Mitch Gann’s

So the U.S. House of Representatives rejected the Big Bailout plan this afternoon by a margin of 23 votes.  A strong majority of Democrats voted for the bill and an even stronger majority of Republicans voted against it. All of this is ironic given that the proposal originated in a Republican White House.

At last check, the world had not yet ended.  However, the stock market did plunge about 8% on the news of the rejection.  Big deal.  Markets go up, and markets go down.  Give it some good economic news of any kind, and this market will go right back up.

My objection to the “rescue” plan (as its backers call it) is simple: it was being shoved down the throats of the American people with unwarranted haste, all on the word of a discredited administration.

Maybe it’s the right thing to do. Maybe the world as we know will end if no epic government action is taken. Maybe. But would it have hurt to hold public hearings for a week or so, and put a range of expert opinion and factual evidence before Congress and the people?  I don’t think it would have hurt much.  Now, the way the thing has been bungled by the political leadership (with the Democratic leadership having done more than its fair share of the bungling), we may not have the luxury of due process.

One especially irritating aspect is the way the main stream media is handling the story. I watched Charlie Gibson tonight, and everyone on the report was dismissive of the representatives who voted no and the people who urged them to do so.  Instead, the attitude was, “Oh, you silly, ignorant, angry, little people, if only you understood.”  ABC even ran a cartoon to explain the concept of a credit crunch to all us common folk.

Well, Charlie, maybe we do get it. Maybe we just don’t give a damn.

Or maybe we just want to see you guys sweat.

An AP poll conducted last night shows that Americans oppose the Bush administration’s plan to bailout the financial sector by a margin of 45% to 30%, with the remaining 25% not yet taking a side.

According to the survey, 40% of Republicans and 46% of Democrats oppose the $700 billion bailout.  A paltry 23% of respondents say that they approve of how President Bush is handling the crisis.

Those numbers are in line with my own informal polling of friends and family. Therefore, it seems amazing that nearly everyone in Washington, D.C., is falling for Mr. Bush’s bailout scheme.  You would think that the Democrats especially would want to let the guy twist slowly, slowly in the wind, but oh no.  They can’t bail him out fast enough.  The same is true of the Republican leadership in the Senate, but that is more understandable. Mr. Bush used to be their guy.

The only group saying “Hey, wait a minute!” are the House Republicans.  Their free-market ideology makes the very idea of a bailout galling to them.  I don’t agree with House Republicans on many things, and I may not end up agreeing with them on this issue, either, but right now I say, hang in there.

You don’t hand over $700 billion on spec. Let’s wait and see.

If the market drops, OK. It will rise again.  That’s what markets do.

If the predicted credit crunch comes to pass, and tight money causes unemployment to rise, OK. We can deal with that situation when and if it happens.  We will have $700 billion to work with. It will come in handy to have a reserve.

Which is what we won’t have if we fork over all the money to Wall Street and doing so fails to solve the underlying problems.

Officials from the Bush administration are on Capitol Hill today, trying to get Congress to hand over $700 billion to bailout Wall Street (”Bush confident on bipartisan financial rescue bill” — Reuters).

“Trust us,” the Bushites say. “The sky really is falling this time. Honest.”

Yeah, right. If you buy that one, I have a stockpile of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to sell you. You can have it for a measley million, and will come out way ahead of the taxpayers in the Big Bailout, guaranteed. (An article on MarketWatch draws interesting comparisons between the administration’s handling of this crisis and the Iraq War.)

I’m not saying do nothing. But take your time, Congress. Get it right this time.

What the heck — ask to see the books.

Let me see if I have this right . . .

A whole lot of banks got into a financial pickle because they extended risky, ill-advised home loans to Americans desperate to own a home, and then got stuck holding devalued property when the would-be home owners defaulted and housing prices plummeted.  The mess got so bad that it caused a general loss of confidence in the financial system, putting even the more conservative and responsible banks at risk of failure.  So now the U.S. government is going to buy up the bad debt, and everybody can just start over, making the loans that the economy needs to function.

Is that about it?

I guess we have no choice but to go along with the bail-out plan.  But we also need a plan to prevent this mess from happening again.

For starters, I think all the free-market economists and their political supporters should be forced to write five thousand times each on the walls of the NYSE: “I believe in the strict government regulation of markets.”

And they should write it in blood.

Their own.

Just what level and type of experience makes a person fit to be President of the United States?

Legally, the answer is simple. The Constitution says that to serve as president, a person needs to be 35 or older and a native-born citizen of the USA.  After that, it’s just a matter of getting enough votes.

Of course, to gather those votes, it helps to have the kind of experience that will give the electorate confidence in you.  The question is, what kind of experience is that? Or what kind of experience should it be? And how much?

One line of thinking is that executive experience — especially in government — is what should count the most with voters.  So in recent years, we have had a number of state governors who have been elected president — Carter, Reagan, Clinton and G.W. Bush.  Looking at those four, I would say that two were successful presidents and two were failures.  I think others might say there were three failures and one success, or perhaps even four failures.  But I doubt that many would see a presidential success rate for former governors of more than 50%. It’s your basic crap-shoot.

Another line of thinking is that legislative experience — especially at the federal level — is what should count the most.  Admittedly, it is mostly US Senators who see it this way; the American people tend to prefer the executives. During my considerable life-time, only one sitting Member of Congress has been elected to the presidency: John F. Kennedy. All of the other presidents with experience in Congress — Johnson, Nixon, Ford, G.H.W. Bush — were all vice president before becoming president.  To me, being vice president doesn’t provide much executive experience, except in running your own office.  The only duty the VP has is to preside over the Senate — a legislative function as much as executive.  I can’t see that Kennedy and the four VPs were any less successful on average than the four former governors.  Their records are  pretty mixed.  Another crap-shoot.

One president during my life-time was a military hero and former general — Eisenhower.  As former generals turned president go, Ike wasn’t bad.  He made up some for U.S. Grant.

Logically, though, if the American people want things done, they ought to elect a president with legislative experience, and particularly experience in Congress. Then they should vote for US Representatives and Senators from the same party.  We don’t tend to do that, though. We seem to prefer governmental stand-offs, and we get them.

When I think about the experience issue as it relates to the presidency, I always think of Abraham Lincoln.  Before being elected president, Lincoln had served a term in the Congress and a few terms in the Illinois legislature.  He famously failed to be elected US Senator from Illinois. When voters cast their ballots for Lincoln for president in 1860, they did so knowing that his election was likely to touch-off a civil war, as it did. Before Lincoln could even sit down at his desk in the White House, seven states had seceded from the Union.  No other crisis in American history comes close to matching that.

If the “inexperienced” Lincoln had been anything less than a success, no candidate running for the office today would need to worry about a “Southern strategy.”