Posted: 3:56 am
October 6, 2008
Last week's passage of the rescue plan still leaves the economy as Issue One in 2008 - and this could give John McCain an electoral opportunity.
He needs to seize it.
The fact is Barack Obama's ties to the far left - to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, radical community groups and rapacious unions - are an objective threat to the nation's already wobbly economy.
McCain should say so - in detail and with vigor. He needs to tell the truth about Obama, his allies and their economically perilous plans.
* Take Pelosi. She already put politics ahead of economic stability with her venomous blame-the-GOP lecture that doomed the first vote on the rescue plan.
McCain should remind the world.
* Or take Obama's ties to radical "community" groups like ACORN, which pushed lenders to make bad loans, helping to spark the current crisis.
It's a natural for the GOP contender.
* Then there's Big Labor. It's betting millions on Obama - because he backs Labor's dream of scrapping the secret ballot for votes on unionizing. It's called the "card check" plan - and it empowers unions to coerce workers into unionizing.
What a way to boost membership. (And to free up time and cash to promote protectionism and undermine free trade.)
McCain can blast it as antidemocratic.
* Next, there's the class-warfare Left and Obama's stiff tax hikes, estimated at some $1 trillion-plus over 10 years.
Yes, he claims those making below $250,000 won't be hit. But he's already voted to hike taxes on folks making just $42,000 - and he plans to boost levies on Social Security, capital gains, dividends, corporate income, oil, coal, natural gas . . . and so on and so forth.
Maybe Obama hasn't seen the news: Financial firms - many in New York - are drowning. How will they survive his tax hikes? How will the middle class?
And how will the wealthy - who likewise reside here disproportionately and who'll be smacked but good - respond?
Goodbye, jobs and investment.
* Obama will need all that cash, of course, to feed his buddies in the health-care and public-education sectors and elsewhere. All told, Obama wants to ratchet up overall federal spending by some $1.2 trillion in just four years. Ouch.
* And what will all that buy? A bureaucracy-first, government-run health-care program, for starters - with all kinds of new mandates concerning the insurance you must have and the doctors you can see.
* Plus, McCain needs to make crystal clear that he long fought to curb Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - whose reckless purchases of bad mortgages underlie the financial mess. And that he fought against Fannie/Freddie protectors in Obama's party, like Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Chuck Schumer.
But the clock's ticking.
McCain needs to move fast - for his own sake and the nation's.
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