Politics

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.

Read more

by publius

Dramatic irony

In drama, the device of giving the spectator an item of information that at least one of the characters in the narrative is unaware of[.]

Not much left to add about Obama’s Berlin speech, so I’ll just go all MoDo on you and make lazy uninformed aesthetic observations. In watching the video, I kept thinking back to Ezra Klein’s much-maligned description of Obama’s best speeches:

Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it.

Klein caught a lot of crap for using this gushing language, but there’s something to the underlying idea. If I could rephrase, I think what he was trying to say is that Obama’s speeches sometimes cause you to become suddenly (though fleetingly) aware of dramatic irony around you. That probably sounds pretty stupid, so let me explain what I mean.

The interesting part about dramatic irony is that the audience knows something the characters don’t. Because the audience knows more, the characters’ actions often resonate with the viewer in interesting ways. For instance, in the John Adams HBO series, the early friendship of Adams and Jefferson has a bittersweet tragic undertone even at its warmest moments because we the audience know what eventually happens. They the characters don’t.

Personally, I feel these same “undertones” when I watch old clips of presidential candidates before they won. For instance, when you see Bill Clinton stand up at the 1992 debate and ask the man how the economy has hurt him, that moment has its own historical undertones. That’s because we the audience know what eventually happened – Clinton won. And he won because he was more in touch with people’s economic troubles. This moment, then, symbolized the broader history.

Read more

by hilzoy

Last month, the Center for Tax Policy put out a report (pdf) on McCain and Obama’s tax proposals. At the time, I noted that some of the assumptions they made about McCain’s policies, which they got from the McCain campaign, did not match what McCain was himself was saying in campaign appearances. Now they’ve come out with a revised version, in which they refine their original calculations, but also note discrepancies between what both candidates’ campaigns say and what the candidates themselves say, and try to cost out both.

The short version: over ten years, the proposals McCain actually makes on the stump would cost $2.7 trillion more than the policies his campaign describes, for a total cost of nearly $7 trillion over ten years. Over the same ten years, the proposals Obama makes on the stump would cost $367 billion less than the policies his campaign describes, for a total cost of a little under $2.5 trillion. (The main difference between what Obama says on the stump and what his campaign describes is his proposal to levy Social Security taxes on income over $250,000/year.)

Here’s a chart showing the effects of both candidates’ tax proposals (the ones they describe on the stump) on people in various income brackets, from p. 46 of the report. Note that while this graph shows taxes going up for people in the top quintile under Obama’s plan, a more detailed breakdown (p. 45) shows that taxes only go up for the top 5% (incomes over $226,918/year.) People in the 95th-99th percentiles ($226,918-$603,402/year) would pay $799 more a year, on average.

Just something to keep in mind the next time you hear John McCain say: “Senator Obama wants to raise taxes; I want to keep them low. Somebody who wants higher taxes, I’m not your candidate. Senator Obama is.”

A longer excerpt from the report below the fold.

Read more

by hilzoy

I’ve been thinking about the Maliki statement and its implications. Here’s my take.

McCain’s entire rationale, as a candidate, turns on Iraq and related issues, like terrorism and (to a lesser extent) Iran. What else is he going to run on? His grasp of the economy? His health care proposals? The widespread popularity of the Republican brand? He can’t even run on the rest of foreign policy: McCain’s approach to foreign policy has always lacked any kind of integrative vision; he treats problems in isolation from one another. This means two things: first, McCain really doesn’t have an overarching foreign policy vision, and second, for him, Iraq has always been The Big Thing, and as a result, everything else got slighted.

(Minor factoid: the Issues page on McCain’s website doesn’t have an entry for foreign policy. An Iraq page, yes; likewise, pages on the Space Program and Second Amendment Rights. But foreign policy? Nothing.)

On Iraq, McCain begins with a huge disadvantage: he advocated the invasion of Iraq, which most Americans feel was a mistake. (He’s always urging voters to look back and consider who showed good judgment on the surge, but he doesn’t want them to look too far back, lest they find themselves thinking about who showed good judgment on the invasion.) He therefore has to argue something like this: now that we’re in this mess, we need someone we can trust, someone who will be able to manage this catastrophe as well as possible. McCain is solid. Obama is untested, inexperienced, risky. There was always a problem with this story: namely, it involves saying that we should trust McCain, who made the wrong call on invasion, over Obama, who got it right. But sowing doubts is pretty much all McCain has.

This got a lot harder last week, before Maliki’s comments.

Read more

by publius

I think it’s fairly clear that Michael Gerson is the worst op-ed writer in the United States. He’s certainly the most insufferable. Sorry Richard Cohen – maybe next year! And today’s effort doesn’t disappoint, even by Gerson’s lofty standards.

First, let’s start with the trifling stuff. Gerson’s writing annoys me because it uses too many puke-inducing adjectives. Good writing and good speechwriting apparently don’t go hand and hand. His columns read like a cross between a Hallmark card and a 9th grade essay. (The majestic majesty of the eloquent sky yawned ostensibly, like a velvet monarch.)

Read more

by hilzoy

More straight talk on display here, via TPM. As Josh Marshall says, the best parts start about 2:30 minutes before the end. Transcribing:

“Q: Finally, you talked a little bit about Senator Obama today, you said he was the most extreme member of the Senate…

McCain: Yeah, that’s his voting record.

Q: Extreme? You really think he’s an extremist? I mean, he’s clearly liberal…

McCain: That’s his voting record. All I said was his voting record — and that is more to the left than the announced socialist in the United States Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Q: Do you think he’s a socialist, Barack Obama?

McCain: Oh, I don’t know. All I know is his voting record, and that’s what people usually judge their elected representatives by. But I know this too: that Senator Obama has not done what I’ve done. He has not reached across the aisle to work in a bipartisan fashion. I have. I have. And if you have an extreme voting record, it’s hard to do that. And finally, Senator Obama, obviously, supported amendments that would have killed comprehensive immigration reform. Then he says that he’s for immigration reform.

Q: But you flip-flop a little bit too.

McCain: No, I didn’t.

Q: You flip-flop on drilling, on tax cuts…

McCain: Actually, I didn’t. Actually, on the drilling issue, when gasoline reached $4 a gallon, we’ve got to do things that we otherwise haven’t done in the past. I have not changed my mind on any other issue. On immigration, I said we need comprehensive immigration reform, it failed twice, so we’ve got to do what’s going to succeed.

Q: But you were against the tax cuts, now you’re talking about making them permanent. Isn’t there flip-flopping on both sides?

McCain: Actually, no. Actually, I had a tax cut proposal of my own. Senator Obama wants to raise taxes; I want to keep them low. Somebody who wants higher taxes, I’m not your candidate. Senator Obama is. I had a package of tax cuts, and I said we had to restrain spending. We did not restrain spending, and therefore we now have the mess that we’re in. We had to restrain spending. That’s the main reason why I voted against them, and I had a large package of tax cuts myself, and I have voted for tax cuts in the past, and Senator Obama wants to raise them. I’ve heard a lot of this propaganda, and I understand what campaigns are about, and all of the back and forth, but I’ll stand on my record of bipartisan effectiveness for American, and putting my country first.”

This has to set some sort of new McCain record for dishonesty. Details below the fold.

Read more

by hilzoy

George W. Bush, today:

“
President Bush said Tuesday that he will not call on Americans to conserve gasoline despite the rising price of oil, saying consumers are “smart enough” to figure out for themselves that they should drive less.

“They’re smart enough to figure out whether they’re going to drive less or not. I mean, you know, it’s interesting what the price of gasoline has done,” Bush said at a news conference in the White House press room, “is it caused people to drive less. That’s why they want smaller cars: They want to conserve. But the consumer’s plenty bright. The marketplace works.”

“You noticed my statement yesterday, I talked about good conservation and — you know, people can figure out whether they need to drive more or less,” he said. “They can balance their own checkbooks.”

“It’s a little presumptuous on my part to dictate how consumers live their own lives,” the president added. “I’ve got faith in the American people.” “

Ari Fleischer, May 7 2001 Press Briefing (h/t someone other than myself):

” Q Is one of the problems with this, and the entire energy field, American lifestyles? Does the President believe that, given the amount of energy Americans consume per capita, how much it exceeds any other citizen in any other country in the world, does the President believe we need to correct our lifestyles to address the energy problem?

MR. FLEISCHER: That’s a big no. The President believes that it’s an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one. And we have a bounty of resources in this country. What we need to do is make certain that we’re able to get those resources in an efficient way, in a way that also emphasizes protecting the environment and conservation, into the hands of consumers so they can make the choices that they want to make as they live their lives day to day.”

Barack Obama, today:

“The surest way to increase our leverage against Iran in the long-run is to stop bankrolling its ambitions. That will depend on achieving my fourth goal: ending the tyranny of oil in our time.

One of the most dangerous weapons in the world today is the price of oil. We ship nearly $700 million a day to unstable or hostile nations for their oil. It pays for terrorist bombs going off from Baghdad to Beirut. It funds petro-diplomacy in Caracas and radical madrasas from Karachi to Khartoum. It takes leverage away from America and shifts it to dictators.

This immediate danger is eclipsed only by the long-term threat from climate change, which will lead to devastating weather patterns, terrible storms, drought, and famine. That means people competing for food and water in the next fifty years in the very places that have known horrific violence in the last fifty: Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Most disastrously, that could mean destructive storms on our shores, and the disappearance of our coastline.

This is not just an economic issue or an environmental concern – this is a national security crisis. For the sake of our security – and for every American family that is paying the price at the pump – we must end this dependence on foreign oil.”

As said: making strategic connections: it’s a good thing.

For good measure, one more comparison below the fold.

Read more

by hilzoy

On Wednesday, the Senate passed a Medicare bill by unanimous consent (the vote on cloture, which was the important one, passed 69-30. Guess who the missing Senator was.) It did two main things. First, it blocked a pay cut of 10.6% to doctors. This is a good thing: we can debate reforms to physician compensation under Medicare, but cutting fees by 10.6% across the board, not as the result of, well, thought, but because a deadline had expired and no one could figure out a way to agree on how not to have those cuts kick in, is surely not the way to do it.

The reason Congress was having trouble finding a way not to make that cut was because they had the curious idea that they should, well, find a way to pay for it. As it happens, a really wonderful way was at hand: cutting reimbursement for Medicare Advantage programs.

Read more