Tis the Season

A supporter of former Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson once called out to him, “Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!” Stevenson answered, “That’s not enough. I need a majority.” Truer words have never been spoken.

How did it come to pass that politics would become the only profession of which people want the C.E.O. to be dumber than they are? When we send our kids to school we expect the teachers to know more than they do. When we trust our money to an investment firm, we want the fund manager to be better with money than we are. When we go the hospital for surgery we expect the doctor to be better with the scalpel than we are. Yet for some reason, when we go to elect a president he want him to be just as “regular” as we are. We want him to sit down and have a beer with us, watch the game and make inappropriate jokes. We want him to pretend to understand our struggle and feel our pain. If that’s what we really want, why not vote for me? I can do all that stuff for far less than the current candidates are charging.

Barack Obama returned from his whirlwind tour of other parts of the world looking quite presidential. Apparently too presidential for some. After a brief two-point bounce following his trip, the race seems to have returned to the three to six-point spread it was at before he left. This has led to speculation that in attempting to appear capable of projecting an image of strength and leadership, Obama may have succeeded too well and may have appeared presumptuous. This discussion is foolish. The very same people who claimed to be unsure of whether or not Obama could appear presidential, complained that he appeared presidential. Getting exactly what they wanted wasn’t good enough for them. Which can only lead to the assumption that what they said they wanted, wasn’t really what they wanted. Eventually, the fence sitters are going to run out of phony excuses not to vote for the guy and are going to have to come to grips with the real reason they’re having trouble making up their minds.

Which brings us to the following observation. This election has little to do with John McCain. McCain’s campaign has more-or-less already admitted this fact. They aren’t bothering to waste time telling voters why their candidate is the right choice. (I guess it's possible they can't think of any.) They’ve skipped ahead to focus solely on why their opponent is the wrong choice. This election is a referendum on Barack Obama – nothing more, nothing less. I’m not the first person to come to that conclusion, and I certainly won’t be the last. Despite the absolute ineptitude of his campaign, McCain’s numbers remain largely the same, while Obama’s numbers fluctuate to match the mood of the electorate. If John McCain walked on stage at a town hall meeting tomorrow and told everyone he would raise taxes by 50%, store nuclear waste in kindergarten classrooms and sell California to Canada for a dozen donuts his support would only decline by a point or two. Maybe. But let Obama put on a tie that doesn’t quite match his blazer and watch millions of voters question his judgment and fitness to be Commander-in-Chief. It may not make any sense that so many Clinton supporters intend to vote against their causes and their own self-interest to spite their own nominee, but that’s the kind of election this is going to be. Obama needs to realize this quickly, get out heck out of Washington and back on the trail, squeezing as much blood from as many stones as he can find along the way. He’s going to need it all.

Being 70-plus-years-old and a long-time Republican politician, McCain has zeroed-in on two issues he believes to be damaging to Obama: experience and taxes. He is well aware of the visceral response voters have to both topics, (taxes are bad, experience is good) and believes – with some degree of accuracy – that he may be able to use them to his advantage. But instead of accepting McCain’s conventional wisdom, I’d like to offer a couple of contradictory observations.

First, taxes. I happen to believe that the president has little – if any – effect on the overall state of the economy. The market seems to function largely independent of whatever administration occupies the White House. Therefore I tend to neither blame presidents for recessions nor credit them for expansions. But many people do. So, for the sake of argument, let’s say the president’s policies do significantly affect the economy. McCain would argue that the Bush tax cuts – which he initially vehemently opposed – were responsible for at least slowing – if not reversing the economic slide of the early 00s, and mysteriously keeping the current economy buoyant in the face of mortgage and energy disasters, which may or may not have been contributed to by administration policies. But, if it were the simple truth that low taxes equal economic growth and high taxes equal economic stagnation, he would also have to acknowledge that the unparalleled economic expansion of the 1990s occurred in the thick of what Republicans at the time called, “the largest tax increase in history.” So, it seems obvious that the throwaway idea of high taxes (particularly on investment income) equaling economic stagnation isn’t necessarily true.

Second, experience. McCain claims, Obama lacks the experience to be president, experience that he, McCain, has an abundance of. Let’s be honest. No one who hasn’t been president has the experience to be president. One could easily make the argument that many who have been president left office without the experience to be president. But more importantly, experience is overrated. Don’t get me wrong, lessons learned from the obstacles life throws in your way are important, but judgment, creativity and intuition are just as vital – if not more so. There are few companies in America with more experience in their respective fields than Ford and Merrill Lynch. Yet both of those companies reported monetary losses of $8.7 billion and $4.8 billion respectively in the past week. Ford has been building automobiles in this country for a hundred years, yet they couldn’t see the coming rise in the price of fuel and the shrinking market for monstrous vehicles, even though other “less experienced” manufacturers could. Through it’s advertising Merrill Lynch likes to boast about the wealth of experience it has managing investments and making money, yet they were somehow unable to understand that loans made to people who didn’t have to verify their income were not a good investment and lost astronomical amounts of money. But on the flip side of that coin, are companies like Google and Apple, where creativity, innovation and judgment far outweigh experience. Somehow, those two companies still manage to turn a profit quarter after quarter in tough economic times. In a rapidly changing world, experience can get in the way of progress and growth.

A Justice Department probe has determined that senior department officials (Monica Goodling in particular) inappropriately and illegally used political litmus tests in hiring employees for non-political positions. Again, is anyone surprised by this? Frankly, I’m getting a little tired of all these probe of the Bush administration telling us things we already know. Why are we still wasting our time with these investigations? We know this was a lousy administration that tarnished the credibility and reputations of some good people. Six months from now they will be gone and hopefully forgotten, and maybe the next administration will be better. They can’t possibly be any worse.

Just a week after issuing a new $100 billion dollar bill, Zimbabwe has come up with a novel idea to combat their incomprehensible inflation rate. The treasury has announced they will simply knock ten zeroes off their currency. So, items that used to cost $100 billion dollars (like a loaf of bread say) will now cost $10. Inflation is such a disaster in Zimbabwe that the country’s computers, cash registers and automated teller machines cannot process simple transactions that now involve billions and trillions of dollars. I’m not sure how this helps, since workers who used to be paid a million dollars a week now earn just 1/100th of a cent over seven days, but who am I to question the economic genius of Zimbabwe.

No one’s talking about the oil spill that occurred on the Mississippi River near New Orleans last week. I guess in this age of $4 gasoline oil spills just aren’t sexy anymore.

Finally, a story from Texas not about people getting shot in the back. A 5-year-old in the Dallas suburb of Denton slipped out of a daycare and ended up half-a-mile away at a Hooters restaurant. That’s right, Hooters. According to the kid, he had only intended to grab some snacks from the gas station across the street. I guess he was hungrier than he thought. Tee. Tee hee. Tee hee hee.