Wow, Frank Rich's Sunday NYT Op Ed column, It’s the Economic Stupidity, Stupid, just slams McCain! Despite a somewhat odd discussion towards the end about VP candidates, it's a thing of beauty, with this as the central point:
were voters forced to actually focus on Mr. McCain’s response to our spiraling economic crisis at home, the prospect of his ascension to the Oval Office could set off a panic that would make the IndyMac Bank bust in Pasadena look as merry as the Rose Bowl.
Is the MSM starting to get it?
He covers all of it - the flip flopping, the lack of understanding of economics, even McCain's misjudgments on the war. Here are some of the choice comments:
Given that it took the deadliest Taliban suicide bombing in Kabul since 9/11 to get Mr. McCain’s attention, you have to wonder if even General Custer’s learning curve was faster than his...
Mr. McCain still doesn’t understand that we can’t send troops to Afghanistan unless they’re shifted from Iraq. But simple math, to put it charitably, has never been his forte...
Perhaps he’ll retire his abacus by Election Day...
The McCain-Gramm bond, dating back 15 years, is more scandalous than Mr. Obama’s connection with his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Mr. McCain has been so dependent on Mr. Gramm for economic policy that he sent him to newspaper editorial board meetings, no doubt to correct the candidate’s numbers much as Joe Lieberman cleans up after his confusions of Sunni and Shia...
The term flip-flopping doesn’t do justice to Mr. McCain’s self-contradictory economic pronouncements because that implies there’s some rational, if hypocritical, logic at work. What he serves up instead is plain old incoherence, as if he were compulsively consulting one of those old Magic 8 Balls...
There's more - it's just delightful. Rich goes on for a few paragraphs about Phil Gramm, claiming that his dismissal from the McCain campaign is just temporary and for show, and delving into Gramm's relationship with the troubled UBS. He spends several paragraphs detailing McCain's flip flops on various economic positions, like tax cuts, social security reform, general economic progress and the mortgage situation.
Rich also spends some time delving into Carly Fiorina's and Mitt Romney's backgrounds. Andrew Sullivan declares that the VP Buzz surrounding Romney is getting louder and that his selection is practically inevitable. Fiorina seems like an odd potential VP for Rich to be attacking, but since his discussion is on the economy, it makes sense. (I'd be far more worried if McCain picked Meg Whitman; she brings many of Fiorina's positives with few of her negatives. But that's a diary for another time). Frank Rich excorciates them both, saying:
Ms. Fiorina, the ubiquitous new public face of McCain economic policy, adds nothing to the mix beyond her incessant display of corporate jargon, from "trend lines" to "start-ups." Before she was fired at Hewlett-Packard, its stock had declined 50 percent during her five-plus years in charge. She missed earning projections — by 23 percent in one quarter —
and
But Mr. Romney, while more plausible than Ms. Fiorina, is hardly what America wants at this desperate time. His leveraged buyout dealings as co-founder of Bain Capital induced plant closings, mass layoffs and outsourcing. If Mr. McCain truly intends to "put our country’s interests" above politics and reach across the aisle to move the nation forward, as he constantly tells us, why not go for a vice president who’s the very best fit for the huge challenges at hand?
Rich closes this terrific column with a rather bizarre discussion about how Michael Bloomberg would be the best VP pick for McCain, while acknowledging that Bloomberg wouldn't take it since he's a "closet Democrat." And he thinks Bloomberg wouldn't want to be McCain's running mate for another reason:
It’s hard to picture a titan who built his empire on computer terminals investing any capital, political or otherwise, in a chief executive who is still learning how to do, as Mr. McCain puts it, "a Google."