Cheat Seeking Missiles

fter last night, I’m thinking about changing my license plates because I’ve discovered (again!) just how much I hate presidential debates.

These are not debates; they are hope-athons. I hope McCain will break through. I hope Obama will say something so wretchedly awful it will cost him the election. It’s like watching NASCAR just for the crashes. And because that’s what they’ve become - thanks to 30+-page memorandums of understanding between the candidates, thrashed out by lawyers - the candidates are so careful about not saying something wretchedly awful that they simply cannot break through.

If a high school debate team performed like these two men who want to be the leader of our country, they would fail to score a point. In a debate, you are expected to answer the question and counter your opponents answer with a logical rebuttal. All we see is block and bridge, block and bridge, block and bridge: They quickly dismiss the question at hand and bridge to a talking point from their prep sessions, too often a point they’ve made thrice already.

If I hear John McCain say one more time, “I know how to do this,” I’m going to puke. Don’t tell me you know how, show me what you know and let me decide whether you know how or not.

I would like just once to hear a candidate say something like this:

Well, you know I have a health care plan that will [do whatever it does], and I think it’s a very good plan.

But you also know who American government works. I will submit my plan to Congress where there will be committee hearings, and amendments proposed, and language struck. There will be votes in two houses and conference committees and new votes. There will be lobbyists for insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, sick people, trial lawyers and who knows who else. There will be campaign contributions and junkets.

In the end, we may or may not get a new health care bill. You are not voting in November, ladies and gentlemen [or "my friends," if you're McCain], for who’s got the best health care bill, you’re voting for the one who you think has the best chance of getting a bill that is somewhat like what you’ve hoped for through that maze. Let me tell you why I’m that man.

But of course we never do. They argue pretend points about fantasy legislation and we’re supposed to judge them on which one misrepresents reality in the way most pleasing to us.

There’s been a lot of hoopla this morning about McCain’s housing bill, including a typically excellent wrap-up by Michelle Malkin with a zillion links. She says of it:

I can’t underscore enough what a rotten idea John McCain’s ACORN-like government mortgage buy-up is. I said it during my liveblog. And I’ll say it again: “HE WANTS TO EXPAND THE BAILOUT. He wants to do what ACORN wants to do. We’re Screwed ‘08.”

This was his supposed “game-changer.” This was the very first thing out of his mouth during the debate tonight — his big pitch right off the bat. The McCain campaign immediately sent out this fact sheet on the proposal, which will cost at least $300 billion. The proposal involves directing the Treasury Secretary to “purchase mortgages directly from homeowners and mortgage servicers.” That’s on top of the trillion-dollar crap sandwich (update - McCain says it would be included in the crap sandwich), the $85 billion to AIG, the $25 billion to automakers, the $200 billion in capital and credit lines to Fannie and Freddie, and who knows what else we’ll be forking over to California, Massachusetts, etc., etc., etc.

Because we no longer have real debates, McCain felt the need to have an anti-crash, a game-changer, hoping that people would really like this, and at the same time Obama would pull out a can of spray paint and spray “potatoe’ on the wall of hall.

Judging from the reaction and the instant replay, he failed on both counts.

I’m not as apoplectic as Malkin and her friends. (Full disclosure: My income from the land development and home building businesses has dropped precipitously this year and I’d like to get it back.) As you may recall, I proposed a similar plan on the eve of the bailout:

I do not want one penny of my currently very dear money to go toward saving people who lied about their income on “‘no stated income” loans. And not a penny to people who made bad bets on the market with nothing down mortgages. And the people who sold and repackaged these mortgages? Let them stew in their own desperate financial juices.

Not one penny to any of them, and I don’t care what the consequences are!

Here’s what we should do instead: Be a government of the people, not a government of the businesses and the lobbyists. We should set up a short-term (three years ’til it sunsets) federal mortgage repackaging house. It would have only one purpose: To rewrite an individual taxpayer’s loan as a 50-year fixed (or even a 100-year fixed; such mortgages are common in Japan).

People who are in bad mortgages or are otherwise about to lose their houses would have show an ability to pay, with the term of the mortgage being flexible enough to allow some pretty underqualified people to slide through. Interest rates, though, would be competitive, not written down at our expense, so the government would be able to sell the mortgages to the private sector at auctions.

McCain’s plan will supposedly keep out those who lied about their finances, those who multi-mortgaged to flip houses, and those who put no money down. Good. Now get out of the underwriting business and the interest-rate jiggering business and do as I say: Re-write the term of the mortgage and only the term. Then I’m fine with McCain’s plan; as it is, I’m not at all fine with it.

So Obama forgot his WWII history and mistakenly had the government inventing computers. And McCain laid out a mortgage plan that reminds us that he’s not a conservative, like we didn’t know that already. Did anything change last night?

Of course not. I H8 DB8S.

Photo: Steven Crowley, NY Times

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