{"id":15857,"date":"2008-06-13T09:50:18","date_gmt":"2008-06-13T13:50:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/15857.html"},"modified":"2008-06-13T09:50:18","modified_gmt":"2008-06-13T13:50:18","slug":"the-republicans-change-but-the-bamboozlement-remains-the-same","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-republicans-change-but-the-bamboozlement-remains-the-same\/","title":{"rendered":"The Republicans change, but the bamboozlement remains the same"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the latest NBC\/WSJ poll<\/a>, released yesterday, there was a noticeable trend when it came to age groups — the younger the voter, the more likely he\/she was to support Barack Obama. The only age group in which John McCain excelled was with those over 65 (who prefer McCain to Obama, 48% to 41%).<\/p>\n

How can Obama win older voters over? Perhaps McCain’s position on Social Security might help.<\/p>\n

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Yesterday afternoon, in response to a question about his position, McCain said, “I’m not for quote privatizing Social Security, I never have been, I never will be.” This, of course, contrasted nicely with a comment McCain made after the last presidential election in which told a questioner that “…without privatization, I don’t see how you can possibly, over time, make sure that young Americans are able to receive Social Security benefits.”<\/p>\n

As Kombiz Lavasany put it<\/a>, “Someone should tell John McCain that if you’re going to misrepresent a position you’ve held, you should probably not have held the opposite position on video<\/i>.”<\/p>\n

Like most of McCain’s reversals, it’s amusing on a certain level to find dozens of examples of Mr. Straight Talk, who emphasizes his consistency, taking both sides of major issues. But when it comes to Social Security, McCain’s incoherence might matter more than most.
\n
\nA few days ago, publius had an item<\/a> I agreed with wholeheartedly.<\/p>\n

So apparently old white people don’t like Obama so much. You know what they do like? Social Security. You know what they don’t like? Private accounts. And though he’s recently flip-flopped, McCain has supported Bush’s private accounts. He told the WSJ this March: “As part of Social Security reform, I believe that private savings accounts are a part of it — along the lines that President Bush proposed.”<\/p>\n

When the WSJ informed him that his website only favored private accounts as “supplements,” he told the WSJ that he would change the website. (He didn’t, perhaps because McCain wasn’t grasping the policy details at the time).<\/p>\n

He’s since flip-flopped, but Obama should still hammer him on this — if for no other reason than to show that McCain doesn’t know what the heck he’s talking about…. If I were Obama, I would literally start putting the commercials up in Florida tomorrow. I mean, if only people had had a chance to invest a third of their Social Security benefits in the roaring markets over the past three years — just imagine the returns.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Quite right. I had an item<\/a> a few weeks ago noting that McCain has been all over the place on Social Security, at times contradicting himself, and at other times contradicting his own campaign’s policy.<\/p>\n

But the bottom line includes two key angles. First, McCain looks at Bush’s fiasco of a policy from 2005 and wants to do the exact same thing. And second, he wants to get into a semantics debate over the meaning of the word “privatization” — as McCain sees it, he wants Americans to be able to remove funds from the Social Security system and put them in private accounts. Told that this is the very definition<\/em> of privatization, McCain denies it (or, at least denies it now, after agreeing a few years ago).<\/p>\n

This hasn’t become much of a campaign issue; in fact, it’s pretty much non-existent on the political world’s radar. But keep an eye on Social Security; it just might end up making a difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the latest NBC\/WSJ poll, released yesterday, there was a noticeable trend when it came to age groups — the younger the voter, the more likely he\/she was to support Barack Obama. The only age group in which John McCain excelled was with those over 65 (who prefer McCain to Obama, 48% to 41%). How […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15857\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}