Obama Leads, Bush Follows

John McCain has been criticizing Obama for having taken an insufficient number of visits to Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course now that Obama is abroad, McCain is criticizing his trip as well. We’ve seen George Bush travel throughout his presidency where among other accomplishments he was able to look into Putin’s soul and judge him a leader who would be a friend of the US. We’ve listened to McCain return from an Iraq visit and inform us that Baghdad markets were safe to walk through, somehow missing the 100 or so armed US soldiers accompanying him and the checkpoints keeping the Iraqi crowds to a minimum.

First hand observation by the President of the US as the basis for making policy is absurd. It is no substitute for the information learned by US representatives who live and study outside the US in countries throughout the world. What we need in a President is not someone who builds a large frequent flyer account, but someone with the intelligence to listen to the conflicting advice every President is subject to, assess what is heard, and then make reasonable decisions based on the information presented rather than on ideological agendas or fly-by visits.

George Bush has been stridently criticizing Democrats, and Obama specifically, for making comments that in his and McCain’s’ view demonstrate a lack of experience in foreign affairs. Major examples, repeated over and over again, are setting a timetable for withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, and suggesting that we should talk to Iran without a prior Iranian acquiescence to US negotiating points.

But last week, Bush announced that he was agreeing to set an “aspirational” timetable for withdrawing from Iraq to meet Iraqi leadership demands. Prime Minister Maliki even indicated his agreement with Obama’s specific timetable, at least until he was made to back off that position by panicked Republicans.

At the same time, the administration sent its third ranking diplomat to join the talks between the European Union and Iran, without first reaching an agreement on subject matter.

These sound like flip-flops to me. Or if preferred, Bush has seen the wisdom of the Obama positions and in the last desperate days of establishing a legacy, decided Barack is the advisor he should have if he is going to accomplish anything positive in his eight year term. McCain has been quiet so far in response to these moves, which makes sense given that one of his major claims of advantage over Obama has just been sabotaged by the President.

McCain is trying to ignore this major contradiction in his message. The key question not being answered is “Are we to stay in Iraq until we ‘win’ even when the Iraqi government wants us out”? There are going to be some convoluted statements coming from the McCain camp trying to salvage this situation and bend it to their advantage.

They will come up with twisted explanations following the Bush precedent of saying anything regardless of whether it is true or reasonable. Any hope that the Straight Talk Express will be different has disappeared. The latest McCain campaign ad blames the high price of oil not on Bush policies of the last 7 ½ years, not on China and India pushing demand beyond supply, not on speculation in the oil markets, but on, surprise, Barack Obama. The reason - he voted against off-shore drilling - which every knowledgeable oil expert says won’t affect gas prices for at least 8-10 years. For someone who McCain thinks is too inexperienced to govern, Obama being responsible for high gas prices is quite a powerful move.

McCain claims that he “knows how to win wars.” He states that we can only be successful in Afghanistan if we win first in Iraq. McCain’s war experience included 5 ½ years in a Vietnam prison camp and participation in the Vietnam War, which as I remember we lost, or at best broke even. How that translates into knowing how to win wars is beyond comprehension, except for the admission (which we don’t hear) that everything we did was wrong and we’ve learned to do the opposite.

Max Boot, one of McCain’s key foreign policy supporters stated on the Lehrer News Hour, that McCain wants to increase troops in Afghanistan and can do so using the surge troops returning from Iraq. Obama claims that the Afghanistan need for troops requires sending more than the surge troops home from Iraq. Boot sees this as unnecessary. Last night the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, also on Lehrer, flatly insisted that no troops are available to send to Afghanistan until 2009, unless there are further reductions in Iraq troop numbers.

No matter what happens in Iraq, we have already lost. It will be a loss even if a stable, democratic Iraq closely aligned to the US results. If you measure that unlikely result against what it has already cost us to be there since 2003 and the way it has prevented us - as Obama says - from pursuing the real vital concerns of the US, the benefit from winning does not counter the cost of being where we should never have gone in the first place.

Whiners

The latest gaffe in the Presidential campaign comes from our old friend Phil Gramm, the former senator from, you guessed it, Texas. Why anyone should be surprised that Phil would make a statement that would reverberate against him and embarrass McCain (he was his prime economic adviser until forced to resign last week), is hard to fathom. Some former quotes from the Senator:

Gramm ridiculed a newspaper photo of poor people who were forced to cut corners to put food on the table. "Did you see the picture?" Gramm asked a crowd. "Here are these people who are skimping to avoid hunger and they are all fat! We're the only nation in the world where all our poor people are fat."

During the fight over health care reform, Gramm said, "We have to blow up this train and the rails and the trestle and kill everyone on board."

When an elderly widow in Corsicana told him that cutting Medicare would make it more difficult for her to remain independent, Gramm said, "You haven't thought about a new husband, have you?

"We're going to keep on building the [Texas Republican] party until we're hunting Democrats with dogs."

More importantly, Gramm is the economic thinker who was one of five co-sponsors of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which critics blame for permitting the Enron scandal to occur. At the time, Gramm's wife was on Enron's board of directors.

As a member of the Senate Finance Committee and the recipient of enormous banking contributions, Gramm did an even bigger favor for the financial industry in 1999 when he sponsored the Financial Services Modernization Act allowing banks, securities firms, and insurance companies to combine. The bill weakened the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to help meet the credit needs of low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. Gramm described community groups that use the CRA as "protection rackets" that extort funds from the poor, powerless banks. The bill is also a disaster for the privacy of bank customers and weakens regulatory supervision. As Gramm proudly declared, "You're not going to find a single bank, insurance company, or securities company that will say they were hurt financially by this bill." Following in the footsteps of this act is today’s sub-prime financial crisis.

Gramm’s accusation that we are a nation of whiners who are experiencing a mental recession, as with most gaffes, is not completely false. The willingness to attribute all our financial woes to this cause, however, is absurd, as John McCain hastily admitted and so now Gramm is out of the McCain campaign as his continued presence is too difficult to defend.

The political stupidity of the quote is not the problem. If you want to see what will be wrong with a McCain presidency, go no further. The Republican Party that has brought us the past seven and one-half years came up with no one better than Phil Gramm to advise the economically deficient Republican candidate for President. This pattern will be repeated over and over again if McCain is elected.

The same ideologues that staffed key US government positions, such as the Embassy in Iraq, only because they were conservative Republicans, but who had little understanding of the entities they were responsible for, have now “burnished” their resumes in K St firms and are the people who will be the key appointees in a McCain administration.

The Republicans need time away from Washington (at least eight years) to assess their inability to create meaningful strategies for the US and to learn from the series of incompetent actions that they perpetrated.