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Democratic Primaries: The candidates’ platforms reflect America’s economic illiteracy

Posted February 12, 2008

Baltimore — (TFN): In a campaign commercial I watched the day before the Potomac primaries, Hillary Clinton pledged to put her "35 years of experience" to work for the American people.

Was this a promise or a threat? I remain uncertain — considering that she kept mum as to just what that experience consists of. Sure, she has been around the block a few times. First in Little Rock and then in Washington. She was a lawyer. She served on the board of WalMart.

She was a politician's wife. Which means she has considerable experience telling whatever client or electorate she is dealing with just what they want to hear.

Shoulders of giants

Her husband's last day job and connections are sterling, good enough to have made her an instant New Yorker and a senator within a couple of months.

For all practical reasons, that means she — like the late Queen Mum –  is fully qualified to wave at crowds while wearing odd-shaped hats. She attended every thinkable ladies' programs for every first lady in the world during the 1990s. She may still remember what floorboards creak and what flush box needs jiggling in the White House. What Secret Service agents to call pigs.

And, most importantly, in her half-decade in the US Senate, she has experience tussling at the trough for taxpayers' dollars with the other consumers of one third of the nation's GDP.

Impressive credentials. But really only if you compare them to those of Candidate Barrack. He has about three year's of trough-tussling under his belt, most of which was spent not doing his job while campaigning for president. He's a lawyer and has written a book.

Then again, who hasn't.

Survival of the fittest

It's been a week since the last presidential candidate with business sense and executive experience withdrew from the primary contest: Mitt Romey, and before him, Rudy Giuliani, was the last hold-out of actual real-life executive experience that required more than running one's mouth and placing one's hands solidly in other people's pockets. Such as running a business, a city, a state. Such as creating wealth, not just redistributing it.

The departure of executive qualifications shows in the candidates' platforms. Both Clinton and Barrack engage in the age-old flim-flam of labeling expenses as "investments". In both cases, they want to plow billions of the nation's wealth into untested alternative energy technologies, which somehow, some time, will "pay for themselves".

(I feel reminded of a multi-level marketing presentation of water filters that I attended as a young journalist, in which the pyramid schemers promised that screwing an overpriced filter on your kitchen faucet would turn tap water into sparkling, crystal clear nectar of the gods "for pennies on the dollar" — and of course "pay for itself" if only you were in the habit of spending a few thousand bucks a year on bottled water. Hey, guess some people do — because the same scam is still making the rounds. Just like Hillary and Obama and the Nigerian bank scam.)

Common denominator

But the true qualifications of the candidates become even more visible when you ask who'd be paying for all those new entitlements, like socialized healthcare, expanded unemployment benefits, public subsidies for private education. Indeed, like suburban teenagers turning to Dad for their financial needs, like attorneys billing a client with deep pockets for every minute spent on the cellphone on their morning commute, or your average Denny's diner loading up on potato salad from under the sneeze guard, the assumption is that there is a one-point payer for it all, with unlimited resources:

The evil rich, who still earn too much and whose property needs to be redistributed. People stupid enough to make $100,000 a year and still not doing so through an offshore corporation.

It is the mindset of the ultimate consumer, not the creator. The mindset of the bureaucrat who has to burn his budget to a crisp each year, not the entrepreneur who is only as prosperous as the revenues he creates. The mindset of the adolescent, not the mature adult.

It's the mindset of the economically illiterate and the mathematically challenged: Those who believe that 10 divided by 5 equals seventeen.

In short: They are candidates fully in synch with the intellectual capacities and yearning for miracle solutions of the American public.

Which, to my entrepreneurial mind suggests a viable alternative source of revenues to bankroll the ambitious social engineering project of the socialist candidates: Sell Holy Water in biodegradable vials at the DNC Convention.

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Posted by J. Christoph Amberger · Filed Under Politics 

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