"How Many Houses Do You Own?" Should Not Be a Tough Question
Michael Landauer, on The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog, reports on John McCain's gaffe answering a simple question: how many houses do you and your wife own? McCain didn't know.
This is the kind of gotcha question that the press and the public love, something that embarrasses a candidate without revealing much about his policies or character or fitness to be President. We all knew already that McCain and his wife are filthy rich. His wife is heir to a beer distributorship fortune. McCain joked just days ago that you have to earn $5 million a year to be considered "rich" in his book. The McCain's income puts even them in the "rich" category.
On the other hand, if played and replayed relentlessly by the Obama McCain, these gaffes could begin to define McCain as being an elitist who is out of touch with real, working Americans. McCain's campaign has painted Obama that way, and polls indicate it's working. Obama has generally stayed above this old-style kind of politics. We'll see if McCain's progress in the polls forces Obama down to McCain's level.
What I find funny are the comments by the McCain supporters. Most of them defend McCain by pointing out how reasonable it is for the very rich not to know how many houses they own. One said it's like the rest of us not knowing how many shares of a particular stock we own in our 401K. Another says that if you own bond mutual funds that hold mortgage-backed securities, you "own" a small piece of thousands of homes. Yeah, that helps McCain. Saying that he owns houses like you own shares of stock in a mutual fund makes him just a regular guy. Like everyone even has 401Ks and bond mutual funds to relate to. His supporters better hope that McCain himself is not as out of touch as they seem to be.
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