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McCain For President (Begrudgingly)

Believe it or not, there was a time in the not too distant past when America’s leaders believed that the best way to fix an ailing economy was to … duh … actually invest in the economy.

And by “invest in the economy,” we don’t mean a $700 billion bailout of the failed, government-mandated lending policies that liberals foisted onto the private sector (and then refused to correct when it was clear that disaster was looming) … we mean an honest-to-God investment in the American people.

The last time that happened in any substantive way was on August 13, 1981 - on a gloomy, fog-covered morning at Rancho del Cielo in the California hills just northwest of Santa Barbara.

Seated behind a rustic, leather table, wearing blue jeans and a look of wistful indifference, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the last major tax cut in our nation’s history.

His biographer, Edmund Morris, describes the scene:

Stroke by stroke in the mist, Reagan reduced the income-tax burden on individual Americans by almost a third, or $280 billion over the next three years, and saved them a further $130 billion in federal spending … there was no doubt that Reagan and his economic aides had brought about the largest spending-control bill, and the largest tax reduction, in American history. Their budget was revolutionary in that it reversed - or, more properly, inversed - and economic theory dating back to the first days of the New Deal.

Given that there was a Cold War to win, it took fourteen years longer than expected for “Reaganomics” to reach its zero annual deficit projections, an effort which was aided substantially by the capital gains tax cuts passed during the Clinton administration.

Simply put, it was Reagan’s tax-cutting vision and Clinton’s “the era of Big Government is over” approach to his job that sent America off and running on two of the largest peacetime economic expansions in its history.

But beneath all that vibrancy and prosperity, the seeds of our current strife - planted under President Jimmy Carter and nurtured by Clinton - were secretly being sown.

And by the time President George W. Bush’s advisors realized the mess we were in, it was too late - although that certainly doesn’t excuse the Democrats from blocking Bush’s (and John McCain’s) efforts to try and reign in the politically-correct lending spree that had our two federally-backed mortgage giants hurtling toward oblivion.

Yet whatever credit Bush and McCain get for belatedly recognizing the ticking time bomb at Fannie and Freddie, we must measure that against their utter failure to rein in the fiscal excesses of a Republican Congress that blew through your money from 2001 to 2006 faster than Democrats ever dared to dream.

The GOP added $3 trillion to the national debt during that time period, forever losing its claim to the Reagan legacy and paving the way for today’s Democratic majority - which despite its 2006 campaign promises has basically continued down the very same road of excess (with no palace of wisdom in sight).

Not surprisingly, a decade of waste in Washington and the brewing mortgage crisis have our country teetering on the edge of a fiscal cliff - with even larger, unresolved monetary crises (Social Security and Medicaid) still lurking on the horizon.

To “rescue” us from the most immediate ledge, President Bush and Congressional leaders approved the biggest federal intervention in the U.S. economy since the New Deal, a $700 billion (and counting) bailout that trampled all over our capitalist principles, our Constitution, any shred of government accountability and … oh yeah … your bottom line as a taxpayer.

But government had to “do something,” we were told ad nauseam, apparently forgetting another lesson from Reagan (and frankly from Katrina, too) about the dangers inherent in government trying to rescue anything.

Not surprisingly, the bailout hasn’t worked … and it won’t work.

And to all the Republican leaders who parroted doom and gloom predictions of an “economic Pearl Harbor” if we didn’t pass the bailout, guess what … we’re still hearing those predictions. And seeing them come to pass.

All of which leads us to Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, both of whom supported the bailout, and both of whom have offered absolutely nothing in the way of conservative economic policy from the day they announced their respective candidacies.

Hence our collective description of the two as “McBama.”

Sure, McCain may have been a “maverick” back in 2000, but today he’s a grumpy old status quo relic responsible for what may well go down as the worst presidential campaign in American history.

Hoping that McCain would offer (let alone achieve) a Reagan-esque restoration of the conservative wisdom our nation needs right now is a pipe dream … and with each new October descent into rank political opportunism we lose more and more respect for the man.

Having said that, he receives our endorsement (begrudgingly) for two reasons.

First is the inexplicable absence of a legitimate fiscal conservative, social libertarian alternative. We say “inexplicable,” because in a country that seems to overwhelmingly embrace precisely this political nexus, there is no one of any relevance carrying its banner.

Bob Barr? Please.

Our second reason for endorsing McCain (again, begrudgingly) is the clear and present danger to America’s long-term economic and national security interests posed by a Commander-in-Chief Obama.

Allow us to explain … it’s not just that the guy has been chummy with terrorists, racists and all manner of other radical, anti-American types (which he has), or that - to borrow Aaron Sorkin’s term - he’s more likely to “take the Arab world out for an ice cream cone” than to stand up and aggressively defend America’s interests (which he is).

Nor is it that Obama is black, or almost black - and as a result a darling of the Oprah-fied liberal media, commie academia and Hollywood celebri-whores.

No … our main reason for opposing Obama is the fact that he’s quite simply a socialist - a guy whose fiscal policies would wreak even more havoc on our nation’s economy than the “bipartisanshit sandwich” we’re all currently taking a bite out of.

Trust us, we want “change we can believe in,” too, but thinking that Obama is going to change Washington (beyond merely escalating its price tag) is a pipe dream.

Yet unlike the “McCain as Reagan” pipe dream, Obama’s pipe dream comes off more like a pipe bomb … in that the man espousing it is flat out dangerous in our book.

At least Jimmy Carter was dim-witted and good-hearted in his liberalism, people. And on some level still a capitalist.

Hopefully, at some point the blue dog Democrats and few remaining fiscally-conservative Republicans in this country will get together and realize they had something good going with Reagan … and with Clinton.

Maybe then they’ll recognize that there are only two things the vast majority of Americans want from government - a smaller tax bill and less meddling with their lives and businesses.

Oh, and maybe then they’ll recognize that neither major party is representing those beliefs anymore, so maybe it’s time to start a new one.

Until that day comes, however, we begrudgingly endorse John McCain for president.

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