McCain's Economic Plan: Poor People Suck

Phil Gramm, the Treasury Secretary in John McCain's make-believe administration of cartoon villains in top hats, ruined thirty years of carefully scripted Republican delusion last week when he attacked struggling Americans as a "nation of whiners."

The United States is a financial wreck, its banking and housing sectors in smoking ruins, jobs are vanishing forever, personal debt is at a crushing historical high, basic health care costs are doubling for those who still manage to get insurance, the dollar is plummeting in value, and even those holding onto full-time employment unable to afford gasoline and food.

But Gramm, McCain's "top economic adviser" who made his fortune from the likes of Enron and the subprime mortgage scam, slipped up by delivering the only coherent McCain campaign statement on the economy: Poor people suck.

"You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession," Gramm told the Washington Times. "We have sort of become a nation of whiners. You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline."

There have never been enough Natural Republicans to win national elections, because the only real Republicans are wealthy, and no more than 20% of Americans can charitably be described as rich.

The trick is to convince middle-class independents and working-poor Democrats through some combination of bogus wars, bogus religious posturing and bogus populism that the GOP is really concerned about Jesus or homosexuals or whatever. (The only homosexuals Republicans are worried about are the ones who won't stay quiet about their affairs with GOP politicians.)

In the 1950s boom years following the Great Depression and the New Deal, Eisenhower won with Cold War fearmongering. Nixon won in 1968 and 1972 with race-war fearmongering. Reagan won in 1980 with a little of both, but with a new form of propaganda so ridiculous that it worked: Republicans were actually the party of poor dumb rednecks.

There wasn't ever a bit of evidence for such an absurd claim, but it didn't matter. If you repeat a lie often enough, in front of an American Flag, it becomes true for people too dim to know better. After all, it was Patriotic, and only communists and homosexuals would be against Patriotism.

Gramm has been around since those days of the "Reagan Revolution," but he's always been a terrible politician, too mean to tell populist lies, the kind of creep who famously attacked poor people for being fat.

When he slunk out of the Senate in 2002, he ran straight to the European banking giant UBS, where he helped create the subprime housing bubble that was destined to collapse and take down millions of American homeowners in the process. Even as the bubble burst last year, Gramm was slinking around Congress as a paid lobbyist for the mortgage industry, fighting against new federal legislation that would've banned the predatory lending and sleazy system that is now bringing down the American Economy.

He would've been a perfect Treasury Secretary for a John McCain administration. He told the truth about what the Republican corporatocracy thinks of "regular Americans."

Ken Layne is the managing editor of Wonkette.