Regular readers probably won’t be too surprised by the very good front-page WaPo piece today on John McCain offering “tax policies he once opposed.” As you know, the current McCain incarnation bears no resemblance to the 2001-2004 McCain, who at least pretended to care about fiscal sanity.
But the article does note one detail that often goes overlooked — McCain didn’t just flip-flop on his economic worldview, he pulled off the hard-to-execute flip-flop-flip.
Now that he is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, however, McCain is marching straight down the party line. The economic package he has laid out embraces many of the tax policies he once decried: extending Bush’s tax cuts he voted against, offering investment tax breaks he once believed would have little economic benefit and granting the long-held wishes of tax lobbyists he has often mocked.
McCain’s concerns — about budget deficits, unanticipated defense costs, an Iraq war that would be longer and more costly than advertised — have proved eerily prescient, usually a plus for politicians who are quick to say they were right when others were wrong. Yet McCain appears determined to leave such predictions behind. […]
[Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s senior policy adviser] urged skeptics to “wind the clock way back,” saying McCain has supported lower taxes and a smaller federal government throughout his political career.
It’s an interesting admission. By winding the clock way back, McCain’s top policy advisor is suggesting there are basically three McCains: the Early McCain (’82 to ’93); the Middle McCain (’94 to ’03); and the Old McCain (’04 to the present).
And if we just pretend the Middle McCain doesn’t exist — if we look at the present and then “wind the clock way back” — he looks entirely consistent.
The irony, of course, is that the Middle McCain was the one who was actually right. He didn’t just oppose Bush’s reckless tax cuts for all the right reasons, he opposed the Gingrich/Dole/DeLay tax policies, as well. I’d forgotten, for example, about this:
But McCain’s conflicts with fellow Republicans over taxes date back well before his differences with Bush. In December 1994, after his party swept to control of Congress on tax-cut promises, he challenged Ronald Reagan’s legacy when he warned, “I think we would be making a terrible mistake to go back to the ’80s, where we cut all of those taxes and all of a sudden now we’ve got a debt that we’ve got to pay on an annual basis that is bigger than the amount that we spend on defense.”
Asked to explain McCain’s shifts — and the ways in which he’s evolved and then devolved — Holtz-Eakin said McCain is “looking forward, not back.”
There’s that attitude again that I simply don’t understand. McCain and his aides argue, with surprising frequency, that McCain’s record doesn’t matter because they’re “looking forward,” or maybe because only “the future” matters. This came up last week when McCain was pressed on his failures on Iraq policy and he insisted that the only question worth asking is “what we do in the future.”
Maybe these guys have been missing their own memos, but the entire basis for McCain’s candidacy is his lifetime of experience. Why is it, then, that every time we start to consider that experience in more detail, all of a sudden, the past no longer matters?
The argument, in a nutshell, is that McCain’s past matters more than anything else, except when he decides it shouldn’t.
Stephen Colbert explained this very well recently.
“[W]hen you question his record he says this: ‘I want to make it very clear this is not about excisions that were made — decisions that were made in the past.’ Now, decisions that were made in the past is how people without experience define experience. So how can McCain claim to be more qualified of a candidate because of his experience yet also claim that any history of bad decisions is irrelevant? Easy. Experience. You see, he is experienced enough to know that some experience is relevant, like the fact that he has experience. While other experience, like his previous experiences, are irrelevant.”
How anyone could fall for this is beyond me.