Hammer Social Security

by Steve Soto

I have to laugh when I hear Team McCain whine about Obama capitalizing upon the financial meltdown, when it was Team McCain that themselves brought about the Georgian crisis and then capitalized upon it. Nonetheless, Obama has effectively taken the opportunities provided by the financial crisis and married his economic message to McCain's desire to privatize Social Security. And he's hammering this in Florida, which is damn good politics.

McCain is saddled with all of these problems because he has taken lobbyist money for years, perhaps shagged a few himself (Vicki Iseman anyone?), and surrounded himself with the same folks that had a direct role in the crisis itself (hello Phil Gramm, Rick Davis, Charlie Black). In the midst of all this, not only can he not get SEC and FCC straight, but he also wants to privatize Social Security and have consumers' health care choices dictated by the same unregulated market forces that gave us this banking and credit meltdown. It is perfectly legitimate for Obama to now drill McCain repeatedly for his policy prescriptions against the current crisis that McCain himself helped bring about.

But while he is at it, Obama should also make McCaina and the GOP answer to several questions, hopefully at the debate when McCain cannot tap dance behind Palin to escape:

*Why is $700 billion suddenly available for the largest corporate welfare in history, but there is no money for universal health care, SCHIP, alternate energy, roads and bridges, or college scholarships?

*Isn't the first casualty of the Bush/McCain financial meltdown the GOP demand to make the Bush tax cuts permanent?

*Why does an over-amped conservative concern about entitlement spending require Social Security privatization and Medicare cuts, but these same Wall Street and conservative whores don't blink an eye at tossing a trillion dollars at Iraq and another trillion at greedy Wall Street robber barons who ran their companies into the ground and then wanted the taxpayers to pick up the tab?

Yes, Obama should pound McCain every day on the meltdown and the role he and his lobbyist campaign team played in it. And while it may be difficult for many to understand why the ready-to-go package Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke immediately pulled off the shelf is corporate welfare and a blank check for robber barons enabled by Alan Greenspan and George W. Bush, Obama can demonstrate to voters what is at stake by hammering McCain on what more of the same could mean to something that everyone understands: Social Security.

And while he is at it, if Obama is looking for a way to fight against a blank check and the biggest piece of corporate welfare in our history, he could tie his critiques over the bailout to what Dean Baker says must be included in it, if only our Democratic congressmembers weren't so flummoxed to fight for it.