Let Me Eat Cake!

David Weigel | October 30, 2008

Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild is my favorite McCain endorser, bar none. A businesswoman who married into a $600+ million fortune, she backed Hillary Clinton even before she entered the race. Once Hillary slipped, de Rothschild started attacking Obama as an "elitist." She endorsed McCain the week that Lehman Brothers collapsed, just when the GOP needed to present voters with the image of a pearl-necklaced tycoon. You'd have to go back to Billy Carter to find a less useful campaign appendage.

Today, she helps out with a column in the Orlando Sentinel. Swing voters, check this out!

When Bill Clinton turned "welfare" into "workfare" in 1996 and created 22 million jobs for Americans, he said, "We are taking a historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to be -- a second chance, not a way of life." At the time, then-state Sen. Obama called this highly successful policy "disturbing." Now, if elected president, he will re-create a failed welfare system while calling it "tax reform."

Is anyone buying this? Both Obama and John McCain are going to be sending checks to people who don't pay taxes. If this is welfare I've gotten welfare in the form of stimulus checks in 2001, 2003 and 2008, which I promptly split into my savings and checking accounts before going back to... my job. Not helpful to McCain, but still more helpful than her next argument.

The fundamental problem with Obama's stealth economics is that his dogma will not make America stronger or fairer. Today, the top 1 percent of earners contributes 40 percent of the nation's $2.6 trillion tax intake, and the bottom 50 percent pay 2.9 percent of our nation's total needs.

Yes, de Rothschild is warning voters that Obama might raise taxes on her in order to give them money. Please, won't somebody think of the Rothschilds?

McCain's own message is less ridiculous but I stiil think it lacks the concrete here's-what's-good-for-you factor that elected Reagan and the Bushes. Small business owners already vote Republican. Most people would like a tax cut. Obama's the only candidate (apart from Barr) promising them one.