George Stephwhatever interviewed the surly John McCain for a few minutes on his show Sunday morning. McCain seemed to have undergone a beige makeup job which made him look less cadaverous than in recent TV appearances, which is good, but he spoke in that soft, furry monotone the whole time, which is not so good. I did pick up on McCain's basic trick, now that I know what to look for: it isn't difficult to find inconsistencies in any position Johnny Mac takes; his life is so full of inherent contradictions that they're hard to miss. He's the anti-special interest crusader, for example, whose campaign is wholly owned by lobbyists on the payroll of those very same corrupting influences. When George S. asked about Rick Davis, the lobbyist for Freddie Mac who runs McCain's campaign and whose lobbying firm, Davis Manafort, remained on the payroll of Freddie Mac until last month, McCain simply persisted in the obvious lie that Davis has not been connected to Freddie Mac "for years." That's how he handles criticism; anyone who points out that he's simply lying is playing the "politics game" and anyone can do that, after all. It doesn't "mean anything." McCain's work is too important and he's too much of a maverick to engage in politics as usual and play the back-and-forth game of modern elections, such as responding honestly to accusations he's lying through his clenched teeth. Since all criticism is politically motivated, it's equally meaningless in McCain's view - just part of the "process," so that even when he's accurately portrayed as a liar and con man it doesn't mean anything. People are only accurately describing him as a charlatan and hypocrite because he's running for office, so why pay it any mind? In that sense, McCain probably represents the final evolutionary stage of American media politics: a human being who underwent a soul-ectomy so long ago that there's no conscience left to bother.
Still, it was the second half of the show that was the most interesting. George S. led a roundtable discussion featuring Newt Gingrich, George Will, Robert Reich and Steven Pearlstein, an economics writer for the Washington Post. The bailout and the country's financial crisis were the topics of discussion. It was an uncommonly serious conversation for one of George's gabfests. I got the general feeling that everyone around the table was genuinely scared. And the most remarkable aspect of the discussion was this: although it might be hard to find two personalities in American politics more historically dissimilar in ideology than Robert Reich and Newt Gingrich, they essentially agreed on everything. Gingrich contended that America can't compete because our educational system has gone to the dogs, our infrastructure is shot, and we're broke. Pearlstein said that America had lived beyond its means for so long that the time had come to pay the piper; the foreign creditors were through financing our extravagant lifestyle. George Will opined that the candidates were probably going to have to admit the truth about the "sainted American electorate;" in general, they're a bunch of self-indulgent, childish and unrealistic people who financed their lives with heavy debt. Reich said that Newt was turning into a "liberal Democrat" before his very eyes, and Gingrich only smiled. Indeed, the only person I thought sounded completely unrealistic was Robert Reich, who gamely tossed out the usual New Deal bromides about the need for increased government spending and larger deficits to stimulate the economy and "get it moving again." What money, Bob? What economy?
So what we're seeing here is the consensus that develops when all options are essentially gone. If four people of disparate political leanings are sitting in the middle of the trackless Sahara next to a Landcruiser that has run out of gas, they might argue about how, exactly, they came to their desperate pass. But they could all probably concur that they were shit out of luck no matter how they got there. That's what it sounded like. Congress can appropriate $700 billion (a number which Henry Paulson admits was plucked out of the air because it sounded "big") by authorizing some more borrowing from those same oversubscribed foreign lenders, but it doesn't mean the U.S. economy is going anywhere. Commercial banks are currently borrowing phenomenal amounts from the Federal Reserve through all of its new open "windows" in order to give the appearance of solvency, as much as $188 billion per week (and how long does it take to reach $700 billion at that rate?), but it's sort of like experimenting with a dead frog in a lab tray. You can run electric current through the frog's legs and make them move, but the frog is still dead.
This huge "bailout" is designed solely to reimburse close personal friends of Administration bigwigs for the consequences of their own cupidity, and to levitate the general economy for a few months or weeks or whatever so that the incumbent scoundrels can get out of Washington, D.C. The Democrats, of course, went along with it, but if you've watched the riveting, incisive commentary by the electrifying Harry Reid during his press ops, you'll have little problem understanding how he got rolled by Bush yet again.
The Big Four around George S.'s table seemed to have little trouble understanding where we are, even if it's impolitic to admit just how bad things really are. Money is what made all those policy differences go, after all; Newt liked seeing the Federal largesse siphoned off to private enterprise and away from entitlements (or public schools, for that matter). Robert Reich liked government "programs," that bete noire of Conservative regard. Now it doesn't matter what they used to think. The money's gone. The sun is rising along with the temperature, the sand dunes are shimmering in the heat, and they don't see any camel-riding rescuers on the horizon.
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