Why Republicans should vote for anyone except John McCain
PHOTO CC: John Siebert – some rights reserved
My Dad, who’s pretty conservative, told me recently that he liked a lot of what he’s heard from Barack Obama. I asked if that meant he’s going to vote for him. “We’re lifelong Republicans,” he said, and then quickly changed the subject.
Voting, for the few of us who do it, is very personal, and closely linked to our self image. So even though a lot of Republicans think the war was a mistake, and that Bush & Co. have mismanaged just about everything, they still can’t bring themselves to punch the card for a Democrat. But there are very good reasons why even lifelong Republicans like Dad should want a Democrat in the White House for a while.
Remember playing Monopoly as a kid? The game inevitably reaches the point where one player just keeps getting richer and everybody else goes broke. Game over. Play again. Well, we’re at that point in our economy. For the last 30 years the powerful players (Wall Street and their paid surrogates, the politicians) have used the questionable principles of Reaganomics (AKA “trickle down”) to strip away consumer protection and investment regulations. McCain’s favorite economic knucklehead, Phil Graham, was instrumental in wiping out the sensible barrier between banks and brokers, but almost every politician who wants campaign cash (and that’s everyone) has taken part in dismantling laws and regulations that served us well since the Great Depression.
The result: ever riskier investment “instruments” that bundle up bad debts; CEO’s who blatantly lie about their forecasts without fear of prosecution or penalty; and a herd of naive consumers who actually believed the savvy talking heads, and bought houses they couldn’t afford with credit that shouldn’t have existed.
For an enlightening explanation of how this dynamic got us to our present economic meltdown, check out this NPR interview with Law Professor Michael Greenberger. He points out what now seems obvious: there has been no “adult supervision” on Wall Street for quite some time. And the current administration’s guiding philosophy has been to “privatize profits and socialize losses.”
There should be a healthy tension between energetic capitalism and vigilant, meaningful regulation. We need to stop pretending to hate government and regulators. The image of the pudgy bureaucrat standing in the way of heroic entrepreneurs is so last century. Ayn Rand is dead, let’s move on. In our new i-conomy, the people who set constraints on our economic system should be as talented, well paid, and creative as the people they regulate.
Which is why we must have a Democratic White House and Congress for a while. The wild Monopoly game is over. Time to clear the board and start over. Republicans, if you can’t stand to vote for a Democrat, then vote for, oh, Bob Barr. Or Ben Stein. Or Barry Goldwater. Anyone but McCain.
Debido said:
on November 2, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Aside from linking McCain to Gramm, you don’t actually make any particular case as to why a Republican should prefer someone other than McCain.
Allowing banks to be brokers was not the problem. The brokerages that were not retail banks, but investment banks, were the most reckless betters, and then, lacked the income available to regular banks to cushion their losses.
I happen to think that regulating corporate power is one of the main purposes of government today. On the other hand, I don’t think many are pretending when they say they hate the government.