2008-09-06 - Running From Reality (Bob Herbert/NY Times)

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[excerpt] For most voters, the No. 1 issue in this campaign is the financial struggle facing working families that are trying to cope with job losses, declining wages, the high cost of health care, home foreclosures, bankruptcies and the like. To a great extent these problems are the result of national policies, forged under Republican rule, that overwhelmingly favored the interests of the very wealthy over working people. Senator McCain’s economic guru through all of this was Mr. Gramm, a former Republican senator from Texas and chairman of the banking committee. He was a demon for deregulation, and he and his wife, Wendy, who once led the presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief in the Reagan administration, were among the big recipients of Enron’s largess. Phil Gramm was one of the lead architects of the breathtakingly irresponsible policies (No more restraints! No more regulation!) that led to the subprime mortgage meltdown and the current credit disaster. A corporate insider in the Bush-Cheney mold, Mr. Gramm was thought to be in line to serve as treasury secretary in a McCain administration until July when he put his foot very publicly in his mouth. To Senator McCain’s great embarrassment, Mr. Gramm dismissed the economic downturn as a “mental recession” and complained that the U.S. had become a “nation of whiners.” That may have been a political no-no, but it was an accurate expression of the slavish devotion of the G.O.P. to the rich and powerful among us, and of the party’s contempt for the interests of working families and the poor. Senator McCain, it should be noted, fully shared Mr. Gramm’s anti-regulatory zeal. This is an odd crowd, indeed, to be offering itself as a champion for working people. [more>>>