McCain’s age
Republicans are acting like any suggestion that McCain’s age makes him less qualified for the presidency is unfair and ageist, no different than sexism or racism. I really don’t see how this is true.
We’ve generally agreed that health is a relevant issue, with candidates expected to release medical records to prove there is no unusual danger of medical problems complicating their presidency. Age is a relevant health issue. Even if your most recent physical is excellent, at some point the fact that you’re very old means that health problems are likely in the not-so-distant future. People are still debating whether Ronald Reagan had memory problems while in office. Of course, you can never know, and anyone, even someone young, could end up with a health problem. Nevertheless, it seems like a legitimate concern and something that should be okay to talk about.
It’s true that some concerns regarding age are prejudiced and unfounded, but some are totally reasonable. I don’t know to what extent there are any serious age-related concerns about McCain, but I know I’d like to see a well-researched news article on the topic with the relevant statistics, and that won’t happen as long as even suggesting that age is a problem is seen as unfair.
Comparing McCain and Bush
Democrats seem very happy to tie McCain to Bush. The accusation that McCain would represent a “Bush third term” is incredibly common. It’s understandable. Bush is incredibly unpopular, his policies are failing, and the party he leads has lost most of its credibility. It seems like the obvious way to attack McCain. Just one problem — no one believes it. Well, some people believe it, but those people are voting for Democrats regardless of any strategic decisions made during the campaign. It’s not an attack that will work.
Most people, when they think of McCain, immediately picture him as a maverick Republican, willing to break with his party frequently to do what he thinks is right. This view isn’t completely unfounded. McCain can point to a large number of issues where he’s broken with the president. He supports stem cell research. He believes in global warming and using a carbon cap-and-trade system to slow it down. He criticized the handling of Katrina (not that that one took a ton of political courage). He called for Rumsfeld’s resignation long before it happened. He argued for increased troop levels in Iraq long before the surge (a strategy that would obviously have at least led to things being better than they are now). He was part of the moderate gang of 14 that created a compromise on judges. The list goes on — not to mention that McCain ran against Bush in 2000 and was only beaten after the Bush campaign used some very nasty campaign tactics. Sure, he campaigned for Bush in 2004, but most see that as a statement of general agreement rather than unwavering support.
Most importantly, perhaps, beyond any particular issue, is the fact that McCain is just more intelligent/competent than Bush. Most of the biggest mistakes of the Bush administration weren’t issues of explicit policy choices. No one chose to leave hundreds of people in New Orleans without any help. What they did choose to do was appoint a political crony as head of FEMA, rather than someone who knew what they were doing. People chose to invade Iraq, but that wouldn’t have been a particularly insane decision if Iraq really did have WMDs, and if the resources necessary to ensure a swift and thoroughly successful follow-up were really devoted to the effort. The Bush administration seems to have been a closed-off echo chamber, where critical thought that differed with accepted dogma were squashed and loyalty was valued over competence. It also simply has a person at the top who is unable to really make intelligent decisions for himself and relies on his top aids, resulting in infighting and a lack of accountability. McCain, at least at first glance, seems to be much better when it comes to these kinds of shortcomings.
When Obama and friends characterize McCain as no different than Bush, I really think most people find the claim unbelievable. Instead it makes Obama look more partisan and less like the new, more honest politician that he claims to be. This is not to say an attack along these lines is not justified or feasible. It just needs to be toned down to a believable level. Maybe calling McCain “Bush lite” would work better. Or criticize McCain on specific issues. He is actually not that different than Bush on a lot of things — he just seems to be because of the disagreement on high-profile but frequently (somewhat) minor issues. He wants to continue the Bush Iraq policy and foreign policy more generally. He wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Those kinds of things can be stated. They’ll have a similar aggregate effect. They will also, I feel, be much more readily accepted by the audience.
The other thing that needs to be done is to undermine the overall McCain persona. There are two ways to do this. One is to say the actual perception is flawed. In a couple ways this is true, most notably the extent to which McCain does and has relied on lobbyists to run his campaign. It’s pretty hypocritical to make it illegal for them to donate large amounts to your campaign, but then allow them to work for you full-time for months in what might otherwise be high paying jobs as volunteers. That doesn’t have all the implied expectations problems that come with donations? On top of that, it gives them a ton of access. It also implies the kind of appointments in a future administration that could lead to something like Katrina.
The other way to undermine the perception is to talk about the “old McCain” and the “new McCain”. The narrative the Democrats can use (and which I think is largely accurate) is that after 2000, McCain felt he lost because he couldn’t get the party base to move towards him. He really wanted to be president, so he resolved to become more acceptable to the base. He spent 8 years becoming less of a maverick. He shifted from criticizing the religious right to courting them. Having initially opposed the Bush tax cuts, he switched to supporting them in the run-up to the primary. Emphasizing these and other changes not only makes McCain look inconsistent and political — views directly at odds with his image. They make the public in general more willing to accept a new narrative about McCain.
Let’s face it. McCain isn’t Bush, and he isn’t a generic Republican. He’d make a much better president than either of those. I’d still much prefer Obama, but the Republicans nominated the right person. Ignoring that will not make it go away — it’ll just make you look stupid.
Gas tax holiday still dumb
So, one of the sad things about starting this blog when we did was that I missed out on the chance to make fun of the idiotic gas tax holiday idea. Luckily for me, McCain brought it up again today, and I just can’t resist. I know I am far from the first to be amazed by how bad an idea this is, and by now most people with a brain understand it’s unwise. I don’t think, however, that the sheer magnitude of idiocy represented in this idea has fully sunk in, so I thought I’d add my two cents.
The main problem people seem to have with the proposal is that it is too small to have any meaningful effect and as such is more of a political ploy than a serious policy proposal. (The federal gas tax is 18.4 cents, which results in an average of somewhere around $30/month in savings for most people.) This is a totally valid criticism, but it’s answered reasonably easily with something along the lines of “Sure, it’s not enough to really solve the problem, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t at least a small help, and if the Washington elites [read: Obama] really cared about the little guy, they’d do every little thing they could.” Everyone knows that the attention on this minor proposal is political, but that doesn’t mean they’ll oppose the proposal. People are also worried (at least with McCain’s version — Clinton’s taxes oil companies to make up the difference) that it’ll either increase the deficit or reduce funding for transit. McCain, of course, plans to avoid this by magically pulling money out of “wasteful spending”. This is the apparently unlimited pool of money, of which the only specific item he’s labeled is earmarks — which he’s also going to use to pay for tax cuts, which he massively over-represents, and large portions of which are totally infeasible to cut. To add a bit of hilarity, in Tennessee, where he brought up the idea today, if this magical fiscal maneuver doesn’t work out and federal transportation money gets cut, the state gas tax automatically increases to make up the difference.
So, great, it’s a meaningless and ineffective campaign promise that has no hope of being passed. That’s dumb, but by no means unique. The real problem here is that whatever effect it does have will actually be incredibly harmful to the country. First, recognize that even the $30/month in savings will never happen, for reasons anyone who’s ever taken freshman economics will understand. Say the tax is eliminated, and prices fall that incredibly drastic 18.4 cents. The price producers receive for selling the gas won’t change (since the extra 18.4 cents previously went to the government, not them), so supply will remain unchanged, but the price consumers have to pay would be lower. That means the amount consumers want to buy will increase. Since previously supply and demand were at equal quantities, and now demand has increased, there will be a shortage. Markets solve shortages with upward pressure on prices, so the price will rise until there is no longer a shortage. In most markets this happens because the higher price partly lowers demand and partly increases supply, and the price would come to rest somewhat below the original price for savings, albeit by less than 18.4 cents. However, this is a somewhat unique circumstance, since the supply of gas is limited by the bottleneck of US refineries, which are already working near maximum capacity. That means in the short term supply can’t increase, so the shortage has to be eliminated entirely through a decrease in demand, which means lowering demand back to where it was before the tax decrease, which means raising the price up to where it was before the tax decrease… which means no savings. There will be plenty of extra profit for oil refineries, though. In the long term, this would mean people would build more refineries, and the price would go down some, but this tax break is only temporary, so it won’t even have that effect.
The consequences only get worse from there, though. Read more
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