The Hole in Their Resumes

Barack Obama and John McCain seem to be in so many ways polar opposites. One is liberal, the other is conservative. One is black, and one is white. One is young, and one is old. One is cool and detached and cerebral, the other is mischievous and a bit of a hothead. One emphasizes negotiation with enemies, the other believes in the all-or-nothing use of force. They are, says political journalist Ronald Brownstein, "the priest versus the warrior." All in all, they would seem to offer voters a stark choice.

But they are alike in one important way: Neither one has ever run a business. Neither one has ever really engaged in the game of capitalism, worried about meeting a payroll, or taken a real risk with money. Both, in a way, are the products of welfare states—very different welfare states to be sure, as different as Sparta and Athens. McCain likes to say he grew up in the United States Navy, where his father and grandfather were admirals. The Navy can be very demanding of sacrifice, and the last person to get rich serving his country on a warship was an 18th-century privateer. But Navy men and women do not worry, or even think about, where the next check is coming from. Obama knows what it's like to be poor; his mother once contemplated going on food stamps. But his interests were never commercial or economic in any personal sense. He has been a community activist or politician almost all his life. After a brief stint at a fancy Chicago law firm, he became a civil-rights lawyer (no big bucks there). His home for the past two decades has been Hyde Park, Chicago, an enclave of upper-middle class academics.

Neither candidate seems all that comfortable discussing economics, or even that interested. McCain, in his charmingly disarming way, once joked that he knew little about economics. He is now selling himself as a supply-sider who wants to cut taxes to stimulate economic growth. But he has come to this faith relatively late in the game. After all, he voted against the Bush tax cuts back in 2002, before later deciding that he wanted to make them permanent. Obama, to a degree that may surprise voters, is an old-fashioned redistributionist. He wants to take from the rich (those earning more than $250,000) and give to the middle class and the poor. Neither candidate seems to be too worried about fiscal discipline; the tax plans of each would add hundreds of billions to the federal deficit.

Both are smart men and well-advised. I don't mean to suggest that either is heedless or reckless. Each man will work out an economic plan that will seem plausible enough to voters. But neither man really has business in his blood, or a real knack for economics. I am reminded of what Sam Rayburn, the wise old Texan who was speaker of the House during the 1950s, said to his friend Lyndon Johnson. In 1961, after LBJ was elected vice president and attended his first cabinet meeting in the John F. Kennedy administration, he was excited about the talent assembled there. As David Halberstam told the story in "The Best and the Brightest," "Stunned by their glamour and intellect, [LBJ] had rushed back to tell Rayburn, his great and crafty mentor, about them, about how brilliant each was, that fellow [McGeorge] Bundy from Harvard, [Dean] Rusk from Rockefeller, [Robert] McNamara from Ford. On he went, naming them all. 'Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say,' said Rayburn. 'But I'd feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.'"

I'd feel better if McCain and Obama had spent more of their lives worrying about how to make a buck.

© 2008