TNR’s Brad Plumer had a line this afternoon that immediately made me chuckle. His headline read, “Does a Financial Crisis Help Romney?” and Plumer said:
Yeah, I know, this post plays into all the worst stereotypes about political journalists (there’s a market meltdown happening, and we just want to talk about the horse race…). The question here is: What about the GOP race? Romney’s starting to make his “I’m a business leader, I know what to do” pitch down in Florida — even if he’s just proposing the same old Bush-style tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. Is that going to convince anyone?
I laughed because I’m just as shameless a political animal, and can relate to those “worst stereotypes.” For the record, upon seeing the global markets take a serious hit yesterday, and reading about the pressure on the Fed here in the U.S., my first thought had nothing to do with the presidential campaign and everything to do with financial consequences of a global economic slowdown. But, after a couple of hours, I’ll concede my thoughts did drift into, “I wonder what impact this might have on the White House race….”
To be sure, one of the least pressing angles to market uncertainty is a presidential primary. But seeing that this here is a political blog, and presumably you’re all interested in political events, it’s probably worth taking a moment to consider the political consequences of the market news.
And while I don’t know which candidate, if any, stands to benefit from the market crunch, I’m quite certain John McCain doesn’t.
Over the weekend, McCain made clear — indeed, he was quite candid about it — that after a quarter-century in Congress, he doesn’t know the first thing about economics.
Matt Yglesias, considering McCain’s persona and campaign narratives, added:
John McCain’s unquestionably a popular figure, but David Kusnet is also surely right that it’s hard to see him winning in bleak economic times if he keeps talking the way he was talking at his South Carolina victory speech. There’s just nothing in there whatsoever to suggest that McCain has any awareness of anyone experiencing any kind of financial difficulties. What’s more, I think it’ll actually be quite hard for him to pivot in a more sympathetic direction. After all, throughout all his flipping and flopping and back again of the past ten years, the “cares about people in economic pain” persona is one he’s never tried on. And I think he’s never tried it on because it runs contrary to his entire schtick, which is all about finding causes greater than ourselves, salvation through nationalism, etc., etc. On some emotional level, he probably thinks a woman who needs to declare bankruptcy because the racked up massive credit card bills while her uninsured husband was dying of cancer should just grin and bear it the way he did as a POW.
After what he’s been through, it’s probably hard to muster a ton of sympathy for workaday problems. And yet that’s what politics is all about. By the same token, though, I think it would be foolish to confidently predict economic conditions eleven months from now. Maybe things will get worse . . . maybe they’ll turn around. But if they don’t turn around, it does seem like potentially big trouble for McCain.
Agreed. McCain barely talks about the economy at all as a candidate, and when he does, he argues a) economic conditions are pretty good right now, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding; and b) making Bush’s tax cuts permanent, despite McCain’s votes against them, should solve our problems.
It’s not a landscape that plays to McCain’s strengths at all.