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Friday, October 10, 2008
Maverick, yes, but still choice for recovery
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
John McCain can be maddening sometimes. Independents and undecideds who may be concerned that he parrots the conservative line need not worry.
He is unquestionably the maverick, subject to bolting from the conservative reservation at the most unexpected times.
Take, for example, Tuesday night’s debate in Nashville. Investors are in full panic. The week’s sell-off on Wall Street was brutal. Cash on the sidelines is at record levels. Anxiety is feeding anxiety, as President Bush reminded the nation Friday. The market will recover.
The real question, however, is the impact of November’s election. Business leaders are not among the undecided. Chief Executive magazine polled 751 of them and found that 80 percent support McCain. “More to the point,” the magazine reports, “a thundering 74 percent majority say they fear the consequences of an Obama presidency, compared to only 19 percent who fear a McCain presidency.”
The angry mob wishes to lynch them all, starting with those whose compensation is obscene.
But the fact is that when the panic abates, these are the people whose decisions will determine when and where jobs are added and the pace of the recovery.
McCain, rather than using the debate to hammer home the message that the spending and tax policies advocated by Barack Obama will be disastrous to the economy, opted instead to unveil a mortgage buy-up program straight from left field and to jump on the Democrats’ Wall Street Greed bandwagon.
Furthermore, he failed to offer a narrative explaining that the housing bubble that precipitated the troubles in financial markets started in Congress with Democrats determined to use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as instruments of their social policy. He offered bullet points, and later in the week tried to flesh them out, but a prime opportunity was missed.
The mortgage bailout is contrary to all conservative principles. Granted, in times of financial crisis, the first obligation is to stanch the panic and to stabilize the market. In the short term, conservative principles may be sacrificed. But as quickly as possible, government has to retreat and let the free market work. It’s not taxpayers’ obligation to save companies or to spare executives and stockholders from financial ruin. Nor, incidentally, is it useful to turn well-compensated CEOs over to mob justice. There’s time to get the crooks, though the tragedy of the scapegoating is that politicians who had even larger roles in this financial disaster — Barney Frank, for example — escape accountability. Always.
The decision by Congress to force Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy home loans made to uncreditworthy borrowers is the root cause of this disaster. The symbiotic relationship between politicians and the two mortgage-bundlers is and was a cancer on government. Never again should Congress imply that any private-sector company, as the two of them are, has debt backed by taxpayers.
Under-the-gun conservatives are not purists in time of crisis, but they do avoid abandoning those principles altogether. McCain’s mortgage proposal effectively says to those who have managed their financial affairs prudently, who played by the rules, who sacrificed pleasures in the interest of their family’s long-term good, that you were a dunce. Had you bought more than you could afford, had you speculated in mortgages, had you gambled irresponsibly, there’s a reward to come. The government will bail you out and, as a prize, give you a better rate.
Suddenly, we’re not putting principles aside temporarily to arrest panic. We’re setting up a massive new social program that rewards the precise behavior that is destructive to families and to their well-being.
What McCain proposes is a version of the social policies that essentially eliminate the difference between responsibility and irresponsibility espoused and implemented for decades by Democrats.
Despite McCain’s occasional venture into strange territory, saddling this economy with higher taxes and $850 billion in new spending, as Obama proposes, would be disastrous.
Given a Democratic majority in both the House and the Senate with the will to implement his tax and spending policies, an Obama presidency could ruin recovery and further move this nation toward socialism. That’s the case McCain should be making, defining the consequences of their differences, not offering me-too rhetoric and social programs.
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