The Food Price Debate. Strike One against McCain.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

That about sums it up. In the last 24 hours, I have have had the unpleasant experience of being in a room listening to ignorant blather about gas prices and reading a dumb quote by McCain on food prices.

The ignorant blather on gas prices was to be expected. It was some Joe Shmoe I know going on about conspiracies, Bush being an oil man (implying that it has something to directly do with it) and Exxon/Mobil running the government and it's gonna take a different President to "fix it" (take their profits away, hocus pocus etc.) so that prices will be down sharply by spring of 2009 and this conspiratorial charade of high prices will just "end" . I just smiled with indifference, gave vague nods of acknowledgment and said nothing since I wasn't directly in the conversation and didn't feel like engaging.

But such simplistic conspiratorial nonsense is to be expected from Joe Shmoe. Joe Shmoe is not really interested in complexity or impersonal forces...let alone unsatisfying murky truths that transcend the simple will of one president or a few CEO's. Joe Shmoe likes a human story where everything boils down to the deliberate whims of a few shadowy omnipotent figures. It gives him a sense of solace that everything is simple and within reach of simple alchemical solutions.

As for our elected and campaigning officials, we see the power of such misdirection and appeals to ignorance in campaign rhetoric, spin and stump speeches. One often wonders if the candidates or officials are just as clueless as the people they are BSing or if they are simply preying on the Joe Shmoe's. Partisan watch dog groups go wild pointing out this nonsense in the other candidate while groups like Factcheck.org go wild on everyone. Some of us may self-deceive at times and conclude that such appeals to the rubes don't work. But the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Some simply tune out what they wouldn't support if stated by the other party while others simply believe everything they hear.

So when McCain got his anti-Obama campaign speeches underway on the heels of Obama's nomination, one has to wonder a few things. Is McCain:

-clueless like Joe Shmoe above?

-or simply making silly appeals to the clueless like Joe Shmoe above?

I'm really, really not sure since I don't consider politicians, on average, to be any smarter, more knowledgeable or wiser than the average engaged voter.

But consider McCain here:

"Sen. Obama supports the tariffs that have led to rising grocery bills for American families."

McCain is either being cute, parroting lines from his economic advisers who are trying to be cute...or....believes it as much as his minions want to believe it.

Well, Economists for Obama , who will probably be just as guilty of "cuteness" at some point..or many, rightly jumped all over it:

This is wrong on two points. First, Obama doesn't support any such tariffs that I know of, although I imagine someone in the McCain campaign would try to argue (falsely) that Obama's criticism of particular aspects of trade agreements means that he supports food tariffs.

This ploy by McCain falls under the Kerry voted a zillion times for higher taxes-style campaign attack....whereby facts are spun beyond recognition and convoluted with so much uncharitable subjectivity that the charge being made sounds more devastating...or REAL...than it really is.

Recall that in the Kerry attack, if Kerry voted against cutting a gas tax or voted for the version of a tax cut on gas, cigarettes, alcohol (or whatever) that didn't cut taxes as much as the other version, it counted as a vote for "higher taxes"....not only that but if the bill entailed multiple votes for cloture or any number of procedural votes...they all counted. If I recall correctly, one minor tax entailed like 9 votes! Sticky, sticky stuff. When called on it, the Bush team had to keep restating the about of "times" at a lower and lower number so that by the time they were done, the total was about a third of the original charge or less...maybe even a fifth. And still, it was the "higher taxes" wrinkle that made it work because "increasing taxes above present levels" would have slashed the total even more. But it was effective, nonetheless. Remember, this is Joe Shmoe we're dealing with here.

So, besides the fact that such a charge of "supporting" such tariffs can be misleading, tariffs are not really the true culprit here anyway.

Most people with any rudimentary knowledge of our current economic landscape will easily acknowledge the following as being dirt-obvious true:

...no one thinks tariffs are behind the increase in food prices. As Obama noted in an interview a few weeks ago, there are many factors behind the rise in food prices. These include rising oil prices (which affect fertilizer and transport costs), poor harvests this year in a few countries, rising demand in Asia, and the rising demand for biofuels, which has been driven by subsidies in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Of course, I doubt that will stop the Obama people from taking jabs at high food prices and spinning it into a partisan issue in stump speech of their own to their own Joe Shmoe's....but at least they are on the record acknowledging the unsexy, unglamorous, unsatisfying and non-partisan truth of it in this posting. ;)

So is McCain spinning and playing the crowd or is he really that stupid on these matters? As much as the talking point about McCain being weak economic issues has kept steam after he admitted economics was not is strong point, I tend to think it's the former and not the latter. I genuinely do not think Obama, as a man, is more astute on these matters than McCain....nor are their advisers clueless on these matters. McCain gets a bum rap on economic issues simply because he admitted something that applies to him and Obama: They are not experts on economic policy or most others policy matters outside their area of expertise from their careers (and even that is no guarantee of expertise). That's why they have advisers. And both have good advisers doing their best to promote good policies that cater to their ideological preferences while being within the the constraints of reality and the passions of their bases.

Who has the better policies? Hard to say and we may never know....nor does it really matter because it's not going to sway anyone anyway. I tend to think it's a mixed bag. People have preferences. There's a sharp but subtle difference between evaluating general policy positions (More govt. run health care vs. more private run health care) and different policies to achieve those aims (Obama's way for more govt. run health care vs. Hillary's).

But that's an area that most people will never find it worthwhile to fully vet. What is far easier to vet, far less important in terms of potential policy and...sadly...far more influential in campaigns with Joe Shmoe, is how the candidates spin facts each other. McCain just gave us taste and it's didn't taste good. Get ready because it's only going to get worse and websites like factcheck.org will once again have their hands full. Of course, it would help greatly if the media began scrutinizing allegations and calling BS when it happens. That might actually help steer the issue debates in a useful direction. But I wouldn't count on that either.

This one, involving McCain, would be easy. The media could make this little snippet drive the next 48 news cycle and bring on economists to break it apart. McCain loses this round easily on the merits because he will be made to look stupid or dishonest. Either way, it's bad. But the real fruit would be that such a vetting may actually push the debate into the real food prices issue itself and real countering policies could actually get discussed. Wouldn't that be nice...

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