Third Way Dispatch

Note: This was authored by Stephen Rose, a consulting economist and former senior economic fellow for Third Way and is reprinted from stats.org

To paraphrase a famous saying: the road to financial ruin was paved with good intentions.

But to understand what has happened, you have to start with understanding the role that finance plays in the economy.

John McCain is proving himself right that the economy is not really his thing. This morning in Wisconsin, he appealed to the LaFollette crowd and announced that the fed should get out of the “bail out business” and get back to monitoring the money supply. Hoover couldn’t have said it better. The consensus among those who say “the economy is my thing” is that the fed is the only thing keeping us from the bread line.

Twenty-four years ago, I had my first paying political job. I performed data entry for the Massachusetts Democratic Party. I was paid $5.25 an hour, and I was in heaven. Hey, it beat making mediocre pizzas for $4.75 an hour. The chairman of the state party was Chet Atkins – a great guy and a member of Congress. But as chairman of the party, he was criticized because no African-Americans were on the state party payroll. So he called Mel King, an African-American city councilman and mayoral candidate from Boston and asked Mel to send him his best person to be field director of the Party. “I’ve got just the guy,” said King. “Jim Spencer.” Atkins interviewed Spencer on the phone and he hired him on the spot. That Monday, Jim Spencer showed up for work. He was White.

Say it ain’t so, Joe.

OK, Joe, we know you love John McCain. We get it. We know you’re angry at the Democratic establishment. Fine. We know you really, really, really believe that Iraq is the central front on terror. Whatever. But Sarah Palin? A “reformer?” A “leader we can count on?”

Be honest with us for a moment. Let’s have a little straight talk, OK. Six days ago you couldn’t have picked Sarah Palin out of a police lineup. She was a total stranger to you and the rest of America. And now she’s a “reformer” and a “leader we can count on.” In poker, that’s called a “tell.”

In ancient medicine, doctors used leeches to drain “excess” blood and “balance the humors” of the human body. (The leech actually gets its name from the word for doctor in Old English: læce). These doctors had basically one approach to medicine: if the patient was ill, drain blood. If things were really bad, drain MORE blood.

That, in short, is the modern conservative’s approach to the economy.

Yesterday, I posted on the Clemens food fight and wondered what got into the Republicans. Why did they behave like cheerleading baboons, and how could they have possibly read the evidence and concluded Clemens was au natural during his 4 Cy Young run in the “twilight of his career?” I surmised that perhaps that years of defending Alberto Gonzalez, WMDs, yellow cake in Niger, and Abu Ghraib had permanently distorted their ability discern truth from lies – even when the witness repeatedly used phrases like “misheard” and “misremembered” to explain away 60’ 6”-sized holes in his story.