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Paul Waldman has a nice take on John McCain's decision to wrap longtime plutocratic shill/jerk Phil Gramm in a close, mavericky embrace:
The problem isn't that Phil Gramm said something jaw-droppingly insensitive, the problem is that John McCain takes advice from Phil Gramm. Until last week, McCain had been going around praising Gramm as some sort of economic genius and touting Gramm's support as evidence of his own acumen on matters financial. In February, McCain even said, "There is no one in America that is more respected on the issue of economics than Senator Phil Gramm," which is kind of like saying there is no one in America more respected on the issue of health care than Jack Kevorkian.John McCain is no expert on economics; like most topics other than war, the issue just doesn't seem to pique his interest. If he thinks Phil Gramm is the kind of person he should be listening to, it can only be because he finds himself in agreement with Gramm's general outlook on the topic. Despite what they are prone to say, politicians don't simply look for the smartest folks around to advise them, and while they might tolerate a little bit of dissent, they want people who don't stray too far from their own thinking. McCain would probably acknowledge that Paul Krugman knows a lot about economics, but he won't be paying much attention to what Krugman has to say. McCain listens to Gramm because they share an economic philosophy, regardless of their respective opinions on the whininess of the American people.Even McCain's locution betrays his inattention. Economics is generally thought of as a discipline, not an "issue." But that aside, naming Gramm as the most respected economic thinker in the country isn't really like naming Jack Kevorkian, a doctor who actually is a leading voice, for better or worse, within the subfield of euthanasia. It's like naming Newt Gingrich. An ultraconservative politician who happened to take an interest in the issue and then cashed in on it after he left office. Gramm is arguably a leading voice in the field of giving more money to rich people, but that's a subfield of redistribution, not economics, and it should be understood as such. Meanwhile, this is the general problem when you have presidential candidate who don't know what they're doing: They don't know who to listen to. So they pick someone they like. Who they trust. Who they know. If that turns out to have been a good choice, hey, terrific. If not, then the country is in more trouble. But because McCain is not, himself, interested enough in economics to learn about it himself, he's got no real way to evaluate advisers.
