10-25-08, 9:37 am

As unemployment grows and trillions are lost in the stock market and the bank “recapitalization,” John McCain is throwing out one liners to make it appear that he is against what he and his party have been doing since the beginning of the 1980s.

He is actually looking a bit more comfortable as he expresses “outrage” at the crisis of the moment and throws dirt on Senator Obama, who opposed those policies to begin with. McCain is desperately trying to create an impression that he, not Obama, offers the nation real change. Maybe he is using self-hypnosis, or one of the therapy techniques based on the power of suggestion that people use to relieve their stress and feel better. I am not criticizing these techniques – they can and have helped individuals deal with personal fears and anxieties. But they are not any social solution, particularly when they are based on falsehoods.

Let me take some of McCain’s recent statements and pretend that he is using them to make himself and his supporters feel better. For example, McCain has said that he is against Bush’s increase of the deficit to over $10 trillion. He and his supporters might close their eyes and repeat over and over again, “I am against the $10 trillion deficit,' and this might relieve their stress a bit.

If this were serious therapy, however, McCain would have to take his share of responsibility and say, “I helped bring this deficit about because I supported the hundreds of billions of dollars in increased military spending and in tax cuts for the rich and corporations that produced the $10 trillion deficit.' To seek atonement, he might then promise, 'I will raise taxes on the corporations and the rich back to where they were in 1980 in real dollars and reduce military spending back to what it was in 1980 and I will relieve mine and your stress.”

Then we would all feel better. But then his corporate backers would turn on him and he might find himself portrayed in establishment media as a brainwashed agent of the Vietnamese, the “Hanoi candidate” who returned to the US as part of a plot to install the first socialist government in US history. Who knows, Bill Ayers at that point would be considered a more suitable candidate for president by McCain’s present backers than he would be.

McCain has also criticized Bush’s “failure” to “update” regulatory polices established in the 1930s, which, he said, were ok for the 1930s but are now very much out of date. Here, power of suggestion therapy won’t help because the problem is obviously amnesia. McCain might be hypnotized into remembering that the powers of the regulatory agencies that he is talking about were radically changed and undermined in the 1980s under the banner of “deregulation” and as a Representative and Senator he strongly supported that.

The hypnotist might induce a crisis as McCain sees Charles Keating before him offering money in exchange for favors. Then, as memory begins to return, McCain will see his bosom buddy and then fellow Senator, Phil Gramm, sponsoring the legislation that repealed the ban on depository banks engaging in commercial banking. These memories might lead McCain to say, “I supported the entire deregulation program for 26 years in Congress. I’m sorry. I didn’t know it would lead to this disaster for you, my fellow Republicans, independents, and anyone else with money. I thought it would just hurt the people who didn’t have much to begin with and help me and you get richer. I’m sorry and if you elect me president I won’t do it again. After all, I have the experience. Obama was only 21 years old when I started to support these policies. He never voted for any of these policies. So who do you trust?”

That might win back the support of a few, maybe even the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers which are making history by endorsing a Democratic candidate, but, unless about 20 million low-income voters are disenfranchised by Republican vote challenges, it won’t swing the election.

Finally, McCain is criticizing Bush’s policy failures in Iraq. On this point he isn’t being too specific, since he supported virtually all of those policies and has been a manic cheerleader for the “surge,” creating either the illusion or is under the delusion that it was his, not Bush’s policy.

Here deeper and more conventional psychoanalysis might help McCain. First he would relive his experiences from age five to nine during World War II when his grandfather and his father were officers winning fame in the war and he was troubled kid fighting with teachers. Then he could relive the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he was on alert as a naval air pilot in Florida, one of those on the brink of World War III. Finally, he could relive the Vietnam War and his 23 bombing missions, his imprisonment, return, and frustrated naval career.

Then he might come to terms with the fact that he considered himself a failure in the military, learn to accept that “failure” and develop a better self-image and spend the rest of his, a life that began in privilege, benefitted from privilege, and will end in privilege with more private peace than he has had in the past. That deep psychoanalysis, which would probably continue well into Obama’s second term, might even help him understand why he chose Palin to be his running mate.

Before some of our readers accuse me of becoming a Freudian, a neo-Freudian, or a disciple of some specific school of psychotherapy, let me say that Marxism does not deny the importance of either the individual or the irrational to an understanding of events. What it does is to provide a framework, based on political economy and class analysis to help us understand who individuals like McCain and Palin got to where they are and what their statements and policies, however irrational, are trying to accomplish.

Also, large numbers of those who have supported the Republican right over the last three decades may come to understand that they need some therapeutic counseling to cope with the real world. Hopefully, such counseling will be part of President Obama’s health care plan which will hopefully bring about a new more secure and humane reality for the people.

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.