Barack Obama’s well known campaign message is “Yes We Can.” John McCain, however, seems to be saying “No We Can’t.” Why can’t we? Well, because McCain has no plans. The McCain campaign is seriously lacking in the planning department.
Analysts caution that both McCain and Barack Obama have produced policy pronouncements that are just as much election documents as workable proposals; after all, that is what presidential candidates do. But when it comes to the metric of paper produced, McCain trails Obama in spelling out the nitty-gritty.
“The Obama people are much more detailed,” said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan advocacy group dedicated to balancing the budget.
That’s just what we need, a president with no plan. Let’s say, for example that you want to know McCain’s plan for Social Security. Good luck figuring that out. The Wall Street Journal noticed that John McCain himself doesn’t seem to be quite sure:
On Sunday, he said on national television that to solve Social Security “everything’s on the table,” which of course means raising payroll taxes. On July 7 in Denver he said: “Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won’t.”
This isn’t a flip-flop. It’s a sex-change operation.
He got back to the subject Tuesday in Reno, Nev. Reporters asked about the Sunday tax comments. Mr. McCain replied, “The worst thing you could do is raise people’s payroll taxes, my God!” Then he was asked about working with Democrats to fix Social Security, and he repeated, “everything has to be on the table.” But how can . . .? Oh never mind.
Yesterday he was in Aurora, Colo., to wit: “On Social Security, he [Sen. Obama] wants to raise Social Security taxes. I am opposed to raising taxes on Social Security. I want to fix the system without raising taxes.”
Great, let’s elect the guy who has no idea what he’s going to do when he gets into office.
Oh but I forgot! McCain does have a plan for our energy crisis. He’s going to make sure we drill offshore. What are economists saying about that plan?
When McCain has focused on domestic policy, it has generally been to offer headline-grabbing plans, such as his proposal for a gas tax holiday and his claim that allowing offshore drilling could have an immediate effect on gas prices, both of which were almost universally derided by economists across the ideological spectrum. [The Politico]
And Paul Krugman says:
Most criticism of John McCain’s decision to follow the Bush administration’s lead and embrace offshore drilling as the answer to high gas prices has focused on the accusation that it’s junk economics — which it is.
A McCain campaign ad says that gas prices are high right now because “some in Washington are still saying no to drilling in America.” That’s just plain dishonest: the U.S. government’s own Energy Information Administration says that removing restrictions on offshore drilling wouldn’t lead to any additional domestic oil production until 2017, and that even at its peak the extra production would have an “insignificant” impact on oil prices.
What’s even more important than Mr. McCain’s bad economics, however, is what his reversal on this issue — he was against offshore drilling before he was for it — says about his priorities.
How are so many people even considering voting for this guy?
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