Why McCain & the GOP went down.(THE LAST WORD)

During the Republican presidential debate in Durham, New Hampshire, in September 2007, Congressman Ron Paul warned that "we've dug a hole for ourselves and we've dug a hole for our party. We're losing elections and we're going down next year if we don't change it."

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Paul's warning was in the context of the Bush administration's interventionist foreign policy, particularly the war in Iraq. Indeed, the year before, the Democrats captured majority control of both the House and Senate based largely on the growing public opposition to the Iraq War, which was associated not just with President Bush but with Republicans in general.

The economy is now far and away the most pressing issue on the minds of the American people, and Ron Paul warned too about the economic meltdown that would occur if we continued borrowing money for programs we could not afford--very much including the war in Iraq--and creating money out of thin air to finance the borrowing.

With a Republican president in the White House, the faltering economy, like the war in Iraq, was also associated in the public mind with Republican administration. Of course, Senator McCain and his fellow Republicans tried to distance themselves from the increasingly unpopular George W. Bush, who was nowhere to be found on the campaign trail.

During the closing weeks of the campaign, McCain tried to show that Obama would harm the economic well-being of Americans by repeatedly referring to a telling comment Obama had made to the now-famous "Joe the Plumber." "When you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody," Obama had told Joe (the plumber) Wurzelbacher while campaigning in Wurzelbacher's neighborhood. By repeatedly citing this statement, McCain hoped to cast Obama as a socialist who would, unlike McCain, tax and tax, spend and spend.

In truth, McCain, like Obama, is a socialist. Both McCain and Obama voted for the bank bailout bill, and both lobbied other lawmakers to vote for it as well. The bill authorized the government to spend up to $700 billion (not exactly pocket change, even in Washington, D.C.) to purchase mortgage-related securities as well as stock in major financial institutions, partially nationalizing them. This bill represented a huge transfer of money from the American people to the wealthy.