The Selective Amnesia of John McCain
By Jon Perr Monday Aug 03, 2009 8:00am
It was a busy weekend in the political spotlight for John McCain. On Friday, the man with 13 cars announced he would oppose the wild popular "cash for clunkers" program before claiming on Sunday that President Obama had failed the test of bipartisanship.
But it was his Wall Street Journal interview with editor Stephen Moore which may have been the most fascinating part of McCain's weekend. Fascinating, that is, as a study of revisionist history and selective amnesia by both men. While Moore now praises McCain as "one of the lead critics of Obamanomics," in the past the former Club for Growth president groused his organization's members "loathe" McCain. As for the ersatz maverick, McCain blamed the economic crisis and media bias rather than his own serial flip-flopping and miserable campaign for his defeat at the polls.
For his part, Moore skipped over his past animus towards the Arizona Senator. After all, in 2004, he announced, "We don't like McCain at all." The anti-tax, laissez faire Club for Growth tried, but did not find, what Moore deemed "a true, Reagan conservative" to oppose McCain in his '04 GOP primary. As last year's presidential primaries approached, the Club blasted McCain's opposition to the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, comparing him to "the likes of Ted Kennedy in his rhetorical attacks."
But when candidate McCain reversed course and backed making the Bush tax cuts permanent, Moore in March 2007 threw his support behind the born-again supply sider:
"I think John McCain, if he can get to the general election, he has a great chance of being president, especially if he's up against somebody like Hillary Clinton."
Of course, things didn't turn out that way. But to hear John McCain tell it, very little of what transpired was his fault.
For openers, he insisted, last fall's collapsing economy dealt him a losing hand:
He believes that he could have won the election had it not been for the market collapse in mid-September. "We were three points up on September 14. The next day the market lost 700 points and $1.2 trillion in wealth vanished, and by the end of the day we were seven points down. We lost the white college graduate voters, who became profoundly disillusioned with Republicans. And by the way, that was the way it ended up. We lost by seven points."
In reality, it was McCain's self-professed, self-evident ignorance on matters economic which undermined his credibility with voters. After all, McCain like his friend and adviser Phil Gramm called the recession "psychological" and prescribed eBay as the cure for what ailed the economy. On the very September day the market plummeted, McCain pronounced, "fundamentals of our economy are strong," the 18th time during the '08 campaign he had done so.
