You Can Go Home Again

By Michael P. Riccards

Novelist Thomas Wolfe was wrong; you can go home again—at least to Michigan and after 40 years absence. Mitt Romney swept John McCain in the Republican primary. He showed vividly what is wrong with Senator McCain’s approach. Going into the state with the highest unemployment rate in the nation, McCain resorted to form. He did not talk about economic security and the erratic stock markets, nor even about the mortgage crisis. McCain stuck to Iraq. He insists that he has stayed the course by demanding that the USA field more money and more brave troops into that civil war morass.

McCain was quoted as saying to press people that he expects the USA will stay in Iraq for a century! The Iraqi Defense Minister has just said that we must be there until at least 2018. As for the unemployed masses in Michigan, McCain thought it was being candid to tell them that they would never get their jobs back. Fifty year olds should go to community college. It was a variation of the straight talking speech in a factory in the film “Primary Colors” except John Travolta did it better.

Romney was smarter in Michigan, the state that elected his late father to three terms as governor. Romney offered them hope, new jobs, some sort of economic growth policy by which they could pay the bills. The only other options are to move to the South or stay in Detroit and die on the vine. McCain seems not to have understood what life is like for the non-heroic of us.

Like Obama, Romney said that the people in Michigan need hope and that they distrusted Washington insiders. Many think that Romney is a trimmer, a lightweight businessman. But he sells things which means, in politics, he sells himself. As the economy is tanking he smells an issue that could work not just for Democrats but for his own cause as well. “It is the economy, stupid,” James Carville yelled in the 1992 Clinton victory. Now, in a more perilous time we are faced with more difficult choices. 1992 did not see a hemorrhaging of $9 billion a month for the Iraq war; $1.5 trillion indebtedness to the People’s Republic of China; oil prices that are moving out of sight.

The economy is being linked up with economy insecurity and with the lack of universal medical coverage. Excessive use of fossil fuels is being linked up inflation, national debts and environmental problems. We have been since World War II, the major prophets of world trade, and now we are recognizing that the rest of the world is just not at the same place as it was in 1945. It is no longer a place on which we can dump our goods and products. We have lost blue-collar jobs and now white collars jobs abroad. The President is a supplicant in front of Saudi Arabian princes on oil prices, and our once major banks are borrowing from Singapore and Hong King.

It is the economy, stupid.