Over his long political career, the presumptive GOP nominee for president has only occasionally tried to disguise his relative disinterest in matters economic. His long record as the scourge of pork-barrel spenders notwithstanding, McCain has for the most part held standard-issue GOP positions on subjects ranging from trade to taxes to social spending, and he has held them without any great passion. As many others have said, that’s a big problem for a presidential candidate running in a year of great economic turmoil, when the economy may be heading for recession or worse and when more than 80% of the adult population believes the country is on the wrong track.
Proving an old pol can learn new tricks, McCain is suddenly sounding like the tribune of the scared, squeezed and downtrodden. As reported this morning in The Hill:
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Monday that he believes the country is in a recession, adding that “these are very, very tough times in America.”
“Americans are hurting today,” McCain said at an Associated Press forum in Washington, D.C. “They’re hurting in the towns and cities across America. They’re sitting around the kitchen table, saying, ‘Are we going to be able to make our home loan mortgage payments? Are we going to be able to — do I have to try to get a second job? Can I keep my job? Why was I laid off?’”
McCain went on to lay the blame for our economic woes on President Bush, Congress and “very greedy people that happen to be in Wall Street today.”
Guess he got the memo.
Today he gave a speech with a laundry list of an economic plan. More on that to come.