“He’s probably the smartest - not just economist, but politician - there is.”
- John McCain on Phil Gramm,
“You’ve heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession. … We have sort of become a nation on whiners. … You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, American in decline. … We’ve never been more dominant.”
- Top McCain Economic Adviser Phil Gramm
“Now, as far as putting additional money in American taxpayers’ pocket, that’s fine, because a lot of this is psychological, a lot it’s psychological. Because I believe the fundamentals of our economy is still strong.”
- John McCain,
“But I think psychologically - and a lot of our problems today, as you know, are psychological - the confidence, trust, the uncertainty about our economic future, ability to keep our own home. This might give them a little psychological boost.”
- John McCain,
McCain Said Gramm Was His “Mentor” On Economic Issues. New York Times business and economics columnist David Leonhardt wrote, “Mr. McCain begins the story of his economic education in 1982, when the country was in recession and he was first elected to the House. Once in Congress, he worked with Jack F. Kemp and Phil Gramm, who conservatives who were also in the House then, and Martin Feldstein, a Harvard economist who was an aide to President Ronald Reagan, to pass tax cuts and spending restraints. Mr. McCain said that Mr. Gramm - ‘a guy who taught economics for 12 years at Texas A&M’…- had been an especially important mentor.”
http://progressiveaccountability.org/2008/07/10/mccain-and-gramm-agree-economic-woes-are-psychological-and-mental/
..........much more McCain double-talk on this terrific site....
The new group -- a joint project of John Podesta's Center for American Progress Action Fund and Brock's Media Matters Action Network -- will have approximately 20 paid staffers and is headed by Tara McGuinness, formerly connected with MoveOn.org. It won't spend any money on ads, but will devote significant resources on digging into McCain's record and policy proposals.
The group also has on-staff trackers that will film McCain at every public event and post the footage on the group's Web site.
Interestingly, the treasure trove of research and months of tracking footage that had already been collected by Brock's group have now been posted on the site, too -- another reflection of the ongoing search by such groups for a way to be useful in a general election at a time when outside ad spending has been nixed by Obama.
"We track McCain and will post literally the footage of every event he does," said Jennifer Palmieri, communications director for the CAP Action Fund. "We're creating an excellent McCain resource."
http://progressiveaccountability.org/