During his first presidential campaign, George W. Bush was pressed on whether he ever had to prepare a budget as the governor of Texas. Bush, pointing to the state’s finances, said, “It’s clearly a budget; it’s got a lot of numbers in it.”
Eight years later, we have Bush’s would-be Republican successor, John McCain, unveiling an economic plan that doesn’t have a lot of numbers in it.
Josh Marshall had this item this afternoon:
I think we may have come to that moment, that quick turn of events, that encapsulates the fact that there is apparently no limit to the howlers and nonsense that John McCain can throw out and still not generate collective guffaws or even scrutiny from the national political press. […]
Now, the general routine is the face of this kind of candidate announcement is that journalists and economists look at the numbers to see if they add up. In most cases, the exercises generates fairly unsatisfying contradictory opinions, with some experts saying one thing and other experts another.
But here’s the thing. McCain doesn’t have any numbers. None. Not vague numbers of fuzzy math. He just says he’s going to do it. Any other candidate would get laughed off the stage with that kind of nonsense or more likely reporters just wouldn’t agree to give them a write up.
That couldn’t be right, I thought. The McCain campaign just released a 15-page report on the candidate’s economic plan, as part of a massive week-long push, and there aren’t any numbers? Not even skewed, misleading ones? Not even ambiguous charts?
As it turns out, that’s exactly what the McCain campaign did.
Earlier this year, when McCain began falsely charging Barack Obama for avoiding specifics, I began calling McCain, “Mr. Vague Generalities.” He gave me quite a bit of material to work with.
When pressed on his position on McCain told an audience last year, “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 here we are, just four months from Election Day, and McCain is presenting a bizarre economic plan, which doesn’t make any sense on its face, and which also lacks any and all support from the campaign itself. Knowing we might look at the numbers to see if they add up, the McCain campaign decided not to include any numbers.
There’s a $410 billion 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.
I’ve seen more details from candidates running for student government.
Josh added:
Remember, this is the guy who’s riding on his reputation for ‘straight talk’. And he’s just promised that he’ll balance the budget in his first term. For any serious reporter covering this campaign that should immediately lead to a request for actual numbers to back up how he’s going to accomplish that. […]
[T]his is the reductio ad absurdum of the mad pass John McCain gets on everything. He’s pledging to balance the budget in four years and when asked for details he says, ‘We’ll get back to you on that.’
If reporters weren’t in the tank for this guy, today would be the beginning of the end of McCain’s chances of winning the White House. He’s not even trying to be a credible presidential candidate anymore, and this “economic plan” (I use the phrase loosely) could very well be the subject of ridicule for the foreseeable future.