McCain's Real Stand on Regulation

This is where McCain really stands, you know, when he's not lying to win an election.

Rasmussen: With the markets in frightening turmoil and the public outraged by financial irresponsibility and excessive greed, John McCain has suddenly rediscovered the importance of strong, watchful government. Only six months ago, he assured the Wall Street Journal that he is generally opposed to regulation, but today he is ready to control executive compensation, defend 401k accounts from corporate predators and impose renewed federal oversight of errant markets.
This populist rhetoric sounds strange, especially when emitted by a politician whose circle of advisers include former Sen. Phil Gramm, vice president of the scandal-tainted Union Bank of Switzerland, and John Thain, chief executive of the firm formerly known as Merrill Lynch. But when facing the angry voters who have watched their savings evaporate, the conservative Republican more hopes to sound more like a liberal Democrat again.
He wants to blur the differences between himself and Barack Obama on fundamental economic philosophy. But there is one critical issue where the Arizonan has established a record that cannot be escaped so easily.
Sen. McCain wants to privatize Social Security. It is a stance he has repeatedly taken over the past 10 years in recorded votes, interviews, speeches and documents. It is also a position that he will deny in this campaign. In fact he tried to deny it at a June town hall meeting in New Hampshire, when he declared, "I'm not for, quote, privatizing Social Security. I never have been. I never will be." But the contrary evidence is overwhelming.
As long ago as 1998, several years before the Bush administration sought to promote privatization, he voted to partially replace Social Security with private accounts. He included privatization in the economic platform of his 2000 presidential campaign. He spoke out in support of the White House's ill-fated push for privatization during the spring of 2005. And when that plan started to sink into oblivion, despite an advertising and public relations budget that exceeded $50 million, he tried to save it.
Sen. McCain was still pushing the Bush plan earlier this year, when he needed to persuade his own party's ultra-rightists to accept him as their nominee. During the same interview when he told the Journal editors that he generally opposes regulation, he explained his plan to "reform" Social Security. "I believe that private savings accounts are a part of it," he said, "along the lines that President Bush proposed."
Obviously such remarks no longer serve Sen. McCain's political purposes, and certainly won't attract voters, who never liked the Bush plan -- and probably like those ideas even less as they watch the market ravage their pension funds and equity accounts. Listening to the Republican nominee promise this week to "protect "their retirement accounts, they might wonder how he will do that when so much of the value of those accounts has disappeared already. They might also wonder what would happen to the elderly and other beneficiaries of Social Security if the privatizers like him had succeeded in consigning their future to the same Wall Street sharks he now denounces for their greed and irresponsibility.

McCain's Fiscal Unsoundness

John McCain's fiscal skills are almost as good as his Internet skills (using email should be a prerequisite to being president). 

It seems the only thing McCain has going for him is that he was a war hero, and he'll protect the rich folk from tax increase. 

Obama had the foresight and judgment on Iraq and Afghanistan. 

McCain can spin it if he likes -- "the surge worked"--but that's getting old and isn't convincing either. Bush McCain keep talking about the surge as if it was a brilliant strategy. All it did was add more troops because of the Bush administration's ineffectiveness (that's a gentle word choice).  

On economics, it's no contest. Obama hands down. 

Frank Rich: Mr. McCain’s fiscal ineptitude has received so little scrutiny in some press quarters that his chief economic adviser, the former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, got a free pass until the moment he self-immolated on video by whining about “a nation of whiners.” The McCain-Gramm bond, dating back 15 years, is more scandalous than Mr. Obama’s connection with his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Mr. McCain has been so dependent on Mr. Gramm for economic policy that he sent him to newspaper editorial board meetings, no doubt to correct the candidate’s numbers much as Joe Lieberman cleans up after his confusions of Sunni and Shia.

Just two weeks before publicly sharing his thoughts about America’s “mental recession,” Mr. Gramm laid out equally incendiary views in a Wall Street Journal profile that portrayed him as “almost certainly” the McCain choice for Treasury secretary. Mr. Gramm said that the former chief executive of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, was “probably the most exploited worker in American history” since he received only a $158 million pay package rather than the “billions” he deserved for his success in growing Southwestern Bell.

But no one in the news media seemed to notice Mr. Gramm’s naked expression of the mind-set he’d bring to a McCain White House. And few journalists have vetted the presumptive Treasury secretary’s post-Senate history as an executive at UBS. The stock of that banking giant has lost 70 percent of its value in a year after its reckless adventures in the subprime lending market. It’s now fending off federal investigation for helping the megarich avoid taxes.

Mr. McCain made a big show of banishing Mr. Gramm after his whining “gaffe,” but it’s surely at most a temporary suspension. When the candidate said back in January that there’s nobody he knows who is stronger on economic issues than his old Senate pal, he was telling the truth. Left to his own devices — or those of his new No. 1 economic surrogate, Carly Fiorina — Mr. McCain is clueless. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, a supporter, said that Mr. McCain’s latest panacea for high gas prices, offshore drilling, is snake oil — and then announced his availability to serve as energy czar in an Obama administration.

McCain's Economy Bust

Alas, the NYT gets off of slamming Obama and gets back to slamming McCain, who was blowing a lot of smoke last week. See, McCain doesn't have a plan for the economy because he doesn't believe anything is fundamentally wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with the wealthiest getting the tax cuts, according to McCain. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy work for McCain.

NYT: All of that made it more clear than ever why this nation desperately needs the next president to have a clear-eyed vision for the economy — and the federal budget in particular. And yet, the biggest news that Senator John McCain made last week was his renewal of a pledge to balance the federal budget by 2013. How? Who knows?

Mr. McCain’s main campaign promises, if fulfilled, would lead to huge budget deficits. Extending the Bush tax cuts, enacting more tax cuts of his own and staying the course in Iraq would cost hundreds of billions of dollars more, every year, than the small bore spending cuts he has specified. Mr. McCain cannot balance the budget on a crusade against pork and a one-year freeze in a sliver of federal spending. Either he has a secret plan to balance the budget or he’s blowing smoke.

The Democratic Ad Against McCain

The ad highlights the McCain-Bush economy.

The McCainPedia.

McCain's affinity for craps (not crap, craps, gambling).

Lack of "Experience" Claim Won't Beat Obama

john mccain getting a vision will.
i didn't say that. this article by mort kondracke at realclearpolitics, which by the way is a terrific site that has the latest delegate counts and a collection of serious articles of the day, says that's what mccain is lacking.
i'll agree with that.
and it's a better option for trying to beat obama, certainly better than the underhanded tactics as of late. but obama has more than just a vision. he's got the leadership style to carry it out.

there's a lot of good stuff in this story. it highlights what mccain needs while at the same time highlights obama's strengths. there are some jabs at obama:

McCain hopes to show that Obama represents nothing but "an eloquent but empty call for change" and a return to liberal big government. He has every right to do so. Obama is short on accomplishments, especially of the bipartisan variety.

but it's all of what's to come. read on:

While some polls show that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is running even with Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) in general election matchups, the Republican has to be considered the underdog -- and will need a compelling positive vision for America to catch up.

McCain needs to advance a reformist-conservative alternative to Obama's "Yes, We Can" appeal -- perhaps updating his 2000 Theodore Roosevelt image -- and focus on the economy and health care as well as national security.

McCain said this week that if the Iraq War goes badly between now and November, "I lose," but it's not necessarily true that if Iraq goes well, he wins.

He ought to. On what used to be the most important issue in America, McCain was one of a bare handful of politicians, including Republicans, who believed America had to win the war and could.

If, this fall, the evidence shows he was correct, his Democratic opponent -- presumably Obama, but Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), too -- ought to be discredited as a potential commander in chief for advocating withdrawal and losing the war, as they do even now.

Sadly, though, politics doesn't work that way. History is strewn with leaders cast aside after a war because their countrymen wanted to "move on." The list includes Winston Churchill and George H.W. Bush -- and this war is not likely to be as decisively won as theirs were.

The country already has "moved on," making the economy Issue One, followed by health care, energy, education and immigration.

McCain is going to have to play both offense and defense on the economy -- proving that he does not represent, as Obama charges, "George Bush's third term," and that Obama's tax increases will be disastrous for the economy and that his own economic vision will produce growth, opportunity and higher incomes for workers.

Right now, Americans don't believe in Republican economics, and McCain is especially vulnerable because he has flip-flopped on Bush's tax cuts, once declaring them gifts to the rich and now saying he wants to extend them.

McCain is going to have to teach economics to a doubting country -- and, first, he is going to have to learn some himself. He also might want to select a running mate who is an expert on the subject, say former Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) or even his detested former rival, Mitt Romney.
rest at rcp

Obama’s speeches
Obama's legislative accomplishments
Obama’s mathematical delegate lead
what are presidential qualities?
Roosevelt was called inexperienced

Historians for Obama