McCain On 'Black Monday': Economy Still Strong

John McCain seems bound and determined to prove he was right when he said that he does not know much about the economy.

Despite the deluge of bad news coming out about the economy, Senator McCain declared this morning that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong." Yet even as he was saying how strong the economy is he went on to describe the news out of Wall Street as "tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and Wall Street." Can you say "disconnect"?

Further proof that John McCain has no clue as to what is happening in his own campaign, much less the economy, the McCain campaign released a television ad this morning that began: "Our economy is in crisis."



McCain seems to be going along with the same line of reasoning that many conservatives and his supporters have been arguing for months that despite Wall Street's failings, the economy is actually on firm footing. This of course goes against the prevailing sentiment of most economists, and economic experts.

As I pointed out in an earlier post, Donald Luskin, who described himself as "an adviser to John McCain's campaign," made such an argument in Sunday's Washington Post.

Despite modest growth and relatively low unemployment rates, many economists see dire signs in today's economic landscape. On Sunday, former fed chairman Alan Greenspan said the market was the worst he had ever witnessed and predicted another major bank would close soon. Meanwhile, inflation is rising, real wages are declining, and the problems in the housing market persist.

To be fair, John McCain did acknowledge some of this in his speech this morning, when he said, "I promise you we will never put America in this position again." The odd thing is John McCain is getting a lot of his economic advice from Phil Gramm, whose policies are responsible for a lot of this mess.

This is why I take no comfort hearing McCain say, "This is a failure. We've got take every action to build an environment of robust energy supplies, lower inflation, control health care costs, access to international markets, low taxes and reduce burden of government to allow people to move forward toward a future of prosperity."

The Obama campaign has regularly tweaked John McCain for having said that the "fundamentals of our economy are strong." They had used it enough that last week, the Washington Post's Jonathan Weisman searching high and low for something to criticize Obama since they were being forced to point out McCain’s lies. Weisman’s criticism of Barak Obama was that he had the temerity to point out McCain’s line, insisting that the quote is "months old". Weisman didn't actually do any research since John McCain had said it again on August 20th on the Laura Ingrahm radio show.

Hopefully the Obama campaign will keep up this attack. McCain is not ready to be President.