In a column beginning “In a season of ironies, the greatest of all might be that John McCain lacks the toughness to get elected president,” Newsweek‘s Jonathan Alter quotes Franklin D. Roosevelt on the Republicans of his day: “They know only the rules of a generation of self seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.”
That Roosevelt could as easily have been predicting Bush-McCain Republicanism as describing Hoover’s has become plain. And while Josh Marshall may wonder Which Crash is Steeper? Global Finance or John McCain?, good old 1920s-style fecklessness assured both.
The New York Times reports Bush-Paulson’s handling of the financial collapse:
Two weeks after persuading Congress to let it spend $700 billion to buy distressed securities tied to mortgages, the Bush administration has put that idea aside in favor of a new approach that would have the government inject capital directly into the nation’s banks — in effect, partially nationalizing the industry.
As recently as Sept. 23, senior officials had publicly derided proposals by Democrats to have the government take ownership stakes in banks.
The Treasury Department’s surprising turnaround on the issue of buying stock in banks, which has now become its primary focus, has raised questions about whether the administration squandered valuable time in trying to sell Congress on a plan that officials had failed to think through in advance.
Similarly, the Times reports McCain’s handling of his campaign:
Tommy Thompson, a Republican who is a former governor of Wisconsin, … [a]sked if he was happy with Mr. McCain’s campaign, … replied, "No," and he added, "I don’t know who is." …
Several party leaders said Mr. McCain needed to settle on a single message in the final weeks of the campaign and warned that his changing day-to-day dialogue — a welter of evolving economic proposals, mixed with on-again-off-again attacks on Mr. Obama’s character — was not breaking through and was actually helping Mr. Obama in his effort to portray Mr. McCain as erratic.
Contrast the phenomenon Joe Klein finds — “We are witnessing something remarkable here: Obama’s race is receding as he becomes more familiar. His steadiness has trumped his skin color; he is being judged on the content of his character” — to hilzoy‘s observation of McCain:
In the last debate, he said: “We obviously have to stop this spending spree that’s going on in Washington.” And then, a few lines later, he proposed spending $300 billion to buy up bad mortgages. And he’s still promising to balance the budget by the end of his first term, while enacting massive tax cuts. Likewise, he is not proposing to kick one country out of the G8 while trying to foster closer ties with another. He is proposing that we adopt both those policies towards Russia.
If I decide to be kind to one person and cruel to another, or to save money on some things but spend in another, that might (or might not) be evidence of pragmatism. But if I decide to be both kind and cruel to the same person, or to spend and save the same money, that’s not pragmatism or “call-it-like-you-see-it independence from dogma”. It’s just incoherence.
And since incoherence makes a poor political platform, Newsweek is obliged to report, “The global financial meltdown has caused a dramatic shift in the 2008 presidential race, according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll.” Rather than the 46-46 tie that poll found one month ago, Obama-Biden now leads McCain-Palin 52-41. With an all-time-high 86% of voters calling the country “on the wrong track,”
Obama … now leads McCain among both men (54 percent to 40 percent) and women (50 percent to 41 percent). He now wins every age group of voters–including those over 65 years of age, who back him over McCain 49 to 43 percent. Supporters of Hillary Clinton, as many as a fifth of whom had at one point told pollsters they’d support McCain over Obama, now back the Democratic nominee 88 percent to 7 percent.
In this season of ironies, I think Jonathan Alter guesses wrong: actually, the greatest of them is that America is turning to a Democrat to achieve a seemingly Republican goal: restoration. Now, as in FDR’s day and words, “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”
Of this season’s candidates, only the Democrats’ “that one” offers to restore noble social values; as 80 years ago, the Republicans’ offers merely more disaster. So as most Americans see it, not Barack Obama but John McCain is the real “other.”
