McCain's blatant pitch to the rich

JOHN MCCAIN went to New Hampshire this week at a time when voters understand the limits of their state motto "Live Free or Die." They know the economy is dying on fat cats living far too free. Barack Obama leads in state polls by 7-to-13 percentage points.

Undaunted, McCain played the greed card. "Barack Obama wants to, quote, 'spread the wealth around,' " McCain said, with fingers in quotation marks as the audience booed at St. Anselm College in a speech shown on television. "We don't need government 'spreading the wealth. . .' " he said. McCain uttered variations of spreading the wealth 12 times.

He was cheered when he said, "The redistribution of wealth is the last thing America needs right now."

In Ohio, McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, called Obama "Barack the wealth spreader" and continued to drop the S-word: socialism.

The problem for McCain, Palin, and the Republicans is that the majority of Americans beg to differ. Redistribution in some form is the first thing people want after two decades of runaway pay disparity between CEOs and workers, tax loopholes so wide that two-thirds of American corporations paid no income tax from 1998 to 2005, and the banking system now getting $700 billion from us to bail out its incompetence. All this while healthcare, gasoline, and college tuitions gobble up any raises regular folks get.

These developments are so identified with the Republicans that every tactic McCain uses to escape them ends up with him making a mockery out of the party's claims to values. McCain's Ohio mascot Joe the Plumber turns out to be Joe the Unlicensed Plumber who owes back taxes. Palin is the self-proclaimed pit bull with lipstick, but the Republican National Committee was so freaked that the shtick was that of a hick that they Barbied her up at Nieman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue for $150,000. Talk about spreading wealth around. Not many hockey moms or wives of Joe the Plumber can drop three times the national median household income to look civilized.

Meanwhile, a CNN poll this week shows Obama leading McCain on the question of who would better help the middle class, 60 percent to 36 percent. A Washington Post/ABC News poll has the same question as 59 percent to 31 percent Obama. Obama has pulled away from a virtual tie with McCain on who would better handle taxes, into double-digit leads in some national polls. On who best will handle either the economy or the current fiscal crisis, Obama is beating McCain roughly 53 percent to 39 percent.

One can guess only that McCain is hoping for a 100 percent turnout from the rich - minus, of course, Obama supporter Warren Buffett.

The more McCain rails against spreading the wealth in America, he runs right back to the man he says he is running away from, President Bush. In 2000, Bush the candidate greeted the well-connected audience at the Alfred E. Smith political roast in New York by acknowledging them as the top 1 percent. "This is an impressive crowd, the haves and the have mores," Bush said. "Some people call you the elite. I call you my base."

McCain is too late to turn that joke into serious political strategy. A recent survey by the American Affluence Research Center in Atlanta found the nation's wealthiest 10 percent to be tied at 48 percent each for McCain and Obama. What once was a campaign of a senator who reached across the aisle on campaign financing and global warming is now stoking selfishness into the silly zone.

Well, it would be silly except for the implications. If McCain is telling America's rich that their gains are utterly decoupled from the wealth disparities of fellow Americans, what does that foretell about foreign policy in his administration? The rest of the world has already told us. The Pew Global Attitudes Project found vastly more confidence in Obama than McCain.

This is, of course, no concern to a campaign whose slogan is "America First." It is rapidly sounding like "Me First." How patriotic. That is too much even for the limited-tax Live Free or Die state.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.