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Now or Never
Getting Down to the Business
of Saving Our American Dream
J A CK CAF F ERT Y
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used
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No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materi-
als. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation.
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Cafferty, Jack.
Now or never : getting down to the business of saving our American dream / Jack
Cafferty.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-470-37230-2 (cloth)
1. United States—Politics and government—2001– I. Title.
JK275.C344 2009
320.60973—dc22
2008055858
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated
to my greatest source of pride:
my daughters, Julie, Leigh, Jill, Leslie.
Contents
v
vi CONTENTS
Acknowledgments / 259
Index / 260
1
n my 2007 book, It’s Getting Ugly Out There: The Frauds, Bunglers,
I Liars, and Losers Who Are Hurting America, I went way out on a
limb and wondered whether there might actually be a positive, if unin-
tended, consequence of the otherwise miserable legacy of President
George W. Bush’s eight years in office. I speculated that it might come
in the form of a sudden nationwide awakening near the end of the
Bush era, leading to a 2008 stampede to polling places as the citizenry
desperately fought to save its democratic system—a runaway train
heading off a cliff into oblivion.
I had been screaming, in my way, about “broken government” for
a couple of years in hundreds of “Cafferty File” segments on CNN’s
The Situation Room. But as the economic crisis seizing America
became the story that drove the election, voters were desperately fight-
ing to save not only their political system but also their homes, their
jobs, their 401(k)s, their bank savings, and, no doubt, their sanity. And
people were paying attention: my “Cafferty File” blog often got three
million hits a day and as many as ten thousand e-mail replies flooding
in after one of my questions of the hour.
1
2 NOW OR NEVER
I’m still screaming about what’s gone wrong, and I’ve written it
all down in Now or Never: Getting Down to the Business of Saving
Our American Dream. The book captures our country at a cross-
roads unlike any we’ve ever faced in living memory—a momentous
period of crisis, threat, challenge, choice, and change as we emerge,
finally, into the Barack Obama era. The book also fixes its unflinch-
ing, take-no-prisoners sights on what now needs to go right in the
first term of President Obama if we hope to survive as the nation
we know ourselves to be before it really is too late. As Now or Never
makes urgently clear, this is a time for change we not only need, as
Obama’s campaign mantra put it, but for change we will believe
when we see it.
So many of the things that I suggested were wrong in my first
book, It’s Getting Ugly Out There, have proved to be quite wrong.
The nation’s confidence in its leaders took a huge hit during Presi-
dent George W. Bush’s two terms in office. Warning signs that we
saw a couple of years ago weren’t taken seriously. With, arguably, the
exception of the sharp decreases in sectarian violence and U.S. troop
casualties in Iraq, we’re in a lot worse shape now than we were two
years ago—for a lot of the reasons that I suggested in the first book.
The incompetence, dishonesty, and corruption of Washington under
President Bush had come together to create the dark economic storm
now raging over the Obama administration as it faces the enormous
challenge of turning America around.
This book examines the issues, turning points, and personalities
that shaped 2008’s historic White House race and Obama’s victory—
notably the astonishing two-year economic slide toward the unprec-
edented $700 billion bailout plan signed by Bush a month before
Election Day; the treacherous new phases of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan; and the rival characters and strategies of the Obama-
Biden and McCain-Palin tickets that made the ’08 campaign such an
extraordinary moment in our history.
OUR LAST BEST HOPE 3
The stakes could hardly have been higher. Domestically, our sink-
ing economy is making the new president’s search for solutions—from
war-zone strategies to energy and health-care reform; from funding
Medicare and Social Security to securing our borders—as daunting
as any since Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932, during the Great
Depression. Globally, the new commander in chief faces escalating
tensions in our dealings with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Russia,
China, North Korea, Iran, the Middle East, and India, particularly
since the horrific terror attacks in Mumbai in November 2008.
Obama has eight years of George Bush to thank for the immensity
of his task—and for inciting an angry American electorate to action.
Now or Never examines the corrosive legacies of the Bush reign; they
include its fiscal recklessness, its illegal surveillance and sanctioning
of torture, and a sweeping agenda of secrecy, deception, and expand-
ing executive power. Bush is gone, but damaging precedents have
been set. As I wrote in It’s Getting Ugly, my hunch was that Bush’s
two-term record would prove to be “so misguided, ineffective, and
reckless while his political base was so egregious and arrogant in its
corrupt abuse of power that Bush & Co. unwittingly woke up the
American people and proved to them that their country was indeed
broken and in urgent need of repair before it got too late to undo the
harm they had done.”
If I was clearly on to something, I underestimated how bad things
would get.
This was a year before the Treasury Department and the Federal
Reserve started to commit hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to
shore up, bail out, and seize control of giant financial and insurance
institutions better known for boundless greed than for bended-knee
groveling. It was months before Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr.
scratched out what read in parts like a three-page ransom note (“Deci-
sions by the Secretary . . . may not be reviewed by any court of law or
any administrative agency”) laying out terms of the initial $700 billion
4 NOW OR NEVER
face lies. Of course the Wall Street folks are going to say that so we
save their ass. We will survive even if the market ‘melts down.’ Sure
it will be tough, but as long as the government steps out of the way it
won’t be more than one bad year.”
Stepping aside wasn’t going to happen. Bush briefly, belatedly
addressed the nation to warn that “our entire economy is in danger”
and that “without immediate action by Congress, America can slip
into a major panic.” His grim, fearmongering tone echoed the Iraq
war run-up, only now the WMD (weapons of mass destruction) were
mushroom clouds of toxic subprime mortgage debt rising over our cit-
ies and towns. The Fed applied a choke hold of its own: the New York
Times quoted Fed chairman Bernanke, a Great Depression scholar,
as telling lawmakers on Capitol Hill, “If we don’t do this, we may not
have an economy on Monday.” Was a bailout really the lesser of two
evils, or just another looting of the little guy by the golden-parachuted
masters of the universe—one final $700 billion Bush-era bridge to
nowhere?
This crisis threw congressmen, candidates, commentators, and
even economists into uncharted territory. I didn’t pretend to know
whether a $700 billion or $1 trillion bailout package would work.
Pessimists suggested that if we did nothing, we’d be headed off a
cliff. Granted, the markets, in time and left to their own devices,
would likely self-correct. But could the country stand the pain that
this would undoubtedly involve? On the other hand, to allow the
federal government to, in effect, take over and/or manage some of
our biggest financial institutions is to compromise our capitalism.
The engines that drove our economy to be the most powerful the
world has ever seen are free markets and an entrepreneurial spirit
that allows those willing to take big risks to reap big rewards. You
didn’t hear pundits or stock-pickers talking much about the long-
term effects of messing with that.
In late September, the bipartisan House leadership assured us
all weekend that an agreement and passage of a rescue plan were
6 NOW OR NEVER
at hand. As the vote on the bailout approached, Wall Street and the
stock market were hinting that they wanted passage. As the votes were
being tallied and approval loomed, the Dow Industrials recovered a
large part of a 600-point loss—a good thing for the middle class that
had stood by and watched their 401(k)s hemorrhage for months.
But in the end, politics trumped everything else. The elected lead-
ers had lied. Again. They weren’t so close to a deal, after all. Nancy
Pelosi had given a partisan, Bush-bashing speech that angered some
House Republicans, and, bingo, the whole project went right down
the toilet. The last-minute mutiny by those Republicans sank the first
vote (228 to 205) on Monday, September 29, 2008. After a later roll
call, the bill bit the dust and everyday Americans bit the bullet: the
Dow registered a 778-point, 7 percent drop, its largest single-day point
loss in history. In one five-minute span of the roll call, the Dow Jones
Industrial Average went into a 450-point death spiral. As the sun set on
Black Monday, $1.2 trillion of investor wealth had been vaporized.
At the end of the day, Bush couldn’t get it done because he had
zero political capital left. Nancy Pelosi couldn’t get it done, and
minority leader John Boehner couldn’t get it done. Obama couldn’t
get it done. And all of this despite the efforts of Arizona senator John
McCain, who impulsively “suspended” his campaign, parachuted
into the Washington fray, said he’d bail out of the first debate with
Obama in two days if his maverick magic was still working “across the
aisle,” and anointed himself the “country first” savior of the rescue
bill. The more he claimed that his intent was to transcend partisan
politics, the more partisan his media-grabbing gamble seemed. As
House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank put
it, “We’re trying to rescue the economy, not the McCain campaign.”
With McCain in town to save the day, he and Obama, who both
urged bipartisan cooperation, were summoned by Bush to a Thursday
powwow with House leaders. They didn’t get it done, either.
Bottom line: the middle class had taken it once again in the shorts.
“Why any of them deserve to be reelected is a mystery to me,” I said
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