McCain/Gramm = Bush - Gramm... by gimleteye

Not a good day to resolve any equation for John McCain.

The Republican nomenclatura have woken up to the fact the national economic crisis unleashed by the housing boom and bust, substantially assisted by prominent Republican developers and Florida Bush team players like Al Hoffman, will dwarf every other issue in November.

A month ago, I highlighted Hoffman and Gramm, former Senator from Texas and chair of the Senate Banking Committee, in "John McCain and the company he keeps". In a recent interview, Gramm called Americans, "a nation of whiners".

You wouldn't expect anything less from a key architect of the nation's financial collapse. After retiring from the US Senate, Gramm became a consultant to the financial services industry he helped de-regulate then a top executive at one of the banks, UBS, now suffering from investing billions in toxic debt.

Chris Cillizza, Washington Post political blogger, writes:

* Gramm's resignation is the inevitable byproduct of the modern political game best described by John Harris and Mark Halperin in "The Way to Win" as the "freak show." Once Gramm's comments made the cable television rounds for a few days, it was something close to inevitable that he would resign.

* It's a near-certainty that Democrats won't give up on the issue. The reality is that Gramm was one of McCain's closest confidantes when it came to the economy and simply because the former Texas Senator is no longer affiliated with the campaign does not mean Democrats won't remind voters of his comments in the fall.

I disagree with the "freak show" part of it.

In addition to the "constant complaining and whining", Gramm pitches the state of the nation's economic health. Compared to our global competitors, Gramm says, "We've never been more dominant; we've never had more natural advantages than we have today."

That's only true if you are a top financial executive at financial institutions that continue to award top executives millions in compensation despite losing billions for shareholders. A firm like Merrill Lynch, for instance, that just hired head of sales and trading Thomas Montag with a $40 million bonus. Merrill Lynch cut 4200 jobs this year and its losses are nearing $15 billion.

If this is a "freak show", it is only because Bush Republicans and top party campaign contributors have become more insulated by wealth and more isolated from ordinary Americans than any epoch since the Gilded Age of Robber Barons.

Of course Democrats will use the McCain/Gramm equation until November. Who can forget, that the biggest mistake McCain made in his political life was rushing to throw a lifeline to Charles Keating, a campaign supporter in the last major financial blow-up related to financial crimes?

Gramm would like to spin our economic distress as a figment of the media's imagination. "Misery sells newspapers. Thank God the economy is not as bad as you read in the newspaper every day."

What do John McCain or Phil Gramm really know about running a household budget like an ordinary American? Not much.

Advantage, Obama.