I got so wrapped up in the Women for Obama rally and then my cartoon deadline that I haven’t had a chance to remark on the vortex of doom that seems to be swallowing our economy. John McCain said something last week that struck me as particularly laughable. On Monday morning, as you may have heard, he stated that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong." This was, of course, mere hours after Lehman Brothers went kaput, and at the beginning of what turned out to be a catastrophic day on Wall Street.
McCain started getting hammered immediately for sounding like an out-of-touch buffoon, so by the afternoon he was massaging his "fundamentals are strong" statement into a new line: that he had actually been talking about the American worker. That was what he meant by "fundamentals," you see. By the next morning, he was all over the morning news shows accusing Obama of not thinking the American worker was strong.
Well.
It’s funny, but whenever I’ve heard the term "fundamentals" in regards to the economy, I always thought it referred to indicators in the form of, you know, data. Profits, unemployment numbers, orders for pork bellies, all that fun stuff. If it refers to the bootstrap-yanking American worker, by McCain’s definition, the fundamentals must be all good all the time, right? By this logic, even during the Great Depression the "fundamentals" were strong.
Seriously, though, when a foe of labor like McCain tries to twist the meaning of his "fundamentals are strong" pronouncement into a big, slobbery butt-kiss of the working class, it’s insulting. Only someone who takes working Americans for a bunch of chumps would attempt BS like that. Some might even call it… elitist.