The McCain campaign and its supporters have been complaining quite a bit this week about the media directing so much attention to Barack Obama’s trip to the Middle East and Europe. As Republicans see it, John McCain deserves more time in the media spotlight.
It’s not at all clear, though, precisely what it is Republicans want covered. It probably isn’t his foreign policy — McCain reversed course and embraced Obama’s Afghanistan policy this week, and yesterday, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said McCain’s strategy for Iraq is backwards.
Maybe conservatives want more attention on McCain’s economic ideas? Frank Rich makes the case today that this wouldn’t be a good idea at all for Republicans: “When it comes to the central front of American anxiety — the economy — [McCain’s] learning curve has flat-lined…. Left to his own devices … Mr. McCain is clueless.”
In 2000, he told an interviewer that he would make up for his lack of attention to “those issues.” As he entered the 2008 campaign, Mr. McCain was still saying the same, vowing to read “Greenspan’s book” as a tutorial. Last weekend, the resolutely analog candidate told The New York Times he is at last starting to learn how “to get online myself.” Perhaps he’ll retire his abacus by Election Day.
Mr. McCain’s fiscal ineptitude has received so little scrutiny in some press quarters that his chief economic adviser, the former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, got a free pass until the moment he self-immolated on video by whining about “a nation of whiners.” The McCain-Gramm bond, dating back 15 years, is more scandalous than Mr. Obama’s connection with his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Mr. McCain has been so dependent on Mr. Gramm for economic policy that he sent him to newspaper editorial board meetings, no doubt to correct the candidate’s numbers much as Joe Lieberman cleans up after his confusions of Sunni and Shia.
What’s striking is that it’s hard to say with confidence which confuses McCain more, foreign policy or economic policy.
Rich makes a very compelling case for the latter.
The term flip-flopping doesn’t do justice to Mr. McCain’s self-contradictory economic pronouncements because that implies there’s some rational, if hypocritical, logic at work. What he serves up instead is plain old incoherence, as if he were compulsively consulting one of those old Magic 8 Balls. In a single 24-hour period in April, Mr. McCain went from saying there’s been “great economic progress” during the Bush presidency to saying “Americans are not better off than they were eight years ago.” He reversed his initial condemnation of mortgage bailouts in just two weeks.
In February Mr. McCain said he would balance the federal budget by the end of his first term even while extending the gargantuan Bush tax cuts. In April he said he’d accomplish this by the end of his second term. In July he’s again saying he’ll do it in his first term. Why not just say he’ll do it on Inauguration Day? It really doesn’t matter since he’s never supplied real numbers that would give this promise even a patina of credibility.
Mr. McCain’s plan for Social Security reform is “along the lines that President Bush proposed.” Or so he said in March. He came out against such “privatization” in June (though his policy descriptions still support it). Last week he indicated he isn’t completely clear on what Social Security does. He called the program’s premise — young taxpayers foot the bill for their elders (including him) — an “absolute disgrace.”
Given that Mr. McCain’s sole private-sector job was a fleeting stint in public relations at his father-in-law’s beer distributorship, he comes by his economic ignorance honestly. But there’s no A team aboard the Straight Talk Express to fill him in. His campaign economist, the former Bush adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, could be found in the June 5 issue of American Banker suggesting even at that late date that we still don’t know “the depth of the housing crisis” and proposing that “monitoring is the right thing to do in these circumstances.”
I think Rich is definitely onto something here. McCain has demonstrated over and over again that when it comes to economics, he’s painfully confused.
McCain told an audience earlier this year, “Every time in history we have raised taxes it has cut revenues.” As a matter of reality, McCain was talking gibberish.
He also recently told a national television audience that he’s “glad” when interest rates fall, and “wishes interest rates were zero,” which really doesn’t make any sense.
Since then, McCain has badly flubbed economic tests on energy, the deficit, poverty, and Social Security.
When McCain recently acknowledged, “The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should,” he wasn’t being modest; he was being truthful.
Maybe now would be a good time for Republicans to remind us about the dangers of having on-the-job training for presidents.