Weekly Standard: Gramm was right, you -- yes you -- are just making up this goddamn recession

We Can't Handle the Truth
The surest way to create a campaign controversy.

by Andrew Ferguson



Former Texas senator Phil Gramm ran for president in 1996. He raised $20 million, spent nearly all of it, and won zero delegates. Political observers had long thought such a feat was impossible, and it remains astonishing even in hindsight. Recently we were reminded how he managed to pull it off.

Earlier this month, Gramm gave an interview to the Washington Times in which he asserted that the U.S. economy wasn't in a recession. We are, however, in a "mental recession," he said--a loss of consumer confidence, stoked by hysterical media reports, that threatens to tip the economy into a real recession.

This is all true. You could look it up: A recession is two consecutive quarters of economic contraction, and the economy didn't contract last quarter. But Gramm was pilloried for his factual statement. Before his interview with the Times, it was assumed (by professional assumers) that Gramm would be offered a high-ranking economic-policymaking job in a McCain administration, maybe even secretary of the Treasury; now assumers are assuming he'll never get such a cool job--especially after he made matters worse by insisting a day later that the fact he had asserted was, in fact, a fact: "Every word I said was true."

To which the general reaction was: So what? Gramm's candidate John McCain said that he "didn't agree" with the fact that Gramm had cited. Clambering down from the high ground of the factual and the objective, McCain slipped himself into the slough of the subjective and the romantic,
where politicians and voters now prefer to luxuriate. "I believe that the person here in Michigan who just lost his job isn't suffering from a mental recession," McCain said empathically. Most of the media reports offered an even bolder response to Gramm. Okay, said David Wright, the reporter who covered the story for ABC, maybe the "economic fundamentals are sound," as Gramm asserted. "But that's no consolation to folks who worry about their mortgages and are paying these high prices at the pump."

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http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/342sfqhg.asp

At a bare minimum, President and First Lady Obama will be able to empathize with the common citizen, having both grown up in extra-modest circumstances.

I hate neocons.

Hekate

Good line.

at least, coming from his beloved righties, these past 40 years...?

I didn't read deeply or know the author, but its extra funny coming from a conservative.

Can we make this "Mental Recession" the center-piece of every GOP campaign this fall? It would sure make that "No Safe Republican Seats" a reality.

Andrew Ferguson is an American journalist and author.

A failed musician who refused to join Walter Cronkite when Walter followed the troops onto Normandy Beach during D-Day

In 1992, he was a White House speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Ferguson_(journalist)