"The Fine Print", by Michael Schrader

<span style='font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt'>"The Fine Print", by Michael Schrader

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<span style='font-size:14.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt'>Whwhat Is the Rust

Foreseeing A Future From The Past

(Written and posted 18 July 2008)<o:p></o:p>

It will go down as an incredible forty-year period in American history. It’s a period where Republicans, conservatism, capitalism, and the free market reigned supreme. Republicans for the most part owned 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Of the ten presidential elections, the Republicans won seven. Only two Democrats occupied the Oval Office – a one-termer and a two-termer who won his first term by a plurality thanks to the help of a third-party candidate who siphoned off Republican votes.

This period followed a forty-year period in which the nation suffered through a great crisis and a great war, and is epitomized by a euphoric optimism in the American way and the American system. While many experienced tremendous and phenomenal economic success, the good times were not experienced by all, as the economic gap between the rich and the poor widened to a canyon, with many of the underclass falling through the cracks. All in all they were good times and people were optimistic about the future, despite bank failures, excessive credit, overproduction, corrupt government officials, a crumbling transportation infrastructure, and other minor black clouds like that.

By now, you have already figured out that this period I am talking about is not from 1968 to 2008, but 1888 to 1928. We all know what happened next – Herbert Hoover was elected in a landslide and the economy crashed the next year. Unfortunately, Hoover was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was blamed for the Great Depression, even though it wasn’t his fault but that of his predecessors, and the country made a tectonic shift to the left and ushered in forty years of Democratic hegemony which lasted until 1968, when the political tectonic plates shifted once again, and the country jumped to the right with Richard Nixon. Although Hoover tried gallantly to right the economy by instituting some policies that FDR would expand upon in the New Deal, the electorate never forgave him for the crash; he was a persona non grata, even within the Republican Party, for the rest of his life.

The similarities between the forty years prior to the Great Depression and the past forty years in terms of economic policy should be cause for alarm. If you read the financials (unfortunately, most people do not manage their own money and couldn’t give a flip about the financials), you should be feeling a bit quesy right now. Large inventories, lots of bad credit, bank failures, foreclosures, high energy and fuel prices, inflation, plummeting stock prices – these are very ominous signs that something bad, very bad, is quickly coming down the pike. Will 2009 be a repeat of 1929? We will know in 2010. If I was a presidential candidate, I would be concerned about it, because, if history is any guide, whoever is at the helm when the economy crashes will be punished at the polls.

It makes me wonder if the Democrats were thinking about this when they selected Obama as their nominee? If you think about what happened to Hoover, then the selection of Obama makes sense. After all, he was by far the weaker of the two Democratic candidates. Perhaps the Democrats are intentionally running the weak candidate expecting him to lose to McCain so that when the economy crashes and McCain becomes the twenty-first century’s Hoover, the Democrats can retake the White House with the strong candidate.

If the Democrats are intentionally running a weak candidate intending to lose, do you think the Republicans are too? McCain is not a strong candidate. In fact, none of the Republican candidates were strong candidates. Since some Republican talk show hosts were encouraging people to vote against Obama and for Hillary, do you think they were hoping to get a sure thing loser to make sure that the Democrats get pinned with the blame should an economic collapse occur? Yes, I know it sounds preposterous, but do you have any other logical explanation for why the parties would nominate such bad candidates? Why the candidates surrogates such as Wesley Clark and Phil Gramm would intentionally say such inane things that they know would alienate chunks of the electorate? These are smart men; neither of them fell off the turnip truck yesterday.

Hold on to your hats. Something tells me we are in for a wild ride.

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