The Palin Bounce

Sarah Palin's lift to the McCain ticket seems to be evaporating. Not surprising given the uniformly negative coverage the mainstream media have given her, combined with the rather idiotic strategy pursued by the McCain campaign to present her to the nation precisely via the news media the favor of whom, she claimed in her acceptance speech, she would not be seeking.

She and McCain were going to shake up Washington. But regarding the seminal issue of the day, the "Wall Street Bailout," she has followed McCain precisely in assiduously assigning blame to capitalism run amuck rather than to where it truly lays: in Washington. The issue was given McCain on a silver platter to run on. Instead, it is successfully being used by Obama and the Democrats to undermine his candidacy. Guilt by association, deregulation, Republican congress, eight years of Bush presidency, all of these are the reason for the current crisis, and the Democrats have the echo chamber of the major media to repeat the charges ad nauseum.

The facility by which people swallow this line is yet further evidence of the visceral, yea even religious, antagonism people have to capitalism. The anti-capitalist mentality is on full display here, and the usual demagogues resort to it with impunity, even when they themselves are so blatantly, obviously, responsible for this. The truth is simple, straightforward, and can be summarized in a few phrases, each of which builds on the previous one: affordable housing (Community Reinvestment Act, National Homeownership Strategy), subprime loans, securitization (loan packaging and selling), absurdly inflated credit ratings, home price implosion, foreclosures, collapse in the value of those securitized loans, destruction of the balance sheets of entities holding those loans (Wall Street, banks throughout the entire world), collapse of all forms of credit. At the heart of this whole process were the GSEs (government-sponsored entities) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who while they were sponsoring the subprime securitization explosion, also funded Democratic party activism and paid off Congressional sponsors who looked the other way. And Senator Obama in three short years received over $100,000 in campaign contributions from this sponsor of our economic destruction.

The reason why McCain-Palin ratings are tanking is because McCain-Palin have not acted on their claim to shake up Washington, and instead look suspiciously as if they are holding back so as not to rock the Washington beltway boat. This, if true, is not only a missed chance but a travesty. Come on Sarah! Get that old goat to change his bipartisan ways. If you don't, you may end up going back to Alaska for good. And that's the last thing this country needs.