The Creepy Foresight of John McCain

John McCain was not my ideal candidate, as I've said many times here.  For one thing, I think he missed his shot in 2000 and was too old and too tired to make an effective play in 2008.  The age concerns around a McCain Presidency were legitimate.  I used to joke here that one of the reasons I liked McCain was that he was slightly crazy, which would be a deterrent against aggression from other countries - they'd never know what would set off his crazy Vietnam flashbacks and launch the nukes.

 And I also found McCain's "maverick" schtick to be a bit tiresome at times.  While I think he had a far more legitimate claim to actual bipartisan achievement than Barack Obama, McCain also had a tendency to overplay the role in a way that seemed more about gratifying his ego than achieving something concrete.

That being said, there were a couple of things that McCain hit on during the campaign that have turned out to be remarkably prescient.

When McCain called for the resignation of SEC chief Chris Cox after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, he was lambasted for what was perceived as a political stunt.  The thing is, McCain was dead on.  As the Madoff scandal has shown, the SEC was horribly inept in doing its job.  The testimony of Harry Markopolos last week was a devastating indictment of an agency that was accomplishing almost nothing under Cox's reign (which started in August 2005).  The SEC was rotting under his watch.  We just didn't know quite how bad it was until Madoff.

The other item that McCain had dead right was the evil of earmarks.  Obama dismissed this in debates as a small component of the budget.  He had to take this position because he had taken home quite a lot for Illinois in earmarks.  The "tiny percentage" argument de-fanged McCain and made him seem like he was focusing on small potatoes.  The problem is, McCain was right.  The direct spending on earmarks themselves was never an enormous number, even though it was certainly substantial enough that voters should have been angry about the waste.  The evil of earmarks is that they are essentially a way for legislators to bribe each other into voting for even bigger bills using taxpayer money.  There is no greater example of this than the extraordinary process that Pelosi and Reid (and, through a default on any leadership, Obama) used to ram through the largest spending bill in American history with no review and only the bare minimum of debate.  The genius of the Pelosi/Reid process was to essentially make the entire bill a gigantic earmark.  Why waste time negotiating with individuals and supporting earmarks to push the thing through?  Just throw every pet project under the sun into the mix and you save time.  After 6 years of overspending under Republicans and 2 years of overspending under Democrats, we cannot afford the boondoggle that Obama signed today.  But the problem of earmarks, derided by Obama in the election, greased the wheels to make it happen.

McCain was dead right about that.