Advice for McFlighty

What's a candidate to do? As John McCain watches his favorables plummet while Barack Obama's rise, McFlighty is in desperate need of some steadying advice. The Washington Post asks five experienced politicos "What Could Change the Election."

John Podesta, Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff, thinks McCain's only hope is to give the electorate less McCain, to.... "change the dynamics of this race, but his erratic responses to the economic crisis aren't the way to do it. He could consider announcing that, if elected, he would pledge to serve only one term." But, wouldn't that position Bush's-dimmer-twin Palin as the GOP candidate in 2012?..... (hair-on-fire alert) aaaaaagh!

Newt Gingrich, former GOP speaker of the House and OK-for-me-but-impeach-Clinton womanizer and legislative bomb-thrower, true to form thinks head-on attack is McCain's best bet... "McCain has to focus on the Reid-Pelosi-Obama machine and the threats they pose to most Americans." Get a grip, Newt, no one wants more "Axis of Evil" scare-tactics.

Mary Beth Cahill, John Kerry's outmaneuvered and Swiftboated 2004 presidential campaign manager, advises McCain to "regain his footing as an independent-minded leader capable of appealing to independents".... but she can't help adding that's "unlikely to happen." Well, she should know all about grabbing defeat from the jaws of.... oh, never mind.

Peter J. Wallison, (who?) counsel to Ronald Reagan (oh), just can't fast-forward to the 21st century with his advice to McCain... "Republicans have been discouraged and frustrated" by McCain's "apparent refusal to challenge Obama on two obvious points." Those points? What else but "deregulation" and that moth-eaten GOP mantra "tax cuts." Wallison.... how gigantic is that trickle-down mortgage on Reagan's "shining city on a hill"?

Stuart Eizenstat, chief domestic policy advisor in the Carter White House, and senior positions in the Clinton administration, thinks a winning strategy would be a memorable debate line like... "Are you better off today than you were two years ago?"... or eight years ago? This helps McCain how?

Tonight's debate is important, but a game changer? Only if McCain flashes his old grin and announces he was only kidding.... Mitt Romney is really his VP pick.

History: McKeating to Meltdown

By contrast, the Keating Five scandal was small potatoes. A financial institution bailout costing over $3 billion in 1989.

Compared with the bailout of hundreds of billions for the current financial meltdown, it seems small potatoes. But, there are other comparisons that chill.

The Keating Five scandal.... five Senators entangled in the failure of big- time campaign contributor Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan. The five were accused of intervening with banking regulators to protect Keating.

Then-economist Alan Greenspan wrote a letter on Keating's behalf extolling the management of Lincoln Savings as "seasoned and expert" with a "record of outstanding success."

Sen. John McCain, now seeking the presidency of the United States, was one of the five.

Alan Greenspan went on to become chairman of the Federal Reserve.

In today's New York Times Frank Rich puts a fine point on this history in Truthiness Stages a Comeback.

Rich reminds us that McCain.... "has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen “every part of our economy.” He didn't, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.

McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.

These smear tactics are nothing new.... George Bush smeared McCain in the 2000 GOP presidential primaries, and Swiftboated John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election..... but, it was the former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich who codified such tactics in a 1996 GOPAC memo entitled Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.

Gingrich advised GOP campaigners to memorize as many of his suggested words as possible and use them. He suggested they talk about themselves with optimistic positive governing words such as... change, commitment, moral, family, vision... and use words to define Democrats such as.... abuse of power, betray, cheat, corrupt, greed, hypocrisy, traitors, welfare.... even, gasp, liberal.

And the point.... control. Over our country, over our lives.

And control the GOP did. Congress from 1994 to 2004 and the White House for the last eight years. Now they want to point the finger at everyone else for the dismal state of our economy, although there is plenty of blame to go around and the Democrats skirts aren't all clean.

The combination of Rove's bogus alternative to reality and the application of Gingrich's advice to use words as tactics has been politically successful for the GOP, and lethal for the country as the populace was manipulated and misled.

As Rich explains: "When a McCain spokesman told Politico a week ago that 'we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say' about the campaign’s incessant fictions, he was channeling a famous Bush dictum of 2003: 'Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter.' In Bush’s case, the lies lobbed over the heads of the press were to sell the war in Iraq. That propaganda blitz, devised by a secret White House Iraq Group that included Rove, was a triumph. In mere months, Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein had aided the 9/11 attacks and even that Iraqis were among the hijackers. A largely cowed press failed to set the record straight...

"If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else."

This same media filter is being used in the current financial crisis. Why isn't the press talking about McCain's Keating past? Rich notes that the "indisputable historical antecedent for our current crisis is the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal of the go-go 1980s. When Charles Keating’s bank went belly up because of risky, unregulated investments, it wiped out its depositors’ savings and cost taxpayers more than $3 billion. More than 1,000 other S.&L. institutions capsized nationwide.

"It was ugly for the McCains. He had received more than $100,000 in Keating campaign contributions, and both McCains had repeatedly hopped on Keating’s corporate jet. Cindy McCain and her beer-magnate father had invested nearly $360,000 in a Keating shopping center a year before her husband joined four senators in inappropriate meetings with regulators charged with S.&L. oversight.

"After Congressional hearings, McCain was reprimanded for 'poor judgment.' .... Yet he, like many deregulators in his party, was guilty of bankrupt policy-making before disaster struck. He was among the sponsors of a House resolution calling for the delay of regulations intended to deter risky investments just like those that brought down Lincoln and its ilk."

McCain as a "maverick" is just another manipulative use of a word as a tactic.

In truth, as Rich reminds us.... "The corporate jets, lobbyists and sleazes that gravitated around McCain in the Keating era have also reappeared in new incarnations. The Nation’s Web site recently unearthed a photo of the resolutely anticelebrity McCain being greeted by the con man Raffaello Follieri and his then girlfriend, the Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway, as McCain celebrated his 70th birthday on Follieri’s rented yacht in Montenegro in August 2006. It’s the perfect bookend to the old pictures of McCain in a funny hat partying with Keating in the Bahamas."

Eric Hovde explains today in Calling Out the Culprits Who Caused the Crisis (WaPo) ...."In the run-up to the millennium, the Federal Reserve, led by then-Chairman Alan Greenspan, began to pump money into the capital markets to deal with any financial problems that might arise from a Y2K meltdown."

The meltdown didn't happen, but the "monetary stimulus, coupled with the aforementioned hype, created an unfortunate bubble in Internet, technology and telecommunications stocks."

Large Wall Street investment banks recognized the potential profit in promoting the technology boom and from mid-1999 to mid-2000 they took about 500 companies public, raising about 77 billion for the IPOs, for which they received a 6 percent underwriting fee.

In this rush for profits, the investment banks also invested in these companies before the IPO when the stock was valued at a fraction of the post IPO, and threw out their underwriting guidelines in place since the Great Depression.

Then.... the technology bubble burst and as Hovde explains, "America's corporate landscape was littered with bankruptcies and mass layoffs, and investor losses have been estimated at more than $1 trillion."

Greenspan's Federal Reserve reacted by increasing the money supply and slashing short-term interest rates to 1 percent... a level not seen for more than 45 years. This stimulus led to an enormous housing boom and new mortgage products that ignored all previous lending guidelines.

Wall Street then packaged these subprime mortgages, again receiving billions in fees, and sold them to investors.

We are now facing the disastrous result as this whole get-rich-quick scheme falls apart as the bills come due.

Hovde explains, "First, the Fed laid the groundwork for both these asset bubbles by lowering interest rates to historic lows. In an attempt to protect his legacy after the Internet-bubble collapse, Greenspan provided unprecedented stimulus to re-inflate the economy and maintain his popularity with Wall Street.... But in doing so, he spawned the largest debt and asset bubble in U.S. history."

Of course, the SEC stood idly by as Wall Street took advantage of the investing public in the Internet and housing bubbles. Treasury secretaries took no action to curb these abuses, and "Wall Street investment banking firms sprinkled some of its massive gains into the pockets of our elected officials," and bought itself protection from any tough government enforcement, Hovde explains.

And, regardless of his current fiery calls for a crackdown on Wall Street, McCain opposed the very regulations that might have helped avert the current catastrophe. In 1999, he supported a law co-authored by his campaign financial guru then-Sen. Phil Gramm "that revoked the New Deal reforms intended to prevent commercial banks, insurance companies and investment banks from mingling their businesses," Rich reminds us.

Now, Gramm is keeping a low profile after he blamed the economic meltdown on our 'nation of whiners' and 'mental recession,' but he remains in the McCain loop.

So there you have it.... greed, corruption and a gulled electorate have brought us to this catastrophic financial crisis.

But history doesn't have to be prologue to the future. We can and must change business as usual.

November!

Will Froggy Fred Blink or Swim?

Is Fred Thompson finally going to forsake his safe lily pad and jump into the brisk waters of the presidential candidate pool?

If rumors are true, he'll stop just testing the waters and be in the GOP swim of things by next week... a do-or-bye date for raising campaign funds. (WaPo)

Newt Gingrich has advised him to announce via video, a' la Hillary, but we wonder if this is good advice. After all, the public expects the Law & Order guy to be up-front, on the firing line so to speak, not hiding behind lip gloss and cue cards.

Speculation is that he'll travel to California on announcement day in a bid to seize the "Reagan mantle" that the GOP hopefuls are fighting over. A tricky icon to emulate, and one that might lead to...."Ronald Reagan was a friend of mine..... " (you know the rest).

Next week the tide of speculation will reach its high point, so Thompson must "pluck your magic twanger froggy" and plunge in, or drift into the sunset of expectations.

Independent on Independence Day

Independence Day this year is more than just fireworks and brats on the grill.... it also marks a growing independence in the electorate.

A new, in-depth study by The Washington Post in collaboration with the Kaiser Foundation and Harvard University, finds that a "broad segment of the electorate - about three in 10 voters" call themselves Independents and could well be the power brokers of 2008.

Putting things into perspective usually means 3-D.... in the case of Independents, the study puts them into focus with 5 Ds:

Deliberators... classic swing voters. They may not decide until the curtain closes.

Disillusioned... there must be hordes of these. They think the parties are but two heads of the same dangerous political monster.

Dislocated... no one party fits their social-fiscal outlook. Remember when the GOP was fiscally conservative?

Disguised... wingers on the left and right. So far out on the limb they can no longer see the tree.

Disengaged... "There's going to be an election?"

The voter category that worries me the most is "Disengaged." They are about 25 percent of all independents and are the youngest of any group.... four in ten are younger than 30. It's their future that's the most on the line in 2008.

It's maddening that the political odor emanating from our so-called political leaders distances the very people their actions will most impact.

So, which party or political candidate benefits from the trend toward independence?

Not former House speaker Newt Gingrich. Two-thirds would definitely not vote for him. New York Mayor Bloomberg if he runs as an Independent? Maybe half, while a third said definitely not.

One is left with the impression that there is a great muddle of voters out there milling around and muttering "Who to trust... who to trust."

They are shell-shocked by the deceptions of The Decider and his partner in crime, "Closed-door" Cheney, and their Constitution-gutting, inept cabinet and congressional enablers from both parties.... a host of good-ol'-boy bureaucratic big spenders and bumblers.

Today, Independents are waving the flag, weighing their options and withholding their support.... for now.

Ten White Men in a Row

A testosterone-hyped field of 10 white men went mano a mano on the Iraq war and torture last night in their debate battle for the GOP nomination . With a couple of refreshing exceptions.

Rep. Ron Paul of Texas (who, by the way, has a corn dog's chance at the Iowa State Fair of getting a bite on the nomination) stood his lonely ground by denouncing the decision to go to war in Iraq, the use of torture and even suggested that terrorists actions like 9/11 were in part in retaliation for the United States' actions in the world, saying "If we ignore that, we ignore that at our risk."

This gave the question-dodging and debate-floundering America's mayor, Rudy Giuliani, the opening he needed for chest thumping, challenging Paul's statement as an "absurd explanation for September 11." We know what Paul was trying to say, but this forum wanted napalm in the morning.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona also rejected the use of torture explaining he's been there and had that done unto him.... and, the thing that kept him and his fellow POW's going was the fact that their country wasn't like that. Of course, McCain stayed with his support of the surge in Iraq, at this point he really has no choice.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee delivered the best zinger, joking that in recent years Congress had "spent money like John Edwards at a beauty shop." This campaign season the GOP will make sure that Edwards keeps paying for his $400 haircut.

Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, was articulate, polished, knowledgeable and well.... perfect. I could hear the casting call. Would someone please put a big spot on his tie?

Former governor James Gilmore, as a poll bottom-feeder, tried to make points by challenging the true conservatism of McCain, Giuliani and Romney. They easily dodged his barbs and he faded once again into the Virginia countryside.

Rep.Tom Tancredo of Colorado delivered the second best zinger aimed at his GOP rivals changing positions... "I trust those conversions when they happen on the road to Damascus, not on the road to Des Moines." But strangely, he gave a shallow reply on a question about illegal immigration, his calling card. It didn't turn out to be a trump.

A glib Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas put on a good performance, but it seemed a performance.

Rep. Duncan Hunter of California was on point on defense issues and immigration. His concise responses were refreshing.

And that leaves only Elmer Fudd, the former Wisconsin gov Tommy Thompson, who seemed to be down-shifted to low gear.... upstaged perhaps by the other Thompson, Fred, the Thompson the GOP electorate is panting for although he has yet to announce, let alone debate. According to the latest polls, Fred is even eating into Giuliani's leading position.

I had predicted, and anticipated, that a debate sponsored by FOX News and hosted by Brit Hume would be one long GOP commercial, all softballs and no substance. I was wrong. It was the best debate by either party so far, although probably partly because the candidates are becoming better at it. And mixing it up a bit.

I also looked for the 10 white men to trip over each other in expressing their sympathy over the death that day of Rev. Jerry Falwell who spearheaded the Moral Majority winning GOP strategy. But wisely, Hume nipped that rush in the bud at the outset of the debate by expressing their unified regret so the candidates wouldn't need to do so individually.

The other no-show thus far in the GOP field is former House speaker Newt Gingrich who is dangling the "great possibility" of his candidacy. At least his timing may be propitious, he is slated to deliver the commencement address at Falwell's university on Saturday.... there could be no better center stage than before a grieving GOP base.

The Shallow GOP Pool

"How far would I travel, just to be where you are? How far is the journey, from here to the White House star?...... And, if I ever lost you, how much would I cry? How deep is the ocean, how high is the sky?"

This should be the official presidential candidate theme song, played whenever two or more are gathered to lay the words on us. However, the song may not quite fit the current field of GOP hopefuls because as Eugene Robinson points out, their field is ten wide, but it's not ocean deep.

In their first debate, this GOP country club lineup of well-heeled white men mostly tread around the shallow end of the Republican talking points .... Iraq war on the right track, abortion rights bad.... Bush who?.... Reagan's our president.

In fact, there doesn't seem to be any reason for Fred Thompson, Newt Gingrich or Chuck Hagel not to wade in.... "The water doesn't look very deep." It'll just be more GOP white men with a toe in the presidential puddle.

After all, shallow has worked fine for The Decider. He has been using the kiddie pool for over six years, barely getting his intellect wet.... "How deep is corruption, how high is the lie"