"The Meanest Man in the United States" - Molly Ivins, after Gramm blocked legislation that would restore food stamps to elderly legal migrants. Let them eat capitalism.
It seems Gramm, like most nightmares, isn't stopped just because he's horrifying. Larry Kudlow:
While McCain clearly disowned Gramm's remarks, Holtz-Eakin and Fiorina were wrong, at least at that point, to throw Gramm out of the campaign. In fact, McCain spoke to Gramm after dissing him, and asked him to stay in the campaign and continue to be a surrogate speaker. This was not widely reported, but several sources confirm the conversation. However, it was no secret that Holtz-Eakin in particular has been a Gramm adversary inside the campaign.
This is weird. I get that McCain would still want the advice of the ultimate e. coli conservative to prove his bridge-collapsing bona-fides to the right, but wouldn't it be better to keep him on in a silent-but-deadly advisory capacity? Does McCain like being represented by such a despicable sociopath?
Well whatever. It is up to us to ensure no one with a conscience or even a desire to live in a functioning society thinks it is good that John McCain thinks Phil Gramm's economic advice is worthwhile, or that John McCain's judgement is well reflected by it.
There has been some decent press attention to Gramm's involvement in the current Housing Crisis (aka "Big Shitpile") but as I (hardly alone I'm sure) discussed last week, Gramm's legislative fraud helped create the Enron collapse, and of course Gramm was great friends with Ken Lay.
I then wrote about Texas' failing electricity deregulation, and speculated that as a Texas (ahem) powerbroker, there's little chance Gramm wasn't involved with that one too. Well, I haven't established that directly, but Gramm did write a (thankfully not-passed) 2000 law that would require all states to deregulate their energy markets.
That's the past. Enron. Texas. Shitpile. It's an impressive record of economic atrocity. What about going forward? Well, this post by Journalism Professor Joe Cutbirth asks the right questions:
McCain didn't announce he was distancing himself from an economic program designed by a man who devoted his entire career to: cutting corporate taxes, reducing the social safety net and deregulating financial markets. The only thing different is that someone else will have the silly title "national co-chairman."
Doesn't anyone in the gaggle assigned to the McCain campaign see this as a prime time to put McCain on the record discussing: 1.) Why he chose Gramm, who Fortune magazine touted as "McCain's Econ Brain," to craft his economic agenda? And 2.) How the conservative economic philosophy they share would play out in his administration?
If McCain sees Monetarism (Quantity Theory) as the key to determining inflation, he should be able to tell us how that works. If he buys Rational Expectations Theory as contemporary reason for a return to a pre-Keynesian model, he needs to say so. And if he is a true Supply-Sider, let's hear how he'll promote private savings and investment and in whose hands that capital will be stored.
Of course, I'm exaggerating for effect, but here's the point: McCain wants us to put him in charge of the world's leading economy, but he is outsourcing his intellectual and philosophical responsibilities in that area. It seems to be part of who he is, just like George W. Bush.
This is one of McCain's many Achilles' heels (Achilles would have to be a centipede to keep up with McCain on this), but it is a good one. McCain really needs to keep Gramm around to show fiscal heartless conservatives that he'll be a lean, mean, poverty causing machine. He also needs Gramm because the corporate press will actually start to mock McCain's economic ineptitude if he is not backed by someone Serious like Gramm. Gramm is economically Serious because he has proved his worth by crashing the entire US economy singlehandedly and also for keeping Milton Friedman's obscene belief system alive. Kudlow speculates that if Gramm really was gone, McCain might move Steve Forbes into place, but I'm not sure what good that would do:
Steve Forbes: Oh I think in terms of advice, Phil Gramm will be critical, which is good, because on things like trade he's absolutely right. I think John McCain has a long friendship with Phil Gramm. So this was something, Phil Gramm said something that you're not supposed to these days. And he paid a price for it. But in terms of the relationship, I think it's as strong as ever. And in a McCain administration, I think Phil Gramm's advice will be taken to heart.
This is someone worth wetting our powder over. Even if we fail to remove him directly, we need to make McCain pay a high price for keeping him around. Really though, he needs to go away so adults can start to work to solve all the problems he created. At the very least, we're creating yet another netroots "I told you so" if a President-McCain nominates Gramm for Treasury-Secretary and Democrats vote to confirm him.
