McCain’s Houses

The Intertubes are abuzz today with repetitions of the story that John McCain could not glibly and correctly respond to a question about how many houses he and his wife own. The liberal Intertubers are gleefully attacking him for being out of touch, too rich for his own good, and so on. Conservative Intertubers, on the other hand, have chosen two strategies — counterattack Obama on Rezko, and to offer lawyer-like apologies because “houses” is a confusing term; after all, the McCain own condominiums, so do they count as “houses”?

So there. I’ve spared you fifty to a hundred blog posts back and forth on the issue. Now I’ll tell you what I think about it. Weak as their defenses sound (and they do sound weak) the conservative apologists are right on this one. To really understand why, you’ve got to appreciate four realities.

First – the socioeconomic reality. Rich people hire people to handle their assets for them. Thanks to Cindy McCain’s family wealth, the McCains are rich. (By the way, his wealth says nothing about McCain’s qualifications, relative to his opponent, to be President.) That’s what it is to be on top of a command structure, whether that be in the military, in politics, in business, or with regards to having personal wealth above a certain threshold — at some point, more than one person becomes involved with running things, and the person at the top is obliged to entrust the administration of details to other people. Asset management is no different than anything else — if you’re quite wealthy, you’ve hired someone else to take care of handling your real estate investments for you.

Second – the professional reality. John McCain has no personal training for managing personal capital. He is a military man, a policy maker, and a politician. Like most politicians, his stock portfolio is administered through blind trusts. His assets and money are handled by other people like his wife and professionals, who think about those kinds of issues for him. This frees him up to think about the policy and political matters that are his job.

Third – the political reality. Presidential campaigns have acquired a significant “gotcha” component to them; a journalist or a political operative will sometimes ask a candidate “Who’s the prime minister of Kyrgyzstan?” or “How many Americans received Social Security in 2007?” and when the correct answer is not immediately shot back, this is cited as evidence that the candidate is not qualified to hold high office. The Ambush Trivia Attack™ is periodically deployed during a campaign for the purpose of making a candidate look foolish. This particular ambush also has an element of economic populism, so McCain was doubly right to be wary of the question. So it was much more prudent of him to to give a cautious non-response than a flip but incorrect response to such a question; I’d rather have a leader who admits what he doesn’t know than pretend to know something he doesn’t.

And Fourth – the personal reality. People get confused all the time, especially when thinking about one thing and being asked about another. Neither my wife nor I always remember the number of pets we own. I’d have to think for a few seconds to answer the question “how many cars have you owned?” Hell, my next door neighbor can’t always keep the names of his three daughters straight. When you get hit with a sudden demand for information, you may not always be Johnny-on-the-spot, especially if at that exact instant you’re thinking about something else.

So McCain got momentarily confused about his assets when he was ambushed with a Johnny-on-the-spot question — and he chose a cautious response rather than a flip reaction. I say, give him a slackburger on that one. All this really reveals about McCain is that he’s got enough money that he knew the answer was “more than one” — something that we already knew about him and something that we seem to demand of our leaders anyway.