hilzoy

by hilzoy

A couple of days ago the Ohio Democrats released this ad:

It shows footage from the town meeting described here:

“Mary Houghtaling, who runs a hospice in Wilmington, Ohio, choked up as she told McCain of DHL’s plans to close its domestic air hub in her town, a move that could throw 8,600 people out of work. “This is a terrible blow,” McCain told her. “I don’t know if I can stop it. That’s some straight talk. Some more straight talk? I doubt it.””

Interspersed with the footage are screens that say:

“McCain and his campaign manager, Rick Davis, played roles in the fate of DHL Express and its Ohio air park as far back as 2003.”

And:

“Those jobs are on the chopping block because Sen. McCain and his campaign were involved in a deal that resulted in control of those positions being shifted to a foreign corporation.”

— Joe Rugola, president of the Ohio AFL-CIO”

And:

“The firm of Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager, earned $185,000 lobbying for foreign ownership, and $405,000 after the deal passed Congress”

It’s a very powerful ad. The sight of McCain saying “I don’t know if I can stop it. That’s some straight talk. Some more straight talk? I doubt it”, about a deal he and his campaign manager were involved in making possible, is jarring. And reminding voters that McCain is surrounded by ex-lobbyists cannot help his efforts to convince them that he is a maverick who recognizes that Washington is broken and wants to change it. Especially since, in this case, one of the people McCain’s campaign manager was paid to lobby was, well, John McCain.

That said, when I first saw the ad I wondered whether there was less to this story than met the eye. To be clear: I absolutely think that it’s a mistake to have lobbyists (including lobbyists who, like Davis, are presently “on leave”) running campaigns and serving as senior advisors to candidates. I could be persuaded to make an exception for people who are paid a flat salary to lobby for some worthwhile cause, like the environment or vaccinations for third world children or workplace safety, from which neither they nor the people who pay them will personally profit, but I think that people who have been paid, and might well be paid again, by private corporations or foreign governments should not manage anyone’s campaign.

That said, I do not have a problem with private employers deciding to relocate their facilities, or with foreign ownership of companies that operate in the United States. Moreover, Davis’ lobbying seems to have occurred between 2003 and 2005, and McCain’s involvement was in 2003, so it seemed worth asking whether, at the time, there was any reason to think that the deal might actually cost Ohioans jobs. Because if it looked like a good deal for Ohio at the time, that would make the story told in the ad look very different — though it would leave intact the general issue of having lobbyists running the McCain campaign.

I was also curious what on earth Congress had to do with what sounded like a normal deal. So I cranked up Lexis-Nexis. Short answer: yes, there were concerns about the effect on jobs at the time. What’s below the fold is an explanation of the deal, and of those concerns; I suspect it will be of interest mostly to people for whom the ad raised the kinds of questions it did for me.

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by hilzoy

Watching McCain’s new video, ‘The One‘, I remembered a recent New Republic piece on Mark Salter:

“Salter is still McCain’s chief wordsmith as well as a top campaign operative and, for all practical purposes, McCain’s brain. (…) “Salter’s just spent so much time with McCain that I don’t know if McCain’s figured out Salter or Salter’s figured out McCain,” says former McCain media adviser Mark McKinnon. Another person friendly with both men calls it a “mind meld.” But Salter not only channels McCain better than anyone. He has also demonstrated a one-of-a-kind instinct for how to craft McCain’s public image. Over the years, he has taken the raw material of McCain’s biography and temperament and turned it into a compelling narrative that supersedes politics–one about an independent-minded war hero who celebrates courage and humility, demands individual sacrifice, and excoriates vanity.”

This is the particular passage that the video brought to mind:

“But nothing seems to rile up Salter like Obama himself. In a February speech drafted by Salter, McCain cracked that he did not harbor the “presumption that I am blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save my country in its hour of need”–clearly a taunt aimed at Obama. Salter recently told The Boston Globe that Obama’s campaign is based around a “messianic complex.” “Yeah, I think politics have changed,” Salter said to me, referring to Obama’s campaign. “The politics are: ‘Elect me!'”

Like Jean Rohe, Obama also provoked Salter into some intemperate typing–even before the campaign began. After Obama and McCain differed over ethics reform, in early 2006, Salter wrote a long and overheated letter under McCain’s name ripping Obama for “self interested partisan posturing,” leading to unhelpful press chatter about McCain’s temper. (Salter says Weaver often jokes about removing the “send” button from his keyboard.)

All the more galling for Salter is his belief that Obama the candidate is lifting from McCain’s oeuvre. Obama has recently described his transformation from a selfish young man who thought “life was all about me” to an adult who realizes “that life doesn’t count for much unless you’re willing to do your small part to leave our children–all of our children–a better world. Even if it’s difficult. Even if the work seems great. Even if we don’t get very far in our lifetime.” Salter hears in this an echo of McCain’s longtime account of outgrowing his troublemaking and self-centered youth to find a higher purpose in serving others. (“I often regret that we didn’t copyright ‘serving a cause greater than your self-interest,'” he cracks.)”

Think about the last paragraph I quoted …

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by hilzoy

Last week, I wrote about a Tax Policy Center report that found that there’s a big difference between the tax policies John McCain says he’d enact in his speeches and the ones his campaign describes. A $2.8 trillion difference. To put that in perspective, the extra $2.8 trillion McCain promises to cut in his speeches is equal to the entire cost of Barack Obama’s tax policies as stated by his campaign, using the least favorable scoring method; it’s several hundred million greater than the entire cost of the proposals Obama describes in his speeches.

Slate asked the campaign about this. Here’s the response:

“Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s chief economic adviser, says the numbers he provided to the TPC aren’t secret—they’re the same ones he provides to anyone who asks. He also disputes the way the study takes suggestions McCain has made on the stump out of context. “This is parsing words out of campaign appearances to an unreasonable degree,” Holtz-Eakin said. “He has certainly I’m sure said things in town halls” that don’t jibe perfectly with his written plan. But that doesn’t mean it’s official.“

Ah. I see. A citizen at a town hall meeting asks John McCain a question, expecting to get, well, an answer. John McCain gives one. The citizen, naively, believes that John McCain knows what his own policies are, and that when he says something, it’s “official”. According to Douglas Holtz-Eakin, that citizen is wrong. You can’t find out what McCain’s policies are by asking him and believing his answer. You have to — well, do what? Check the website? Become one of those experts to whom the actual, official details of McCain’s tax policies are disclosed?

That’s some straight talk, my friend.

Some enterprising reporter should ask McCain about this. Offhand, I can think of only three real explanations:

(a) The normal case: Holtz-Eakin has said that he, not John McCain, gets to say what John McCain’s economic policy is, without any backstory. He’s just saying: “don’t listen to him; listen to me.” In that case, I would expect Holtz-Eakin to be fired.

(b) McCain and Holtz-Eakin are making a calculated attempt to deceive. McCain says one thing in public, Holtz-Eakin quietly backtracks to experts; as a result, Holtz-Eakin gets to protest when anyone tries to cost out what McCain actually says, or to point out that it blows a hole in the federal budget. In this case, reporters need to call this attempted bluff.

(c) What Holtz-Eakin says is basically accurate. McCain doesn’t know enough about economic policy. He has therefore outsourced his economic plan to people like Holtz-Eakin. So far, so normal. But in a normal campaign, the economic policy people go over various ideas with the candidate, the candidate chooses among them, and then that is the “official” position, which both the candidate and the campaign know about and try to defend. In this case, the economic policy advisors have gone over different ideas, McCain (let’s imagine) wants to do the various things he’s talked about on the campaign trail, his advisors say: no, that would blow a huge gaping hole in the budget, McCain agrees to a less costly policy, but that fact somehow doesn’t take hold in his mind, and when he goes back on the stump, he reverts to his old ideas.

This scenario raises serious questions about McCain’s fitness to be President. A President needs to be able to make commitments and stick to them. He needs to know what he has previously agreed to. If McCain cannot do that, that’s very serious.

Personally, I suspect that (c) is most accurate. But whatever the truth is, we need to find out who actually speaks for John McCain.

A few more wonky details about Holtz-Eakins’ response to the report below the fold.

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