Published in The New York Post on September 27, 2008
THE DEBATE ARGUMENT HE DIDN’T MAKE - BUT COULD STILL HELP HIM WIN
During Friday’s debate, John McCain assiduously and inexplicably avoided using the issue that might have won him the debate and the presidency: opposition to a taxpayer-funded bailout of the financial crisis.
Congress is about to pass - and the president is about to sign - a bill that the American people detest by 2:1 margins. When Americans realize that there is, indeed, an alternative to handing over $700 billion to financial institutions as a reward for their failure, opposition to the idea will swell even further.
The bailout ideas proposed by the House Republicans and trumpeted by former Speaker Newt Gingrich make eminent sense. Indeed, they make so much sense that it is as if the roles of the parties have been reversed. It is the Republicans who are demanding that the banks and financial institutions pay for their own bailout, granting them only a mixture of loans and premium-paid insurance, while the Democrats want to pass the hat among the taxpayers to buy their dirty paper.
In an unusual act of political foresight and skill, the normally dead-headed House Republican leadership has crafted a platform that can carry the party to victory in November. All that remains is for the Party’s candidate - and perhaps even its president and Treasury Secretary - to get on board. McCain can recover at the negotiating table the economy issue he lost in Friday’s debate. He needs to have the courage of his convictions and insist on a bailout without requiring taxpayer-funded purchase of defunct mortgages from failing institutions.
The difference in the bailout plans is, of course, largely cosmetic. Dead paper is dead paper whether it is on the books of the government, purchased from banks, or on the books of the banks, insured by the government. The game is the same: Through loans or grants fund the deficient debt service on the defaulted mortgages until homes can recover their value in the cyclical real estate market.
But it makes all the difference in the world politically if this task is accomplished by buying bad debt or by lending the bankers the money to cover their current losses while they keep their bad debts on their books and by insuring them against future losses.
Loans are politically viable. Purchase of bad debt with tax money is not.
The Democrats and our politically-challenged president have failed to appreciate the difference between spending and lending. Treasury Secretary Paulson can be excused for not realizing it. Politics is not his thing.
But John McCain must realize the crucial distinction and must use his leverage to stop a taxpayer-funded bailout, insisting instead on loans and insurance.
If McCain stands firm, the Democrats will either have to pass the bailout package on their own, without Republican votes, and rely on Bush’s signature on the bill to provide a fig leaf of bipartisanship - or they will have to cave in and pass the Republican package.
Either way, McCain comes out ahead.
If he gets his way, he gets credit for the bailout. If he doesn’t, he can spend the campaign attacking Obama and the Democrats for spending $700 billion of taxpayer money.
If the Democrats don’t adopt either course and play a game of chicken with the Republicans, their Congressional status as the majority party dooms them to taking the blame for any ensuing collapse.
Voters can count.
They know that Reid and Pelosi are Democrats and that they control Congress. With this power comes responsibility.
And if the Democrats do nothing - that is they fail to use their majorities to pass a bailout or to cooperate with the Republicans in adopting the GOP version of the package - it is they who will get the blame for the catastrophe which will follow.
The Democrats don’t dare take that chance.
The cards are dealt for John McCain. All he has to do is have the guts to do what he didn’t have the courage to do in the debate: Play the hand.
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Comments
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It is starting to look like he got finessed.
If only you were his campaign manager, Dick. I wrote to the MCain camp early on, suggesting just such a scenario. Apparently, I ruffled a few feathers.
Whatchagonnado?
Our Free Market System works best when it is allowed to work without government interference. When government steps in, and socialism takes hold, as it did with Welfare and then with Fannie/Freddie, removing the incentives of free enterprise and violates the forces of the marketplace, the problems grow and grow, requiring further socialism, and the wheel keeps turning. One government socialist program after another takes our freedom of choice and even our freedom to succeed or fail in the Free Market, and soon every freedom we have under the Constitution. This Bailout is a step further down the road to disaster.
Ultimately, socialism fails. It has never succeeded because it goes against man’s nature. It takes away man’s creative drive, destroys ambition and the rewards of hard/smart work. It has failed everywhere it has been tried, but not before citizens lose everything, including their precious freedom, an inch at a time. Ben Franklin predicted that Democracy fails after a time simply on the promises of politicians, buying votes with give away programs controlled by a growing government, as the citizens look more and more to government to do what they should always do for themselves.
While other countries are moving away from Socialism, we are - inch by inch - moving to it, as a country and a government. Those among us who are children of the GREATEST GENERATION, our parents who lived through the Great Depression and the Great War, are responsible for this movement toward socialism in our society, more then I hate to admit. We failed to instill in our children the values of our parents, as we made them soft and “ready meat” for socialism. Wanting them to have what our hard working parents did not and what we did not; wanting them to have it easier’ wanting them to enjoy life without drudgery and hard work, we removed the incentive to accomplish in so many of them.
Though most of us, our generation, fear socialism as we fear hard drugs, it is a fact that the younger generations are more than willing to sell their freedoms, inch by inch, and allow government to take control, as their expectations are that the world and particularly America owes them a quality life without care or effort. Free health care; guaranteed employment; a house and a car or two and a months vacation for all……sounds good, and even better when your government will provide it from some magical source that turns out to be ALL of the earnings of ALL of the people, managed by Big Brother, who cannot even manage the Post Office or Social Security or even their own government budget. In the end, this type of socialism implodes, as we are beginning to see, as their actions of the 90s in the socialist Fannie/Freddie programs roll out to their flawed conclusion in the market, forcing the government through higher and higher taxation to grow government in large leaps, to shore up the flawed socialist system we are building. When it comes crashing down, as did the Soviet Union, we will all suffer and pay dearly…….for selling out the Free Market System and our Freedom of choice, on which this country was built.
If we elect a socialist left wing extreme President to join with the socialist extreme Congress under Pelosi and Reed, we are doomed to continue down the road to Socialism, only with this total control at the top, it will happen overnight, not over a much longer time. The Socialist systems begin to fail when the “takers” become the majority and take from the minority, all incentive to keep struggling, working, building. When the “takers” take from the few “creators” all there is to take, the well runs dry and the system fails. Ask those Russian citizens who lived through the demise of their Empire and you will know what is coming, if we go down this road.
VOTE MCCAIN.
This election won’t be won or lost at the debates. Nor will it be determined by the two campaigns’ “ground games” — their get-out-the-vote efforts. Nor, unfortunately, will its outcome even depend on how many Americans wake up on Election Day intending to vote for one candidate or the other. Instead, my fear is that the Electoral College results will hang on the swing state voting systems’ vulnerability to sabotage (M. Kaplan HuffPost).
So while the presidential and vice presidential debates may make for swell political theater, the likelihood is that victory will be determined not by how the debates move a small percentage of undecided Americans off the fence, but by the voting experiences of a few thousand voters in a few swing states on November 4. Josef Stalin is reputed to have said, “Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.” I think he had it half right. Those who decide who cast the votes also decide everything (M.Kaplan HuffPost).
[…] to do is have the guts to do what he didn’t have the courage to do in the debate: Play the hand. MCCAIN’S TRUMP CARD at DickMorris.com __________________ Forward motion makes you sway like the ocean The herb is more than just a […]
To hell with McCain’s trump card. After witnessing the bungling in Congress this morning I think it is time for the voters to play their trump card. I suggest we vote en-masse against every single incumbent.
It seems clear that McCain has his opening to run against the Democratic Congress and W. (both supported the latest bailout plan). I’m not sure the McCain Camp knows how to take advantage of this issue and do what is right for the American Taxpayer!
Dick….your Country is calling you. Officially or unofficially, please join the McCain Campaign…..they need your help big time!
I wonder if this was a rope-a-dope crafted by the GOP to lure the Dems into fearfully buying into the Paulson plan/warnings, to accept, change, and embrace that plan. Then the Republicans swoop in with their plan, which is a lot more politically viable, leaving the Dems with no political cover and appearing as acting rash when faced with a crisis, while the cooler, more level-headed Republicans and McCain called for more another direction. It’s probably not the case that it was all planned in advance, but it would be an impressive play.
In any case, Obama has already embraced the current plan, attempting to ride on it’s political coattails, saying McCain should receive NO credit for the current bailout plan, and that he himself has been the one working the phones, and been on the phone everyday with Paulson, to craft the current plan. Now, if as Dick said, the Republicans can hold and force the Dems to accept their plan, Obama is left vunerable to backing a plan that was ultimate nixed, playing on his lack of experience causing him to make a “rash decision” and not explore other options that better protect the taxpayer. What the Republicans should continue to push, is an immediate repeal of the “mark-to-market” accounting rule, which would solve an estimated 70% of the current crisis. This would also be a great play against the administration to help remove the Bush’s 3rd term label, and actually have Obama on the same side as Bush instead of McCain, and would help push the fiscal conservative side of McCain.
Once the Republican plan is adopted, “Obama’s plan”, which may have worked, now becomes an indefensible position since nobody knows the true outcome of what may have happened with their bailout, only that it was ultimately dropped in favor of a superior Republican backed plan. Similar to the situation of Obama stating he was against the Iraq war, which was an easy stance to take since it’s impossible to show actual outcome of not going to war.
Why was there such a cry when Enron went under and the cuprits were investigated and then jailed? Now….with the fat cats of Freddie and Fannie doing even worse there is nobody looking to do likewise? It’s not Wall Street that is to blame, it’s Barnie Frank and the Democrates who pushed for “Affordable Housing” and made the banks take those loans even though the individuals couln’t pay them back. That was another Welfare program spawned by the Democrates and nobody seems to have the courage to lay it on their doorstep. The Republicans tried for a long while to blow the whistle but Congress would not listen — didn’t want to. They were making more votes (via the poor) come their way. What a party. Now they want us to pay for their deeds. No way.
[…] Gridlock? This week’s obvious game-changin’ stunt for McCain to pull would be opposing the bailout bill, as Dick Morris advises.** But McCain probably can’t pull that stunt because of Last […]