FUNDAMENTALIST

FUNDAMENTALIST 

For weeks, we were treated to the new McCain, a sort of pseudo-populist wrapping himself in a real one from Alaska. 

As this unrecognizable imitation of his former honorable self, the senior Senator from Arizona threw caution (and conscience) to the wind, spinning out Rovian lies that Obama wanted to teach sex education to kindergartners, increase everyone's taxes, and insult pols who wore lipstick. His running mate, who is much better at this, stood by his side, creating the crowds McCain could never get on his own while pretending (like George W.) that decisiveness is an effective substitute for knowledge. 

Then they ran into reality. 

Lehman Brothers went belly up, Merrill Lynch sold itself for a song to avoid the same fate, the DOW plunged, and in the space of forty eight hours, the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve redefined schizophrenia, first promising they would never bail out AIG and then proceeding to . . .bail out AIG. Indeed, in that peculiar form of Communism for the rich that seems to have been invented here, AIG (like Bear Stearns before it, but, alas, unlike Lehman) was deemed "too big to fail". So you and I will assume the risk, and write another chapter in the apparently endless American quest to privatize gains while we socialize losses. 

McCain's reaction to this dizzying array of events was to appear . . . well, dizzy.

First he told us that the "fundamentals" of the American economy are sound, which refutes itself. Attacked, he then claimed that the "fundamentals" to which he was referring were America's workers, which refutes the English language. A little later, his spokesperson announced that McCain had (Gore-like) invented the Blackberry, which refutes reality (assuming one applies the same standard used with Gore).

Resuming command, John took a new approach, saying we need a "9/11-type commission" to investigate the causes of the current financial meltdown. Not for nothin', I guess this is because the Administration and McCain himself had listened so intently to that committee's recommendations that they think a reprise would be good. Around this time, Hewlitt-Packard's ex-CEO (and McCain supporter) Carli Fiorina weighed in with the announcment that neither McCain nor Palin were qualified to run HP (which makes it very clear why he did not chose her for VP). And finally, McCain bemoaned greed on Wall Street (a first for a conservative) and amended his past to come out for increased regulation as the solution to the problem. 

In Congress, before members or Senators have their remarks printed in the Congressional Record, they get to submit new or different remarks under the guise of "revising and extending" what they actually said. McCain is now raising that to new heights, effectively asking us to "revise and extend" his entire anti-regulatory political career. Resembling a balloon losing air more than a politician engaged in the usual spin, the GOP's standard bearer has now variously staked his economic "plan" on ground occupied by denial, dissemblance, delusion, despair and dishonesty, roughly in that order. 

The truth is he has no plan. That is why he has trumpeted a faux-populism, accented by Palin's scary but real version of the cultural variety. For years, the GOP has convinced voters that, in Ben Wattenberg's words, "values matter most." So long as life is protected, gays are excluded, evangelism is institutionalized and moral relativists are excoriated even as they are imitated, the old GOP of rich fat cats had their economic way with tax cuts and de-regulation. The GOP base may have seen its wages and benefits go down, but at least the party of God was keeping the San Francisco liberals in their place (which is roughly one California earthquake from falling off the country). 

All that is now changing. What happens when you gut the regulatory state and invite more risk is that profiteers . . . take more risk. Sooner or later, however, risk matters, and later has now arrived. This, as we learned this week, is bad news for Bear and Lehman and Merrill and AIG. 

But it is really bad news for the rest of us. Bear and AIG and Fannie and Freddie were too big to fail, so now they haven't. 

 As for you and me, it's a different story. 

 In the GOP world, we're too small to save.