In February, in an observation that seemed truly ridiculous, even at the time, Mark Halperin argued that Barack Obama benefits from an electorate that “seems oddly indifferent” to Obama’s alleged failure to offer “detailed policy prescriptions despite the grave problems confronting the nation.” Soon after, John McCain said of Obama, “I respect him and the campaign that he has run, but there’s going to come a time when we have to get into specifics.”
It’s breathtaking how completely backwards this criticism has been.
While campaigns typically snow reporters with white papers and policy minutiae, many of the domestic policy plans of John McCain have been notably short on details.
Analysts caution that both McCain and Barack Obama have produced policy pronouncements that are just as much election documents as workable proposals; after all, that is what presidential candidates do. But when it comes to the metric of paper produced, McCain trails Obama in spelling out the nitty-gritty.
“The Obama people are much more detailed,” said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan advocacy group dedicated to balancing the budget.
It’s getting increasingly difficult to note that McCain is either unwilling or unable to offer any kind of specifics about what he’d want to do as president. The AP’s Charles Babington, in an otherwise forgiving piece, conceded this week, “At times McCain can appear to be short on details.”
As it turns out, the same campaign that was foolishly (and falsely) criticizing Obama for lacking policy details a few months ago now argues that McCain’s lack of details is a good quality to have.
Consider McCain campaign senior adviser Taylor Griffin’s description of his candidate’s plan for fixing Social Security:
“The history of the Social Security debate has taught that too many specifics, especially during a presidential campaign, has polarized the debate,” he said of the program that McCain called “an absolute disgrace [that’s] got to be fixed.”
Will he contrast his plan to that of his opponent? “Sen. McCain believes this is so important that we do not politicize this debate during an election season.”
This would be hilarious if it weren’t so obviously pathetic. First, McCain is politicizing everything he possibly can — NASA’s 50th Anniversary, Obama’s remembrance of the Nazi Holocaust, etc. But even putting this aside, he’s promising voters he can help “fix” an enormous government program that represents about a fifth of the federal budget. Asked how, McCain not only can’t tell us, he argues that he shouldn’t tell us.
It’s obviously not just Social Security. There’s a half-trillion dollar budget deficit, which McCain will eliminate in his first term. How? He just will. He wants to cut taxes by about a trillion dollars. How can we afford it? We just can. McCain realizes the value of the dollar is down, and he’s committed to reversing this. How? He just will. McCain wants to lower gas prices though a gas-tax holiday? How can this work, given that it’s inconsistent with Economics 101? It just can.
When pressed on his position on Iraq last year, McCain told an audience, “One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit.'” Asked about how he would shape the nation’s surveillance laws, McCain said, “[P]eople that are patriotic Americans need to sit down together and work this out.”
And McCain has accused Obama of failing to “get into specifics.”
Why is it, exactly, that McCain can get away with offering no substantive details on any subject? The Politico’s Avi Zenilman argues, persuasively, that there’s a partisan difference.
In part because the leading Democrats’ policy proposals were largely similar and the details were much considered by key constituencies, the candidates were compelled to offer fine-grained plans to draw differences.
It made for debates in which Clinton keyed in on nuanced and sometimes difficult-to-explain differences between her plan and Obama’s to vastly increase the federal government’s role in providing health care. […]
The more dominant interest groups in the Republican Party — social conservatives, hawks and tax-cutters — had less wonky primary goals that didn’t need extreme specificity to be articulated clearly, which was also true for women’s groups on the left.
When McCain has focused on domestic policy, it has generally been to offer headline-grabbing plans, such as his proposal for a gas tax holiday and his claim that allowing offshore drilling could have an immediate effect on gas prices, both of which were almost universally derided by economists across the ideological spectrum.
“There’s a lot more happening in the Obama budget. There’s a lot more moving parts, and I think that probably calls for more specificity,” Bixby said. “It’s a much more ambitious agenda than McCain’s.”
As Josh Patashnik added, “There’s just no huge upside to being a policy wonk, if you’re a Republican presidential candidate.”
Something to keep in mind the next time conservative activists and/or media personalities complain about Obama’s lack of specificity.