The parallels with 1992 should worry McCain.




Remember 1992? The first President Bush kicked off that year by falling ill and throwing up in the lap of the Japan's prime minister at a state dinner. The dollar was weak, the nation was coming out of a recession. House prices had fallen and banks, including five of the six largest in New Hampshire, had failed. Two-thirds of Americans said the economy was headed in the wrong direction.

Fast-forward to 2008, and the national mood is much the same. That's bad news for John McCain. In the fall of 1992, Bill Clinton, whose presidential campaign, like Barack Obama's, was all about hope, defeated the senior Bush, albeit with help from third-party candidate Ross Perot,

This time around, it's the non-bank banks like Bear Stearns that gambled big on sub-prime mortgages and lost. Home foreclosures have skyrocketed and values plummeted. Energy prices keep climbing.

Nearly half of those surveyed in a Gallup poll this month rated current economic conditions as "poor." A whopping 85 percent said they expect them to get worse.

Retail sales have nonetheless soared to a six-month high as goods flew out of stores like Wal-Mart. That's probably because consumers are in a celebrate-while-we-still-can mood and raced to spend the $50 billion in economic stimulus checks the government has sent out so far in hopes of staving off a recession that may have already be here.

Like the first President Bush, McCain is running on foreign policy issues when people are worried about how to keep gas in their cars and heat their homes next winter and whether they'll have jobs. As Democratic campaign strategist James Carville famously put it in 1992, "It's the economy, stupid!"

McCain's strong suit is his military experience, which no one questions, and his foreign policy expertise, which he has yet to convey convincingly. He is, however, correct in saying that the situation in Iraq is much improved and he may be right in his emphatic belief that success in Iraq, however it's defined, is still possible. But the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not the public's prime concern. In large measure that's because President Bush continues to ask nothing of most Americans and everything of the men and women in uniforms and their families.

For most, the scary economy is here, and the wars are out there somewhere. That's a big problem for McCain.

Though he's backpedaled mightily since, McCain has been unable convince many voters that he was exaggerating when he publicly stated that "the issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should. . . " That statement could do for him what the first Bush's seeming unfamiliarity with a grocery store scanner did for him in 1992: prove that he was out of touch.

To have a chance in November, McCain will have to prove that he "gets it" on the economy. He's made a good start by saying that he'll break with the president and most of his party and vote to extend unemployment benefits for 13 weeks. Republican members of Congress who don't will be handing their opponents a gilt sword to use against them in the fall.

McCain must not simply break convincingly with Bush but also come out with a credible economic policy that recognizes how much some people are hurting and how worried the rest of us are. If he doesn't, he won't be president.