Choose Your Delusion 1 -- The Establishment Maverick
As the myriad gambits of hallucinated financial wealth come unraveled like so many strands of a first grader's basket-weaving project, the two major Presidential campaigns are struggling to convey the proper levels of outrage. Obama and McCain are trying valiantly to show that they are more in touch with the economic conditions of regular folks on the ground, but each are hampered by that pesky little thing called reality. So the American voter is left having to choose between two delusions, in hopes that the less damaging one ends up in the White House.
So we're supposed to believe that a three-decade Senator is a radical reformer, even though he voted with Bush on almost everything? And he's going to clean out lobbyist influence in Washington, even though these are the guys he hired to advise him? His tax cuts for the wealthy, which have utterly failed to spread broader prosperity in their Bush incarnation, are suddenly going to have the opposite effect in a McCain regime? And perhaps most important of all, he's making all of these claims when he knows that he will have to work with a more substantial Democratic majority, since the American people are certainly going to punish the Republicans for the 8-year Bush catastrophe? That McCain himself doesn't buy his own snake oil is evidenced by his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate. Realizing that his oxymoronic establishment maverick image would likely be decimated in the home stretch of the campaign, McCain went out and recruited an actual outsider to bolster his sagging contrarian bona fides. Unfortunately, her inexperience is so stark that McCain's selection itself borders on criminal negligence.
In short, McCain is selling a bill of goods that makes absolutely no sense on its face. It's no wonder that Davis said, that "This election is not about the issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates." Sure, but it matters if what makes up that 'composite view' is an utterly fantastic and ridiculous amalgam of lies, half-truths, and empty sloganeering. Here's hoping that enough people see the Establishment Maverick puff pastry for what it is.
Next time: Obama the Empty Vessel
The McCain delusion is, like most Republican Presidential endeavors, audacious and almost insulting in its disregard for the truth. Here's a 26-year Washington power broker trying to milk Vietnam captivity and a tattered maverick reputation all the way to the promised land. McCain paints himself as an outsider, ready to stick it to the fat cats in Washington and reign in decades of waste and fraud. And now that investments banks are folding right and left, he's suddenly appalled at Wall Street greed, like Jesus and the moneychangers.
The absurdity of this crusading outsider image is obvious. McCain's campaign is filled with financial lobbyists and former government officials who literally wrote the book on banking deregulation over the last two decades. Phil Gramm, McCain's former campaign co-chair (he of the American 'whiners' comment) has been instrumental in rolling back regulatory oversight of Wall Street. In the Wall Street Journal ("We'll Protect Taxpayers From More Bailouts," 09/09/08), McCain and Sarah Palin told us that "Fannie and Freddie's lobbyists succeeded and Congress failed. Under our administration this will not happen again." Really? That would be something, since a bunch of these very same lobbyists work for McCain, including campaign manager Rick Davis and national finance co-chair Wayne Berman. All in all, McCain has over 80 finance-industry lobbyists on the payroll. Friends close, enemies closer, I guess.
So we're supposed to believe that a three-decade Senator is a radical reformer, even though he voted with Bush on almost everything? And he's going to clean out lobbyist influence in Washington, even though these are the guys he hired to advise him? His tax cuts for the wealthy, which have utterly failed to spread broader prosperity in their Bush incarnation, are suddenly going to have the opposite effect in a McCain regime? And perhaps most important of all, he's making all of these claims when he knows that he will have to work with a more substantial Democratic majority, since the American people are certainly going to punish the Republicans for the 8-year Bush catastrophe? That McCain himself doesn't buy his own snake oil is evidenced by his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate. Realizing that his oxymoronic establishment maverick image would likely be decimated in the home stretch of the campaign, McCain went out and recruited an actual outsider to bolster his sagging contrarian bona fides. Unfortunately, her inexperience is so stark that McCain's selection itself borders on criminal negligence.
In short, McCain is selling a bill of goods that makes absolutely no sense on its face. It's no wonder that Davis said, that "This election is not about the issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates." Sure, but it matters if what makes up that 'composite view' is an utterly fantastic and ridiculous amalgam of lies, half-truths, and empty sloganeering. Here's hoping that enough people see the Establishment Maverick puff pastry for what it is.
Next time: Obama the Empty Vessel
Comments