I came across an interesting take on John McCain's obvious discomfort with anything economic. This financial crisis has him flustered beyond words. It then begs the question of what exactly would he do if faced with this issue as the President? Much of the same I guess. One would think that the rookie, Barack Obama, and not the so-called "experienced" one, John McCain. It is quite obvious that he is playing in a league that is way too high for him. Not even Gov. Sarah Palin can help John McCain on this issue.

According to the Washington Post, channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the SEC, should be fired. This childish reflex provoked theWall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" -- disconnected from knowledge and principle -- had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Cox that was "unpresidential" and demonstrated that McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does."

Perhaps an old antagonism is involved in McCain's fact-free slander. His most conspicuous economic adviser is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who previously headed the Congressional Budget Office. There he was an impediment to conservatives, including then-Rep. Cox, who, as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, persistently tried and generally failed to enlist CBO support for "dynamic scoring" that would estimate the economic growth effects of proposed tax cuts.

In any case, McCain's smear -- that Cox "betrayed the public's trust" -- is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people. McCain's Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law's restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending.

Even more ammunition against McCain, the Washington Post article states that by a Gresham's Law of political discourse, McCain's Queen of Hearts intervention in the opaque financial crisis overshadowed a solid conservative complaint from the Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the RSC decried the improvised torrent of bailouts as a "dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the federal government both to be looked to and indeed relied upon to save private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic decisions." This letter, listing just $650 billion of the perhaps more than $1 trillion in new federal exposures to risk, was sent while McCain's campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for coherence, was airing an ad warning that Obama favors "massive government, billions in spending increases."

He shoots himself in the foot once again. On "60 Minutes" Sunday evening, McCain, saying "this may sound a little unusual," said that he would like to replace Cox with Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic attorney general of New York who is the son of former governor Mario Cuomo. He explained that Cuomo has "respect" and "prestige" and could "lend some bipartisanship." Wow, I guess he just put all conservatives on notice. I'm sure they are afraid, very afraid! Hah. Is this the person you trust to make policy decisions and make excellent judicial appointments? A trigger-happy nutjob?

The bottom line is that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is clearly not suited to the presidency. Barack Obama's perceived unreadiness can be corrected quite easily, but the dismaying temperament of John McCain cannot be fixed.

Sphere: Related Content