When McCain said he needed more learnin’ before he could talk about the economy, he chose Phil Gramm — author of the Enron Loophole that allows energy traders to speculate without regulation, hoard commodities, and pay margins as low as 5% to seal deals — to be his teacher. In a Washington Times interview, Gramm shared one of his lessons: the economy just ain’t that bad, and we’re a nation of whiners.
“You’ve heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession,” [Gramm] said, noting that growth has held up at about 1 percent despite all the publicity over losing jobs to India, China, illegal immigration, housing and credit problems and record oil prices. “We may have a recession; we haven’t had one yet.”
“We have sort of become a nation of whiners,” he said. “You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline” despite a major export boom that is the primary reason that growth continues in the economy, he said.
“We’ve never been more dominant; we’ve never had more natural advantages than we have today,” he said. “We have benefited greatly” from the globalization of the economy in the last 30 years.
Mr. Gramm said the constant drubbing of the media on the economy’s problems is one reason people have lost confidence. Various surveys show that consumer confidence has fallen precipitously this year to the lowest levels in two to three decades, with most analysts attributing that to record high gasoline prices over $4 a gallon and big drops in the value of homes, which are consumers’ biggest assets.
“Misery sells newspapers,” Mr. Gramm said. "Thank God the economy is not as bad as you read in the newspaper every day."Naturally, this has pulled every McCain surrogate out of the woodwork to do damage control, the key talking point being that Gramm is speaking for himself. It’s the same thing they said about Charlie Black, another McCain advisor, when he mused that an attack on America would be a good thing for McCain.
It’s been a busy day for his spokes-apologists, so McCain decided to handle the remarks of another key advisor, Carly Fioriana, who’s in charge of gathering Hillary women into the fold, and who yesterday lamented the unfairness of insurance covering viagra but not birth control. See how McCain masterfully handles a reporter’s question about it with facial contortions, long pauses, and a plea that he be given time for more learnin’.
Of all the things to debate about this, one that occurs to me is whether Gallup is just making shit up. How is it possible that this Keystone Cop campaign is polling so close in daily tracking to the best run campaign in modern history, headed by the most charismatic candidate since John Kennedy?
At any rate, I’m eager to see how McCain supporters here, who don’t get the talking points memos, defend this latest affront to voters. Is it really every man for himself in the McCain campaign, with no one speaking on behalf of the candidate, other than the candidate himself, who often cannot speak? How is his candidacy not summarily and universally dismissed as just one big, bad joke?
