I drew this for a special editorial section today, in which four prominent local GOP leaders engage in some hard-core hand wringing while examining what went wrong this fall, and plot a course for electoral renewal. This drawing is in the center, anchoring the whole page and offers my own gentle take on their problems:

I confess that I’m projecting a little with this cartoon, however I’m not an “economic expert” and everything I’ve heard from Henry Paulson on down indicates that none of the pros have what is known in industry parlance as “a clue” either.

Also, on a cool and unrelated side note, I was just thumbing through the book So Wrong For So Long by Greg Mitchell in a wistful look back at the Bush years and was dumbfounded when I stumbled across this passage:

”(March, 2006) Everyone had some fun in February after Vice President Cheney on a hunting trip ‘shot his friend in the face,’ as the incident came to be known, thanks to The Daily Show. But in Iraq, they were not using bird-shot. My favorite cartoon of the month came from my local paper in the Hudson Valley, The Journal News, which employs a recent Pulitzer winner, Matt Davies. He pictured a barren landscape, looking much like Iraq, with buckshot-riddled bodies strewn across the field, Cheney with his shotgun still smoking, and flying harmlessly overhead a duck labeled ‘WMD.’ Cheney looks up and says, ‘Damn. Missed.’ Well, that pretty much said it all”

It’s a weird sensation being reminded that something I scribble at my shopworn drawing table, which often feels like something I am doing to amuse myself, is in fact being seen, read and digested by many, many people. Yourselves included.
Oh, and here’s the cartoon:

Looks like a setup for a sub-par knock, knock joke, huh?

Having President Clinton as a husband has been an interesting double-edged sword for Senator Clinton. Thanks to Bill, and her own prodigious political talent, she ingeniously rode her wave of First Lady fame into the Senate, and – in case you’ve been living under a rock lately – Bill has been a loud distraction to her career development efforts since.

Nonetheless, it looks like WJC is feverishly cutting post-Presidential business ties with shady rogues and bazillionaire strongmen to do whatever it takes to free up his wife to become the Obama Secretary of State. I personally think she would make an excellent, relatively hawkish SOS, but I get the nagging feeling she might experience simmering loyalty issues with President Obama and be tempted to freelance and self-promote a little.

Putting aside the fact that Republicans were complicit in the demise of Detroit by protecting them from progressively higher MPG standards – The Big 3 being lectured by newly electorally challenged Republican leaders on the subject of responsibility for one’s actions, and building a product that people want is an interesting concept. Not that they aren’t 100% correct, mind you.

This cartoon is sort of a sorry adjunct to the previous cartoon. I don’t know about you, but I have become a bit numb when it comes to the concept of trillions of dollars lately. It all starts seeming like so much Monopoly money, doesn’t it?
I was speaking to a good friend last night who heads up a charitable foundation in DC. He described a paper loss of about half the value of the entire foundation in a period of less than six months.

More Play money.

Yesterday morning I dropped off my wife’s station wagon at the dealer for its 15k mile service and their lot, brimming with hundreds of shiny new vehicles twelve months ago, was conspicuously only one third full. According to the head sales guy, the credit freeze is affecting their ability to cycle stock, and also their ability to get customers approved for loans. And I don’t even want to talk about what that does to their newspaper ad buying budget.
It’s hard to contemplate, but there is probably no entity that hasn’t been heavily affected by the financial black hole.

At least with Monopoly money, after some fun, the dopey game ends, and you can pop the lid back on the box.

I am generally agnostic when it comes to present day Unions. I believe they can be both good and also incredibly stupid. I understand why NY State’s public school and health care unions are girding themselves for a fight to retain their raises and budgetary promises. They have to rally the membership. State tax revenues are tanking and, as Governor Paterson is reminding them, their income source is threatened. But placed in context, private sector incomes (and the source of all the revenue) are threatened too. The cash cow of Wall Street tax revenue has evaporated. Unions want to raise taxes on the rich, but, all together now: the cash cow of Wall Street tax revenue has evaporated. And the rest of your average wage-slave New Yorkers are cripplingly over-taxed as it is.

The services these workers provide is vital and affects all of us. Normally I’d be lining up to defend them, but they have to acknowledge the reality of the financial situation. It’s tough to do, but if they are willing to allow give-backs and other concessions, they may actually help out their employers (you and me) and simultaneously save their jobs.

Knowing there are readers of this blog who are from every continent on the planet – and might therefore not get this cartoon – I should mention that “Like a Rock” is the chorus from a schmaltzy Bob Seger song that was co-opted by the GM ad department and used as the tagline for Chevy truck ads. And for all my American readers, I apologize profusely for ruining your day by embedding the song in your mental audio loop for the rest of the day.

On the issue of bailouts to US carmakers? They fought tooth and nail for years to keep inefficient federal mileage standards on the books so they could dismiss their critics and continue to sell large amounts of oversize, crappy trucks at an astonishing profit to people who should’ve known better. Now their business model has predictably collapsed, and they want taxpayers to bail them out. That’s just plain irritating. If this was the seventies, a Big Three bailout would be imperative for the US economy, but Japanese and European automakers employ as many American workers here as the US Automakers do and they’re not asking for a nickel. Instead they have invested in a revolutionary business and marketing strategy, which is known in industry-speak as “selling cars that people wish to purchase.”

Sorry for the radio silence. Our tech department just finished a server/system switchover. Everything should be smooth sailing from here…Except, I can’t seem to get my superfly star rating system back online. I’ll get back in there and start clicking on some more technical and mysteriously named buttons to see what I can cook up.

The cartoon is self-explanatory (hey, aren’t they all?). Republicans are going crazy trying to figure out where they went wrong. The economy simply went really bad in September and that was, I believe, it. Enter President Obama.
Establishment Democrats who are chomping at the bit to overreach and think this was some type of glorious mandate to transform the country in their ideologically purist image run the risk of making the same mistakes the Bush administration did. Conversely, Republicans who think the party needs to move further right on social issues to win back American voters are just plain crazy.

That said, I don’t plan to hold my breath waiting for some newfound transformational aptitude on either count.