Patterico: It's Over, Because the McCain Camp Refuses to Fight Back on Fannie, Freddie, and CRA

As that US News blog post said, the McCain camp thinks it's "too complicated" to explain the current crisis to the American people, so they're going to let Barack Obama claim it was all the Republicans' and McCain's fault.

I said McCain would turn towards these topics after the bailout passed. I appear to have been very wrong. The McCain camp is choosing a frankly insane strategy of allowing Obama to destroy him every day without a peep of objection.

What will they run on? Character, patriotism.

All well and good, but Obama has now set the narrative that he foresaw the subprime meltdown and tried to avert it while John McCain didn't -- and in fact a abetted it with his crazy let's-deregulate-everything cuckoo policies. In fact, the opposite is true, at least on the subprime mortgage fiasco specifically, but McCain thinks that if he refuses to engage in the argument, the argument will just go away.

Running on character and patriotism does McCain no good if the public believes he has character, patriotism, and economic incompetence.

Which is precisely what he'sl letting them believe.

This SNL sketch would seem to indicate the issue is not "too complicated" for the American public to understand...

Democrats wanted to give credit-poor people mortgages they couldn't afford, resulting in a housing bubble, a recession, the American taxpayer on the hook for failed mortgages, and even the credit-poor homebuyers themselves harmed. Republicans -- including McCain -- tried to bring some sanity and oversight to the process, but were blocked by Democrats. What's so complicated?

Incidentally, this sketch is almost certainly written by Jim Downey, one of the acknowledged greatest SNL writers of all time, particularly on the political parody side, writer of the great Gore-Bush debate sketches, and, if not exactly a Republican, at least not so in the tank for Democrats so as to write every sketch as a DNC talking point memo. Compare and contrast to the debate sketch, for example.

But Jim Downey isn't able to carry this message. Only McCain is. Not even Palin can really carry it, as she wasn't present in DC when all this was happening. John McCain was, and could explain it to America, but chooses not to.

posted by Ace at 12:06 PM

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