Dan

Calabrese

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October 6, 2008

McCain Can’t Fully Rebut Obama If He’s Unwilling to Defend Bush

Advice abounds for John McCain on how to close the gap with Barack Obama and put himself back in a position to win the presidency. A lot of the advice is good. The best I’ve read comes from Bill Hobbs, who works for the Tennessee Republican Party and offers a 10-point strategy of messages and tactics that comprise about the best plan McCain could possibly embrace.

But McCain has created a problem for himself that may prevent him from taking good advice, and from actually trying a strategy that deals in the truth and effectively rebuts Obama’s most preposterous arguments.

McCain seems unwilling to do or say anything if it makes him look like he’s sticking up for the record of George W. Bush. President 29 Percent has been labeled by conventional wisdom as a political toxin, and McCain is afraid to touch.

Sometimes he can make this work, as with his argument about the surge (McCain argued for it long before Bush did it) and his arguments about spending and earmarks (McCain fought the spend-happy GOP Congress while Bush was choosing other battles).

But the leading economic arguments coming from Obama and Joe Biden are working, precisely because they assume everyone will believe the Bush-as-disaster template. Never has this been more evident than with the issue that has propelled Obama to a huge lead in the polls – the Wall Street meltdown and financial bailout.

Time and again, Obama and Biden repeat the nonsense that the problems in the capital markets are the “final verdict” on eight years of Bush economic policies. And time and again, McCain fails to rebut this preposterous fiction. If Bush’s free-market sensibilities had ruled policy, Fannie and Freddie would not have been putting taxpayer dollars at risk propping up these toxic mortgage deals. If Bush’s priorities had ruled the day, Congress would have put the clamps on this practice five years ago. Lord knows Bush tried. Lord knows a parade of Democrats cried bloody murder, and scared off the Republicans who ran the show on Capitol Hill by threatening to tar them all as poor-people-hating racists if they drew attention to the problem, let alone fix it.

This is incontrovertible fact, and if the voters knew it, it could propel McCain back into the lead. But McCain won’t tell them about it. Why? Because he would have to acknowledge that Bush did something right, and he’s afraid to do that.

It’s a larger problem that hogties McCain on the entire economic debate. When Obama goes around decrying economic policies that “gave tax breaks to the wealthiest 2 percent,” where is McCain to make the case that these tax breaks set in motion five years of unabated economic growth, and unemployment that was at historic lows until the Democrat-caused market meltdown brought about an employer panic?

McCain is on solid ground talking about the need to reduce the corporate tax rate, and it’s not hard to make the case that increasing corporate taxes during a slow economy is a bad idea. But you can’t fully rebut Obama’s arguments unless you’re willing to defend the better policy decisions of the past eight years, because Obama’s entire premise is that Bush policies are the cause of every problem America faces.

The maddening thing about all this is that, at least on substance, McCain can give Bush credit where it’s due and still be the maverick he wants to be. There’s nothing wrong with crediting Bush’s tax policies, but resolving to do better on spending. There’s nothing wrong with crediting Bush for passing Health Savings Accounts, but vowing to take the next step and change tax incentives to make people even less reliant on their employers for health care coverage.

But McCain is afraid to defend any portion of the Bush record, no matter how laudable, because conventional wisdom says McCain must Distance Himself From The Unpopular Bush, and McCain is scared to death to deviate from this course in any way.

As a result, he engages Obama on economic issues with one hand tied behind his back, forgoing the most powerful rebuttals of Obama’s arguments because these rebuttals would defend Bush, and nothing could be worse than that. So he lets Obama get away with whoppers about the economy, the bailout and any number of other issues.

That’s no way to win an argument, and it’s sure as hell no way to win an election.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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