North Star Writers Group - Syndicated Commentary: Opinion, Humor and Features

October 13, 2008

Virginia Bellwether? Gilmore Stands on Principle on Bailout

So how’s that $700-billion bailout working out for you?

Not.

Our shining knights in the Treasury Department and Congress had no sooner assured us of our delivery from doom, gloom, despair and possible depression than global markets took a plunge deeper than J-Lo’s neckline.

Not to mention AIG – whose executives hadn’t let their own $85-billion public rescue party deter them from following up with a $440,000 private spa date – bellying back up to the bar for another $38-billion helping of taxpayer largess.

Oops.

Yet with banks still teetering at the edge of the abyss, small businesspeople gnawing their nails and trillions in retirement savings vaporizing before our unbelieving eyes, it hardly appears an opportune time for a candidate to stake his career on opposing the rescue.

Looks like someone forgot to send Jim Gilmore the memo.

What’s with the former Virginia governor and GOP Senate candidate devoting almost all of the only statewide-televised debate with his successor and opponent, Mark Warner, to his objections to the measure?

I understand raising qualms about the handout when the subject is the tanking economy. But turning practically every debate response – even one on the statewide Standards of Learning – back to the giveaway and the financial drain it would create? Maybe just a little overkill?

“It was the compelling issue before the public and still is,” Gilmore told me last week. “We wanted to make sure that people knew I would protect the taxpayer – and Mark Warner would not.”

He’s making sure, all right. I also got a recorded phone message from the governor informing voters that the bailout means putting “$10,000 for every family in America into the pockets of Wall Street millionaires.”

Now, the cynic could be forgiven for thinking that this laser-beam focus on Washington’s financial wizardry was merely a matter of a politician – on the ropes by every report – rolling the dice in a desperate search for an issue to galvanize his base.

But I’ve been struck by Gilmore’s repeated use of a word you don’t much hear from politicians of any stripe these days.

“The bailout position,” he declared in our call, “was wrong – and still is wrong.”

Stop the presses. Wrong? As in (per Webster) “something . . . immoral, or unethical”?

I didn’t think the term existed anymore.

“The real flaw,” the candidate continued, “is not just that they’re giving away money. What they’re getting in return is bad debt. No financial advisor would suggest to their clients to take on bad debt in return for cash.

“Someday, someone is going to pretend that he is a conservative and say he is being responsible and let’s pay this off. He is going to say, ‘let’s raise taxes.’ And I object to that.”

Me too.

Gilmore suggested other approaches – like having distressed banks issue bonds to be sold to the government. Banks would get money to recapitalize, while the taxpayer would get a pledge to be re-paid, rather than billions in bad debt of uncertain value.

I can do the Guv one better. What if – instead of giving away money you and I don’t have to pamper reckless souls who engaged in the financial equivalent of running the bulls in Pamplona – Congress had matched Ireland’s corporate tax rate of 12 percent, and slashed capital gains rates to boot?

Now we’re talking. About freeing up billions of dollars on the balance sheets of businesses big and small. About breaking the psychology of fear that has locked up credit markets and sent the Dow into a nosedive. And about unleashing a flood of investment dollars into the world’s largest economy that would have made Hurricane Katrina look like a leaking faucet.

As for goosing the conservative base, Gilmore insisted his balking on the bailout wasn’t a really a partisan issue at all. “The public is not upset because they are Republicans – they are citizens upset that their money is being given away.”

This sentiment – that opposing the mega-giveaway isn’t a question of ideology but rather of ultimate truth – echoes that expressed by another one-time governor 44 years ago this month:

You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down: up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order – or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism,

Ronald Reagan uttered those sentiments on behalf of another candidate whose name started with a “G,” who also ran, against all odds, on principle – and who inspired a movement that ultimately not only transformed a nation, but rocked the world.

Could Gilmore’s stance also have long-term national implications as a rallying point? After all – with the presidential candidates of both parties sharing a Kumbaya moment on the greatest freefall toward all-controlling government since that fateful address – the Virginia race might provide one of 2008’s few high-profile tests of whether the American electorate will heed the Gipper’s “up-or-down” warning.

So I’m wishing Governor Gilmore well. But in the meantime, I’m packing my parachute.

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