The American presidential campaign this week was fought on economic terrain, and John McCain was the New York Yankees battling in Boston's Fenway Park or Liverpool playing at Manchester United's Old Trafford: the visiting team with a decided disadvantage.
The Republican standard-bearer isn't comfortable in the economic arena. He started off the week talking about a "slowing'' economy. Slowing? Most Americans think it's going overboard and threatening to take them down.
He pledged to balance the budget by the end of his first term, which is inconsistent with the lavish tax cuts he also promises. He offered the same Social Security prescriptions that President George W Bush failed to sell, insisting that somehow a more Democratic Congress would be receptive.
Contradictions, detours and flip-flops abound. On Bloomberg Television this spring, the Arizona Republican said there's been "great progress" economically under the Bush administration; the next day, he said Americans are "hurting badly'' and aren't better off than they were eight years ago.
McCain likes to joke about his rebellious youth, noting that he graduated fifth-from-the-bottom of his 1958 US Naval Academy class. The valedictorian of that class was Ronald Reagan's one-time national security adviser, John Poindexter, who barely avoided prison. This reinforces novelist Walker Percy's admonition not to get all A's and still flunk life.
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McCain gets an A in life and in most subjects. Just not economics.
Quick Lesson
If he wants a quick tutorial there are two useful books: Unequal Democracy by Larry Bartels and High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families by Peter Gosselin. They dismantle many of the policies he's espousing.
These aren't ideological diatribes. Bartels, a Princeton University political scientist, says he hasn't voted in a presidential election since 1984, when he supported Reagan. Gosselin is a well-regarded national economics correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.
The Gosselin book focuses on the precarious state of many American families as safety nets