It
By
Bill Press Read Spanish Version
Take
this to the bank, if you can still find one open for business: Two
months from now, we will look back and assert that the week of Sept.
15 was the week John McCain lost the presidential election of 2008.
Why?
Because that’s when Wall Street collapsed, causing real economic pain
to tens of millions of Americans and exposing the failure of those
conservative, unfettered free-market economic policies John McCain
has championed his entire career.
This
isn’t the first time McCain has been caught at a financial crime
scene. In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, "This is like deja
vu, all over again." Remember his first appearance on national
radar? When the dust cleared from the 1980s failure of 747 savings
and loans, there stood so-called reformer John McCain, right in the
middle of it all: one of five senators investigated for pressuring
the Federal Home Loan Bank Board to drop its investigation of crooked
Lincoln Savings and Loan owner Charles Keating.
As
junior senator from Arizona, McCain had the closest ties to Keating.
He received $112,000 in campaign contributions from Keating and
associates. He, his wife, kids and babysitter took nine vacations at
Keating’s expense, several of them on Keating’s private jet. Cindy
McCain and her father were major investors in a Keating shopping
center. And McCain co-sponsored legislation relaxing regulations on
savings and loans and allowing them to gamble investor funds on
certain highly risky financial ventures. Sound familiar?
For
his role in aiding Keating, McCain received only a reprimand for
"poor judgment" from the Senate Ethics Committee. But ever
since, the "Keating Five" has been the symbol of how much
influence money can buy in Washington. And McCain, having learned
nothing from the experience, then turned around and repeated the same
tricks on Wall Street.
In
2000, McCain supported legislation authored by Sen. Phil Gramm that,
in effect, freed Wall Street financial institutions from federal
regulation and oversight, broke down the walls between banking,
insurance and fund management, and forbade federal agencies from
regulating financial derivatives that greased the skids for passing
along risky mortgage-backed securities to investors. And today we are
suffering the consequences.
Gramm’s
legislation was the key. Without it, AIG could never have veered from
the solid ground of life insurance onto the shaky ground of subprime
mortgages. Nor could Merrill Lynch have stuffed its portfolio with
mutual funds based on bad debt. John McCain championed that
legislation, and Gramm was McCain’s chief economic advisor until he
showed his true colors by calling America "a nation of whiners."
Suddenly,
in response to this week’s disastrous economic news, and in one of
the most daring flip-flops of American politics, John McCain is
trying to reinvent himself as the champion of government regulation,
promising to push for new regulations on financial institutions. But
it’s too late for McCain to change his spots. As recently as March
2008, he told reporters, "I’m always for less regulation."
And starting with Lincoln Savings and Loan, he has a lifetime record
of fighting for big business and against necessary government
oversight and regulation — for which he was richly rewarded this
year by over $1 million in campaign contributions from employees of
Merrill Lynch.
The
McCain campaign enjoyed a bounce with the surprising appointment of
Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate. But any glee over her
nomination soon disappeared once the Wall Street meltdown began.
Goodbye lipstick, hello pocketbook. With the country facing its worst
economic crisis since the Depression, lines of credit frozen,
unemployment at 6.1 percent, government bailouts costing taxpayers
over $850 billion so far, and millions of Americans having lost their
jobs, homes or savings, the very presence of Palin on the ticket
suddenly seems more and more frivolous.
But
if Palin can’t be trusted to fix this economic mess, neither can
McCain. After all, he once admitted: "The issue of economics is
not something I’ve understood as well as I should."
We
remember Herbert Hoover for saying, on Oct. 26, 1929: "The
fundamental business of the country . . . is on a sound and
prosperous basis." We’ll remember John McCain for saying, on
Sept. 15, 2008: "The fundamentals of our economy are strong."
That
statement alone cost John McCain the White House, because it proved
he doesn’t understand how bad people are hurting. Or, as Yogi Berra
also said, he just doesn’t understand "a nickel isn’t worth a
dime today."
Bill
Press is host of a nationally syndicated radio show and author of a
new book, "Train Wreck: The End of the Conservative Revolution
(and Not a Moment Too Soon)." You can hear "The Bill Press
Show" at his Web site: billpressshow.com. His email address is:
bill@billpress.com.
(c)
2008 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
