Looks like something really bad happened to McCain’s campaign around September 8th: Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over that day and according to Pollster.com, it was all downhill from there.
Archive for category Bailout
Pathetic John McCain
Oct 7
After crashing his campaign into the mountain with the “suspend the campaign” stunt to “save” the country from the financial mess, finding his deregulated economy crashing down around him and power-hungry Palin giving barely literate interviews to “hard-ball” morning show reporters like Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson, John McCain will now have to spend every last drop of his faux “straight talker” legacy in a pathetic attempt to derail Obama in these final days of the 2008 Presidential campaign.
No matter how many of the polls found the country yearning for a more Preisdential and fiscally responsible adult, McCain only has the “angry” right-wing vote left. As boneheads in Republican audiences scream, “Terrorist”, the rest of the country is now loudly voting “No” to the ham-fisted economic team of Angry and Snippy.
As Talking Points Memo Election Central’s ever astute Greg Sargent puts it:
The crisis also forced McCain to suddenly wrench himself into a populist posture — a transformation so ridiculous given his previous statements and pro-deregulatory past that it colored everything that followed. Obama then performed solidly amid the skirmishing in Congress. This, combined with the public’s preference for Obama’s economic solutions over McCain’s, ensured that McCain’s higher “preparedness” numbers didn’t lead voters to see him as best prepared to manage the crisis.
It’s the basic disconnect at the heart of McCain’s claim to being the right candidate to take control of the economy that is really driving him down. In short, McCain lost his “maverick” brand because on the driving issue of the campaign, he isn’t a maverick, and never really was. And thanks to media coverage pulled towards skepticism by the liberal counter-narrative — not to mention the crisis itself — voters know it.
Or as Glenn Greenwald of Salon describes the Republicans’ situation:
This is a dying, desperate movement — so deeply out-of-touch with the country that they actually proclaimed that Sarah Palin would save them in the wake of the debate, only to watch her continue to drag down their ticket. Polls now even show Obama with large leads in traditional red states like Virginia (10-12 points) and North Carolina (6 points). Watch McCain’s speech today and you will see only one thing: the behavior of cornered rats.
I’ve never written a word about finance before, but on the way into work yesterday as I listened to the doom and gloom forecasts for the financial markets, I had a thought: If we’re concerned that the failure of these idiot financial institutions would cause a credit crunch that could drive inflation and interest rates through the roof, why not create a new class of bank, invest $700B in their start-up, and let them take over? Screw Goldman/Sachs and all these hedge fund players. Let them sink or swim with the anchor they tied around their own neck.
This new class of investment bank would operate with a set of regulations that would put capital requirements on an credit default swap contracts they write, include requirements that prevent them from moving bad assets or losses to other special investment vehicles offshore (a la Enron), and include any other requirements that smart economists believe would help them profitably succeed.
There’s no credit crunch if there is capital available from banks that are fully liquid.
Turns out that writer Diane Ritter also had this idea. Could this work?