IT IS hard to see anything in America these days for the festoons of bunting and balloons in this febrile election season. So it is perhaps unsurprising that the next chapter in the fall of David Stockman has gone largely unnoticed.

Stockman was once the financial wunderkind of his era, the man who put the “omics” in Reaganomics. As president Reagan’s budget director, Stockman championed “trickle down” theories, where tax cuts for the rich would eventually feed the poor, only to later dismiss the idea as a Trojan horse.

His influence waned after a devastating article in Atlantic Monthly magazine in December 1981. The piece, The Education of David Stockman, used this quote from the rapidly tarnishing golden boy as its subtitle: “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers.”

Stockman then went on to write his own expose of the Reagan years, The Triumph of Politics. According to his take, Stockman was an idealistic rustic from Michigan betrayed by the cynicism of Washington and a president who could not add up and did not much care to try.

Reagan’s Washington was an Alice in Wonderland world where spending was saving and deficits paved the road to a balanced budget.

Now Stockman faces pretty much the same charges himself as he fights government claims that he defrauded shareholders in Collins & Aikman, a Detroit-based manufacturer of car parts. If found guilty, he faces up to 20 years in jail. After an 18-month delay, a judge has now set the trial date for May.

Collins & Aikman went bankrupt in 2005, five days after Stockman resigned. Federal prosecutors claimed Stockman orchestrated a fraud in which he lied to his auditors KPMG and lenders including JPMorgan Chase and Credit Suisse as the firm’s finances deteriorated.

At the time of the charges, Stockman said in a statement posted on his law firm’s website that the company’s collapse “was the consequence of an industry meltdown”, not fraud. His lawyer, Elkan Abramowitz, called the case “a disappointing attempt by federal prosecutors to criminalise the good faith efforts of a dedicated CEO to save his company”.

Last year, TIME magazine quoted Stockman as saying he had been engaged in “an epic struggle for survival” and everything he told the public reflected “a realistic and balanced view of the facts as I understood them”.

It is the “moron” defence, one most recently used by Bernie Ebbers, the 67-year-old former boss of WorldCom, now serving a 25-year sentence for fraud. Ebbers was a former high school basketball coach, milkman, and bouncer. How was he supposed to know what was going on? The jury did not buy it. Is it likely to buy it from the former architect of Reaganomics?

In another Stockman quote about his government years, he said: “If the [Securities and Exchange Commission] had jurisdiction over the White House, we might have all had time for a course in remedial economics at Allenwood Penitentiary.”

Allenwood is supposed to be nice and it does sound like Stockman needs a refresher course in maths.

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