Hot Marbles

I was a surgeon, once. When things got really serious in the operating room, facing a difficult dissection through dangerous territory for example, I got pretty quiet. Generally, I liked talking, joking, teasing in the OR. Music was good, too. But when in that (thankfully) rare situation of impending disaster, it was about focus and silence, except for words necessary to the task at hand. Music was turned off, extraneous conversation ceased at my request.

I've seen some surgeons get all panicky and throw instruments, yell and fire off blame like cannons, indiscriminate and wild. It doesn't help. In fact, it worries the hell out of the entire crew, gets them off their game.

In that context, it's interesting to compare the reactions of John McCain and Barack Obama as the banking industry crumbled before our eyes. It's predictive, I predict, of what their respective presidencies would look like. Couldn't be more different.

First thing out of McPOW's reddening face was the threat to fire Christopher Cox, the head of the SEC. (A couple of times he referred to it as the FEC, the federal elections commmission. Far be it from me to go all Freudian.) Funny, really. For one thing, the president can't fire the head of the SEC. For another, criticizing the man for failing to regulate after passing all the deregulatory legislation is like yelling at your plumber for poor work, after hiding his tools.

Next, while his campaign was accusing Obama of politicizing the crisis, McCain got up and said: "We're heard a lot of words from Sen. Obama over the course of this campaign, but maybe, just this once, he could spare us the lectures and admit to his own poor judgment in contributing to these problems," McCain said. "The crisis on Wall Street started in the Washington culture of lobbying and influence peddling, and he was right square in the middle of it." Politicizing much?

Well, you gotta admire his balls (okay, that's a really scary thought.) In Congress for decades, leading the fight against deregulation, hiring bank lobbyists and those of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae by the bagfull, tainted by the Savings and Loan debacle, Mad Mac manages to suggest that it's Obama (whom he previously criticized for not being in Washington enough) who's at fault. This, from the man whose campaign manager is as deep in it as it gets. That's straight talk only in Wonderland.

So let's recap: John McCain's response to the Wall Street crisis was first to pop off and want to fire someone. Someone whom he can't actually fire, and who had not much to do with the failures; and then to attack Barack Obama in a most pot-calls-pottery-black (no offense) sort of way. Fire, ready, aim. Oh, and he abruptly changed his life-long mantra of deregulation and pretended he'd always been the opposite. Spinning. And spinning.

By contrast, Barack Obama got together with a collection of economic heavyweights, from across the spectrum: a former Fed chair, two or three Treasury secretaries, couple of other guys. He made no from-the-hip pronouncements. He laid out a list of priorities.

I look at it as a window. Before the recent privacy rules, OR doors used to have windows, too. In one, I see a guy screaming at the nurses, stamping his feet, and tossing clamps on the floor. Overheated, losing his marbles. In another, there's a surgeon calling for calm, collecting his thoughts, and concentrating on the job at hand. Who you gonna open your belly to; in whose hands trust your life?

[Update: even that lefty George Will agrees.]