burro in his native Panama when Republican policies of Greed and Selfishness plunged the U.S. into the Great Depression. And now he is surrounded by economic advisors who want to role back all the reforms from that era meant to protect consumers, workers and society in general. In fact, his chief economic advisors claim there is no real crisis and that Americans are whiners and exaggerators and just have "psychological" problems. McCain doesn't remember how many homes he owns; he's not hurting. I suspect Lady de Rothschild, who claims Barack Obama is an elitist, may have a similar problem keeping track of all her estates spread out over several countries. I don't know if in-and-out of serial bankruptcies Trump, another decadent parasite who endorsed McCain, knows how many homes he owns either. Larry King should have asked him.