Another Missed Opportunity

Y'know, Sith masters aren't generally known for failing to exploit opportunities to make progress toward their ultimate goals.  In the second Star Wars trilogy, how many years did it take Darth Sidious to manipulate events around in such a way as to finally make himself ruler of the galaxy?  First by getting himself elected to the Galactic Senate from Naboo, then becoming a player with the Trade Federation while undermining the incumbent Supreme Chancellor, then replacing him and using other underlings to gin up a fake civil war that gave him indefinite emergency powers, and finally duping the Jedi Council into moving against his burgeoning dictatorship and making it look like an attempted coup de tat.  It took literally decades to bring about.

I've believed from the start that John Sith McCain's 2008 presidential run wasn't primarily about winning the White House, but gaining revenge on the GOP for rejecting him in 2000.  Particularly in an election cycle in which the Republicans' "brand" is residing at the bottom of the political septic tank, a condition largely inflicted by its uberpurist base.  You might even say that this GOP "civil war" provided McCain with the opportunity to swoop in and usurp the party's presidential campaign when the real Pachyderms were distracted.

This presented Maverick with an intractible problem: how to fabricate a reconciliation with the Republican base he's been screwing for the past decade.  Having a genuine, unabashed Marxist quisling for a general election opponent certainly doesn't hurt.  But as is a long established political rule of thumb (and was borne out in 2006 when congressional 'Pubbies attempted to retain power via the spectre of "Speaker Pelosi"), you don't win elections solely by demonizing the other side.  You also have to make a positive case why you should be elected instead.  And in McCain's case, provide a reason for your own base to get out and bust its balls trying to get you elected.

On Wednesday, one of Sailor's right-wing faces on his RINO campaign provided him with an opportunity via, ironically, some economic straight - and some would argue TOO straight - talk:

In an interview with the Washington Times, Phil Gramm, a former Texas senator who is now vice chairman of UBS, the giant Swiss bank, said he expects Mr. McCain to inherit a sluggish economy if he wins the presidency, weighed down above all by the conviction of many Americans that economic conditions are the worst in two or three decades and that America is in decline.

“You’ve heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession,” he said, noting that growth has held up at about 1% despite all the publicity over losing jobs to India, China, illegal immigration, housing and credit problems and record oil prices. “We may have a recession; we haven’t had one yet.”

Senator Gramm is abso-frakking-lutely correct.  This is the truth, these are the FACTS, and McCain should be flogging them relentlessly in a sunny, optimistic, yes, "Yes, We Can!" dose of Reaganian optimism to "strike back" against the years and years and years of ignorant left-wing Donk doom & gloom economic pessimism.  Indeed, Gramm concedes the economic "sluggishness" - which is also a fact - and its causes, but restores the perspective to the issue that the Democrats have, yes, "cynically" done everything in their power to destroy.

Then he went one paragraph too far:

“We have sort of become a nation of whiners,” he said. “You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline” despite a major export boom that is the primary reason that growth continues in the economy, he said.

“We’ve never been more dominant; we’ve never had more natural advantages than we have today,” he said. “We have benefited greatly” from the globalization of the economy in the last thirty years.

Those, too, are the facts.  Unfortunately, using perjoratives to express public attitudes that reflect the corrosive impact of years and years of Donk and Enemy Media propaganda is not a politic way of expressing them, and the Dems weren't long in casting Gramm and his boss as "out of touch," even though the truth is the diametric opposite.  He'd have been far better off keeping the focus on exposing that disinformation and bludgeoning its source, especially seeing as how the economic politices they advocate - higher taxes, bigger government, bigger deficits, neo-protectionism - can only make their hysterical shrieking about "Great Depressions" and "Herbert Hoover economies" into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Still, Gramm did provide McCain with an opening to take the tack that he himself muddled with the "whining" reference.  It would have been a large step toward an at least tenuous detente with the center-right base that never will have much in the way of positive reasons to hang the chad for the bane of their party.

Amazingly - or not, depending upon your degree of Sithian cynicism - Maverick did not avail himself of it:

And thus the Gramm opportunity, which the former Texas senator tainted but which Senator McCain could have salvaged, was instead pissed away in a cowardly fit of craven defensiveness.  Indeed, if Phil Gramm doesn't speak for Lord Queeg, how can he retain him on his campaign as an economic advisor?  And if one of the apostles of supply side economic does not speak for his envisioned economic policies, isn't that another kick in the collective nuts of the conservative base he's trying to reel in?

Palpatine didn't liquidate the Trade Federation and Count Dokoo until he no longer needed them.  Darth Queeg may not have foreseen Phil Gramm's momentary overabundance of rhetorical enthusiasm, but his pulling of the verbal ejection lever was vastly premature - assuming that his true objective has not already been attained.