PrintOctober 28, 2008
Time for McCain to ruffle some feathers
The conventional wisdom is that John McCain's only hope for this election is for the economy and markets to "settle down" so that he can focus on foreign policy and Joe Biden's statement that a young Obama "will be tested" with a "manufactured crisis."
With one week to go, there is simply no time for settling. I submit that in fact, some more ruffling of economic feathers is what McCain needs. It needs to get so bad that people start focusing on what is causing it rather than who happens to be in the White House while it is happening. Personally, I thought it was already bad enough for such focus. Not so for much of the American public and MSM apparently.
Consider: Today the world's stock markets are continuing to tumble. Let me reiterate - the world's markets are continuing to tumble. That includes more than "the 57 states" that "the tax policies of Bush and McCain" have supposedly tortured for the past eight years. One would think that "citizen of the world" Barack Obama would understand that.
The Euro, the financial unit of the Socialist utopia of Europe, is tanking violently against the dollar. In the past few months, the Euro is down some 30% against the dollar and the markets in Europe have tanked further and faster than the Dow and S&P as well. To simplify, things in Europe are considerably worse than they are here -- even while we've been going through a terrible stretch. This would include John Kerry's Paris as well as Obama's Berlin.
And speaking of the 57 states of the United States -- depending on which particular survey you use -- the worst states for "business climate" are almost all the very bluest including California, New York, Michigan, New York and New Jersey. They are also among the worst states for the housing crisis as well. The laboratory of federalism has demonstrated again what world history has shown elsewhere. Liberalism is an absolute disaster for business. (google Cuba).
In other words, wherever you turn, the worst of the worst economies are the more socialist economies. Sarah Palin understands this, and she lashed out at these nanny state economies this weekend in Iowa. These nanny states are places where they have done a much better job of "spreading the wealth around" than others. Or so they say. Ironically, not only are these wealth-spreading economies poorer, they actually have more concentration of wealth and less freedom. But of course, they mean well.
Inexplicably, the Republican Party has managed not to take advantage of the two huge shocks brought on our economy directly as a result of liberal policies: the energy price shock and the mortgage-housing crash. The legislative record on both is clear and it points directly at liberal policies at the root of both. Complicating the GOP's efforts to make this distinction, McCain was on the wrong side of global warming, seems more interested in running against Wall Street than ACORN, Obama, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, who are most responsible for the mortgage meltdown. In fact, it is still not clear that he even understands ACORN's tie to the mortgage issue to this day.
The result? McCain is getting the voter fall-out from problems caused by his political opponents and their philosophy of governing. McCain should have realized that this election is all about the economy and that blame for it must be contested, or else the party holding the White House would get the blame.
Ironically, his only hope may be that it gets so scary in the next week that the electorate will have to focus. But McCain must focus on it himself. He must hammer the message that an Obama Presidency, with its massive tax increases, would be the wrong direction to go as the US economy faces a global crisis, and would throw us into a depression. It is now the home stretch and he must close the sale.
Time is running out.
