It’s late in the game, but Johnny Mac may have found himself a teency bit of traction through his efforts to paint Barry O as a conniving socialist hell-bent on redistributing the wealth. Yessir! From the recently bailed-out tycoons up on Wall Street to the heavily subsidized big-time farmers down South, all decent, God-fearing believers in this glorious free-enterprise capitalism we practice in this country are cheering for JM to root out and destroy the malignancy of socialism that under Bolshevik Barry’s misguidance would speedily metastasize throughout the American body politic.
Since the New Deal ushered it in, the American variant of a socialistic state has survived and grown, not uniformly, but in bits and pieces and fits and starts, chiefly because few of its beneficiaries (that would be almost everybody, in one way or another) want to admit that it exists. We’re way too into rugged individualism for that. Starting with FDR, who, however unwittingly, as historian Paul Conkin has so brilliantly and concisely shown, laid the foundations for our unacknowledged welfare state, our politicians have been unwilling to tell their constituents anything other than that the government benefits accruing to them are theirs by right while assailing those aimed at other interest groups as unjustified and wasteful. Hence, for some time, the formula for success in American politics has consisted of milking the government dry for your supporters and raising ten kinds of hell when anybody else shows up with a bucket trying to squeeze out a few drops for folks who live outside your district or didn’t vote for you.
Back in the late 1960s, I worked for the Department of Agriculture as a “crop reporter,” charged with ascertaining that individuals had not planted cotton in excess of their allotted acreage, and far more importantly from the landowner’s perspective, certifying that he had left enough acreage unplanted to qualify him for the maximum government payment for not farming land that he had no intention of farming in the first place. I wish I had kept count of the number of times that I heard a guy who was getting paid not to farm launch into a tirade against the “guvmint” and all its welfare checks and food stamps lavished on people who obviously just didn’t want to work.
It was about this time that Mississippi Congressman Jamie Whitten professed to wonder if “when you start giving people something for nothing . . . you don’t destroy character more than you might improve nutrition.” Whitten showed no such concern, however, about character issues among the 350 large-scale planters in his Mississippi Delta district who received Department of Agriculture crop-control subsidy checks in amounts of more than $50,000 in 1967, with 69 of those payments topping $100,000 and some even running in excess of $200,000.
In 1964, John McCain’s Arizona predecessor, Barry Goldwater, sounded mighty good to the business and financial types when he railed against the lazy folks on “the dole” and advocated making social security voluntary. Then, however, as the old lady said when her pastor served up a sermon against dipping snuff, Goldwater “quit preachin’ and went to meddlin’” by talking about “getting big business out of government” and curtailing corporate tax breaks and other incentives. This sent such a shiver down the spines of the denizens of Wall Street that Goldwater’s Democratic opponent Lyndon Johnson achieved the unprecedented by besting his GOP rival’s contribution total from big business by nearly 50 percent.
By the way, am I the only one who’s puzzled by the folks who tear their hair at the prospect Obama raising their taxes to support his domestic agenda, but don’t even blink when told repeatedly that, at the very least, the war in Iraq is costing them a cool twelve billion bucks every month? Apparently they think that the debt for this massive and massively wasteful and harmful expenditure is just going to evaporate, never to show up on their tax bills or those of their children.
Still , we should be grateful to the McCainiacs, I suppose, for giving us a chance to save ourselves from a slick-talking socialist who has so clearly beguiled not only the resolute free marketers at The Economist, whose team of experts chose Obama’s tax plan over McCain’s by a wide margin, but the likes of Paul Volcker and even Warren Buffet. Asked to comment on Buffet’s endorsement of Obama, McCain running mate Sarah Palin shrugged, “ Who cares about some guy who spends all his time wastin’ away in Margaritaville?”
