McCain's Stunt, John Paul's Principles and Obama's Opportunity

Who knew that John McCain was his own stuntman? What else to call his decision to "suspend" his campaign and fly back to Washington to help solve the economic crisis. Was McCain earnest about the importance of being back in the Senate or was he merely confused about the word order of the Oscar Wilde play?

McCain has admitted to no special expertise in complex economic matters, despite chairing the Commerce Committee of the Senate for many years. Nor do complex legislative negotiations necessarily benefit from having "mavericks" involved. Nor did any of the lead congressional or administration negotiators – not Treasury Secretary Paulson nor Congressman Barney Frank nor Senator Dodd – call for McCain’s help. The negotiations, by all reports, were proceeding well when John McCain decided he was needed. Rep. Frank, the funniest as well as one of the smartest members of Congress, was having none of it: "We’re trying to rescue the economy, not the McCain campaign."

If McCain’s polls numbers had been on the upswing, his move might have been seen as disinterested. Instead, it looks like a ploy, a gimmick, a stunt. You have to be careful with such stunts. Yesterday afternoon, it looked like the McCain camp had beaten Obama to a bipartisan punch, that he had outwitted his opponent, and changed what had been a bad storyline. But, precisely because his move was seen as political in nature, it is doubtful that he will gain much from his intervention except the wrath of some in the GOP base who have rebelled against the President’s proposals. Complex economic realities will not be solved by the heroic intervention of anyone, least of all when there is not much heroism in the act. McCain did not look presidential yesterday. He looked frantic to change his poll numbers. Stunts will not change anything.

Principles, on the other hand, are especially important in a time of crisis. Part of the economic crisis is complicated and financial. Part of it is moral. In 1981, Pope John Paul II issued his first (and favorite) encyclical on social justice, Laborem Exercens. "[T]he error of early capitalism can be repeated wherever man is in a way treated on the same level as the whole complex of the material means of production, as an instrument and not in accordance with the true dignity of his work-that is to say, where he is not treated as subject and maker, and for this very reason as the true purpose of the whole process of production."(Chapter 7) The Pope’s highly philosophic words are not the stuff of a 30-second campaign spot, but Barack Obama would do well to consult, and repeat, the distinction that Pope John Paul II made in homier words: the human person is not a means, or a thing, or a worker-bee, or a cog in someone else’s economic wheel.

Part of the horror of the current crisis is that some Wall Street companies clearly did not give a hoot about the average investor or the average homeowner. The average person who invested with Lehman Brothers could not be expected to know how to value these "financial instruments" that bundled bad mortgages and sold them at inflated costs to unsuspecting buyers. Indeed, one of the most difficult problems still on the negotiators’ table is the question of how to assess the value of these mortgage-backed securities. But, the captains of high finance did not care. They did not care if the homeowner was offered a loan they could not afford. They did not care if the bundling of these mortgages on the belief that housing prices would go up forever bore a frightening resemblance to a ponzi scheme. They saw the chance for a quick profit, and they took it. The average investor was a means to their end.

Obama does not need to embrace Catholic social teaching about the economy, but he needs to speak to the moral aspect of the economic crisis. The crisis is rooted in the fact that Wall Street forgot that the money at issue was not just a dollar figure on a balance sheet but the life savings of a human person, a grandmother who had earned her retirement or a married couple trying to put money away for their child’s college education.  

In the 1930s, Msgr. John A. Ryan denounced the "economic dictatorship" that controlled Wall Street. His attacks were echoed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt who spoke forcefully against "economic tyranny" and argued that "the collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people’s mandate to end it." In doing his debate prep, Obama would do well to consult the words of FDR who so effectively channeled both progressive and Catholic beliefs about social justice.

Michael Sean Winters