Matt Yglesias

Mac Wants to be Back Again

I’d been assuming that John McCain wouldn’t run for Senate again in 2010. For one thing, defeated presidential nominees tend not to want to hang around the halls of the Senate (witness John Kerry’s desperate quest for a cabinet position). For another thing, he’s really old — if he gets re-elected in 2010, he’ll be eighty by the time the term ends. On top of which, he has a really great life — eight houses, thirteen cars, all the rest. Why not enjoy it?

Lurking in the background as the obvious challenger is Arizona governor Janet Napolitano who got re-elected in 2006 and is broadly popular in the state. Of course, McCain’s popular, too. It’d be an interesting matchup to watch. Despite his long service in congress, the 2008 presidential election was the first time in his life that he faced a competitive race against a Democrat (he had a tough primary to get into the House, and of course noteworthy primary campaigns in 2000 and 2008). It didn’t go very well. 2010 would be a second bite at the apple.

The McCain Health Care Plan

National Review editor Rich Lowry offered his prescription for what ails the GOP and says various sensible things before turning his sites on the McCain health care plan. Unlike a lot of aspects of McCain’s campaign, Lowry likes this initiative — subjecting employer-provided benefits to taxes, then offsetting the giant tax hike with a tax credit that, over time, would come to be worth less-and-less relative to the cost of health care — praising it as “innovative, representing years of work by conservative policy wonks to develop an alternative both to the current employer-based system and to government-heavy liberal plans.”

Lowry thinks this plan was unfairly subjected to attacks (from this quarter among others) as a tax increase because “tax would have been more than offset in the vast majority of cases by the new credit.” Lowry thinks the plan wasn’t adequately defended because “McCain didn’t seem to have a firm grasp on his own plan, and the Obama campaign successfully distorted it as a huge new tax increase.” I actually think Lowry doesn’t have a firm grasp on the plan. The size of the credit would be scaled to the CPI, but health care costs grow faster than inflation, so over time there would be a tax increase. Indeed, as I’ll explain shortly, this was the point of the plan.

Interestingly, after he’s done with his discussion of health care, Lowry says that “At times, conservatives seemed bizarrely at odds with public sentiment.” In fact, I’d say the health care issue was one of those times.

Most Americans would define “the health care problem” as consisting of inadequate health insurance or fear of imminent inadequacy. Many Americans don’t have health insurance. Others have health insurance but it’s very minimal. Others have good coverage on paper, but are frustrated to discover in practice that their insurer will struggle mightily to get out of paying for things that the patient/customer feels should be covered. And yet others are simply worried that if this or that happens, or if they do this or that, they’ll find themselves in one of the previous categories. The animating impulse of the McCain plan was that this whole definition of the problem was wrong. Instead, the conservative view is that the government, by offering a large tax subsidy to employer-sponsored insurance, is creating a situation in which people have too much insurance. If there were less health insurance overall, the feeling goes, total health care expenditures would be lower and people would have more other stuff. What’s more, the right feels that this situation would create incentives for people to be more discriminating customers, so that the reductions would come disproportionately from the “waste” column of the medical expenditures table.

I think this view of the matter isn’t entirely wrong. But the crude outline of the McCain plan suffered from a lot of defects. Most notably, I would say, an indifference to distributional issues and to the value of preventive care. This paper from Jason Furman (or see Ezra Klein’s shorter and somewhat clearer account of the paper) who, in virtue of McCain losing, will now be in a position to do something about it, contains some very smart thinking about how to apply the truth of this insight in a non-disastrous way. But instead of addressing the main substantive defects of his plan, what Team McCain did was try to address what they saw as the main political vulnerability of the plan — the charge that it was a tax increase. They did this through the tax credit.

In practice, however, all that did was phase the increase in more slowly — ultimately, if your plan is to remove a tax subsidy for something, you’ve got to remove the subsidy. Indeed, I would say that McCain’s real problem in this regard was simply that his tax plan was so hugely regressive that absent the credit most middle- and working-class families would have seen a net tax increase. If he’d had a less regressive tax policy (as, indeed, he had in 2001-2003) he maybe could have squared the circle in an easier way. But that still would have left him with an extremely crude health care proposal that would have been pretty sharply at odds with what most voters are looking for in a health plan.

Atonement

Frank Foer speaks for many once and future McCain admirers:

As a one-time admirer of John McCain, I was grateful to see him at his patriotic, eloquent best tonight. It harkened back to his performance during the first half of the Bush administration, when he was one of the best spokesmen for a progressive agenda in Washington. During the past campaign, I wondered if his performance during those years was an aberration. Was he only driven to the left by his hatred for George W. Bush and his despicable performance in the 2000 primary? Or was he a decent man with humane instincts who had never thought about the world very hard—but had the capability for genuine outrage when confronted with injustice?

McCain made a devil’s deal when he decided to run for the presidency this cycle. He reconciled himself with George W. Bush’s party and the Karl Rove style of dirty politics. His flip-flops were some of the most absurd in recent history. My reading is that he clearly didn’t feel comfortable with this new persona. You could see it in his unease in interviews and his overall moodiness. My guess is that he’s going to spend the next few years atoning for his performance these past couple of months—and the fact that he’s about to become a piñata of the right will likely drive him further in that direction.

Since I was never a McCain fanboy, I never felt the sense of betrayal and anger than some did. But by the same token, I think there’s no atoning for this. McCain’s not a young man who can learn his lesson and do better next time. In 2000, he ran a high-toned campaign as long as it suited him, and then endorsed the Confederate Flag when he thought that’s what he had to do to win. When he lost, he “atoned.” Then in 2008, he went through the whole rotten cycle again. A man who violates the dictates of his honor whenever it’s convenient, and apologizes for doing so only after his opportunistic gambits fail, is not a man of honor at all.

Or think about it another way. If John McCain had never backed off the McCain-Lieberman climate change bill, and had never gone against his previous beliefs by embracing “drill baby drill” and coal demagoguery then it seems to me that the legislative prospects for some kind of serious cap and trade bill would, today, be considerably better than they are. And if we fail to take serious action in the near term, real and very dire consequences will befall the world — especially portions of the developing world where the resources to “adapt” don’t exists. The lives of millions of people hang in the balance over this, and I doubt the people of Bangladesh and the world’s island nations are going to care very much about McCain’s atonement-oriented words or his “humane instincts.” I hope he’ll flip-flop back to a decent position on these now, but nevertheless doing so now won’t have nearly the impact that having stuck to his guns when it counted could have.

Joementum

Kevin Drum on the final days of McCainism:

But the genuinely weird part of it is McCain’s bizarre embrace of Joe. It’s one thing to use the guy as a campaign prop, but to tell the world that it was Joe who “turned the whole thing around”? That Joe is his personal “role model”? You gotta be kidding. Those aren’t things you’d want to admit even if they were true, are they?

It’s fascinating to me how McCain, who spent so much of 1999-2005 at loggerheads with elements of the conservative base, keeps forgetting the distinction between things that make the base excited and things that help his campaign. Sarah Palin is the obvious example, but Joe is in some ways a deeper and truer example. The idea behind the Joe the Plumber saga is that Barack Obama would be bad for people like Joe, a small business owner who is (putatively) prosperous enough to be hit by Obama’s tax hikes on people with over $250,000 in annual income. Of course Joe doesn’t actually earn that much. But if he had, Joe would just be the very model of a hard-core Republican. Whites are more Republican than non-whites. Men are more Republican than women. Small business owners are more Republican than any other occupational group. High-income people are more Republican than are middle-class and poor people. And among white people, those with no college degree are more Republican than those with college degrees.

Thus, a white male small-business owner practicing a blue collar trade and earning enough money to be hit by Obama’s tax hikes is nothing other than the Platonic Ideal of a Republican (think Tom DeLay when he owned a successful bug-killing business). Republican crowds go wild for Joe because they can identify with him. But by the same token, the people who identify with Joe are the Republican base. They can’t turn this thing around. And they’re certainly not the people you’re supposed to be talking to in October. It’d be as if Barack Obama were criss-crossing the country with a young, hip lesbian acting as his main surrogate to attack McCain’s health care plan.

Cheney’s No Obamacon

Dick Cheney throws his covered endorsement behind the McCain-Palin ticket:

Obama campaign’s been sending this around gleefully to their press lists.

McCain: Nuclear Safety “Blah Blah Blah”

John McCain mocking the idea of nuclear safety seems about on a par with his air quotes around women’s health, but the fact that the whole audience shares his scorn for the idea that nuclear plants should be safe is odd:

The policy argument that our ability to use nuclear power on naval vessels indicates its safety is curious. For one thing, active duty military personnel are, as a matter of course, asked to undergo risks to their personal safety that we don’t routinely ask of civilians. Fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan isn’t safe, but the Army does it anyway — that’s their job. In the specific context of sea-based military operations, nuclear power has some unique advantages — you can’t make a solar powered submarine. But to conclude that because nuclear power works well in that context it’s obviously a good idea to provide large subsidies for civilian nuclear power is pretty odd. Meanwhile, they’re not storing nuclear waste for the long-term on naval vessels and it’s finding a safe way to store the waste that’s the big logistical challenge for large-scale civilian nuclear power.

The Fates

To be clear, I don’t think that denying that John McCain’s political problems are a result of poor political tactics is equivalent to saying he’s a “victim of circumstances.” He’s a victim of the dual facts that George W. Bush has made the Republican Party extremely unpopular, and of the fact that the national economy has been heading downhill all year.

But neither of those are just vague “circumstances” or bad luck they largely follow from the fact that policies McCain has embraced have had bad consequences. But to me the main difference between 2004 and 2008 isn’t that Bush’s campaign was run by evil geniuses and McCain’s is run by inept fools, the difference is that actual conditions got worse.

McCain: Vote for Me and I’ll Create an International Crisis

Lately, John McCain’s been trying to dine out on Joe Biden’s weird remark that electing Barack Obama would somehow prompt others to “test” him within six months. But the rhetoric around it is a bit weird:

“I have been tested,” McCain said, with a certain gritted-teeth look at the state fairgrounds in New Mexico. “I’m gonna test them. They’re not gonna test me.”

So rather than respond to an international crisis provoked by others, McCain intends to provoke one himself? Why? Sounds dangerous.

The Hoax

I didn’t want to blog about this business because it seemed like a hoax but it would be unseemly to accuse a victim of perpetrating a hoax just based on general intuition. But for the record, Ashley Todd has admitted she was lying about the idea that a black man mugged her, sexually assaulted her, and scratched a “B” into her cheek because she had a McCain bumper sticker on her car. Matt Corley observes that before the hoax was exposed, Fox News Executive VP John Moody, a Pittsburgh native, had some provocative thoughts on the matter:

If Ms. Todd’s allegations are proven accurate, some voters may revisit their support for Senator Obama, not because they are racists (with due respect to Rep. John Murtha), but because they suddenly feel they do not know enough about the Democratic nominee.

If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.

Of course the McCain campaign could have done the smart thing and stayed circumspect about this until all the facts were in. But instead they decided to try and exploit it.

Don’t Know Much About the Budget

John McCain likes to run around the country touting his neo-Hooverite spending freeze, but it seems that almost every time he’s challenged on a specific program, he decides to exempt that one. Now we can add NASA to the list. Ali Frick rounds up all the various exemptions and reminds us that we’ve seen this before when he decided to back off promises to eliminate aid to Israel and cut military housing programs under the aegis of earmark reduction.

McCain’s Social Security Alternative Universe

Josh Marshall watches John McCain talk about Social Security with Wolf Blitzer and is astounded:

McCain fabricated an alternative history of the 2005 Social Security battle in order to create a new tax talking points. According to McCain, and he repeated this again and again, “the [Social Security] talks broke down because the Democrats insisted as a precondition that we raise taxes.”

That’s very weird. First, there were no Social Security talks. And the Democrats didn’t make any demands to raise taxes. They didn’t even propose raising taxes. As many of you know, I followed that debate extremely closely. And McCain just made this stuff out of whole cloth. Really bizarre.

Right. What happened was that Bush proposed privatizing Social Security. Democrats said “no.” Then Bush said there was a crisis and we needed to respond by privatizing Social Security. Democrats responded that there was no crisis and privatizing Social Security would be a bad idea. Then Bush called for everyone to get together and reform Social Security in a bipartisan way. Democrats said they were open to holding some bipartisan negotiations about the projected long-run financing of Social Security if Bush would take the concept of privatization off the table. Bush refused, and suddenly, albeit accurately, stopped proclaiming the existence of a crisis. At this point, many Republicans who backed Bush’s privatization effort started pretending they’d done something else.

John McCain, Socialist

Eight years ago when John McCain was less crazy, he offered a full-throated defense of the progressive income tax, specifically acknowledged that people with no income tax liability nonetheless deserve tax cuts, and denied that any of this was socialism:

But desperate times call for something something.

Spreading the Wealth Around

Charles Babbington has an excellent AP piece noting that John McCain’s newfound notion that progressive income taxes are socialism runs contrary to American history:

John McCain is pouncing on Barack Obama’s call for shifting more wealth from richer Americans to poorer ones, likening it to socialism. His remarks win applause at campaign events. But they ignore the nation’s long tradition of redistributing huge amounts of wealth through tax-and-spending policies.

Placing a heavier burden on the wealthy has been a cornerstone of the federal income tax since its inception in 1913. [...] As for the claim that Obama might turn the Internal Revenue Service into a “giant welfare agency,” liberal groups note that the number of Americans on welfare fell by more than 60 percent after a 1996 overhaul of the program approved by President Clinton.

For several years, a strong economy and social safety net programs helped many families avoid poverty. However, the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities says the recent economic downturn “has coincided with a sharp increase in food prices, which has exacerbated hardship for many low-income families who also face high gas prices (and will face high home heating bills this fall and winter).”

Of course, one might further note that John McCain himself supports progressive income taxes. Back during 2001-2003, he sounded like a downright liberal, worrying about the inegalitarian implications of the Bush administration tax policies that he now supporters. But even in his current right-wing phase McCain isn’t supporting a flat tax or Chambliss/Huckabee-style “fair tax” nonsense.

Scandal!

John McCain on Barack Obama’s fundraising success: “I’m saying that history shows us where unlimited amounts of money are in political campaigns, it leads to scandal.”

I’m a supporter of full public financing of political campaigns. I can only hope that John McCain’s experience of getting pummeled at fundraising will lead him to join that cause. For years, though, McCain’s been opposed to that kind of far-reaching reform, thinking that the only good kind of campaign finance reform is the kind that’s predicted to give the Republican Party an edge.

Meanwhile, I’m a little bit confused about the prospects for corruption here. In September, Barack Obama raised about $150,000,000. His average donor gave him $86 or 0.0000573 percent of the total. The maximum contribution anyone could have given him was $2,300 which comes out to 0.00092 percent of the total September haul. Someone responsible for 0.00092 percent of Obama’s total warchest doesn’t have any meaningful levers of influence over Obama. The nature of a huge haul from a giant pool of donors is that there’s no real prospect for corruption.

I think you could fairly say that issues of corruption aside, the Obama Method is still troubling insofar as it involves a systematic class bias in favor of politicians who appeal to the kind of people likely to make campaign contributions — i.e., relatively prosperous people. Of course this problem also applies to the way McCain is financing his campaign. The only solution would be full public financing of campaigns. Which would be a good idea. But it’s an idea McCain has long opposed.

Alec Poitevint

Marc Ambinder reports:

Republican party insiders say that operatives close to Sen. John McCain’s campaign are pushing Alec Poitevint, the former state party chairman of Georgia and a member of the Republican National Committee, to run for the RNC chairman’s position.

But if McCain loses, is anyone going to care what operatives close to McCain’s campaign think? McCain wasn’t exactly a hugely popular figure among conservative activists twelve months ago, and political figures rarely make themselves look better by losing.

McCain: Let’s Destroy the Economy for the Sake of an Anology

Watch in amazement as John McCain promises to make the government “live on a budget, just like you do”:

The first thing to say about this is that it would be silly for the government to behave “just like you do” when the government doesn’t otherwise resemble you in any respect. Sound budgeting practices for a 27 year-old blogger are very different from sound budgeting practices for a 72 year-old multimillionaire Senator. That’s common sense. But suppose we were comparing me not to a 72 year-old multimillionaire Senator, but to a 232 year-old immortal abstract concept that’s able to print money and legally coerce people into giving it money? Well, that would be a very different situation, indeed. Or so you might think.

Another way of thinking about what’s wrong with this idea is that how much money it’s prudent to borrow has something to do with the terms on which you can borrow it. Credit card debt comes at an extremely high interest rate, so the prudent person should avoid amassing any unless there’s absolutely no alternative. But at the moment the federal government can borrow money on very favorable terms, so it’s worth doing so if there’s anything useful on which to spend the money.

But last, connect the “spending freeze” part of this to the “just like you” part. “You” need to cut back on spending because of the bad times. That means other people will get their hands on less of your money. And then McCain wants the government to also cut back on spending. Meanwhile, state and local government has to cut back on spending. But if consumers cut spending at the same time businesses are reducing investment and state and local government are cutting spending and then the federal government also reduces spending well, then, everyone is going to be spending less and less. Which means everyone is going to be earning less and less. And things are just going to get worse and worse. Oftentimes it’s possible to break this cycle without large-scale deficit spending because the Fed can lower interest rates, which makes it easier to borrow and spurs new investments. But the nature of the current crisis is that this won’t work. If the federal government cuts back on spending then we’re going to go down the drain.

Cell Tower

It’s still the case that my new house gets lousy AT&T service. I’d like to get a special tower set up only for my benefit. But I can’t get it. It seems, though, that John McCain can. Despite his campaign’s denials, and despite Verizon’s denials, it’s increasingly clear that Verizon did in fact try quite hard to install a permanent tower on the McCain ranch at the request of Cindy McCain. Meanwhile, McCain is the top Senator on the committee that regulates Verizon. It looks pretty corrupt to me.

UPDATE: A little vintage McCain:

“The appearance of it was wrong,” McCain said. “It’s a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do.”

Of course these days McCain denies he did anything wrong related to the Keating 5.

McCain and Liddy

It seems that David Letterman had the guts to do what noone else in the press has done and question John McCain about some of his “questionable associations,” specifically G. Gordon Liddy, the guy who was so crazy and crooked that the other insane criminals on the Nixon plumber squad had to restrain him. McCain told Letterman “I’m not in any was embarrassed to know Gordon Liddy.” Steve Benen observes:

That’s an interesting response. Liddy is, of course, a convicted felon who has “acknowledged preparing to kill someone during the Ellsberg break-in ‘if necessary’; plotting to murder journalist Jack Anderson; plotting with a ‘gangland figure’ to murder Howard Hunt to stop him from cooperating with investigators; plotting to firebomb the Brookings Institution; and plotting to kidnap ‘leftist guerillas’ at the 1972 Republican National Convention — a plan he outlined to the Nixon administration using terminology borrowed from the Nazis.” Liddy also once famously gave his supporters advice on how best to kill federal officials (he recommended shooting them in the head because they might be wearing flak jackets).

Despite this scandalous past, McCain has accepted thousands of dollars in contributions from Liddy, attended a fundraiser in his honor at Liddy’s home, and told Liddy that he’s “proud of” him.

Also remember, Liddy can be fairly described as “unrepentant.” When asked if he regretted his felonies, “A vein twitches angrily on one of his scales, but he replies in a level voice, ‘No.’”

McCain is proud to know a man who had no regrets about his serious crimes against American democracy.

Smile With Your Eyes

Via Chris Hayes, the America’s Next Top Model crowd offers John McCain some advice:

Indeed.

Customer Service

The AT&T signal quality inside the Flophouse is deplorable and the situation at my new place is, if anything, even worse. Too bad I don’t chair the committee that regulates telecom firms, if I did I might be able to get them to install a special cell tower just for me.

Things to Worry About

Nagourney & Bumiller report:

After a turbulent week that included disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin and signs that Senator John McCain was struggling to strike the right tone for his campaign, Republican leaders said Saturday that they were worried Mr. McCain was heading for defeat unless he brought stability to his presidential candidacy and settled on a clear message to counter Senator Barack Obama.

The concern here is touching, but it seems pretty obvious that McCain’s problems have less to do with his campaign tactics and “message” than they do with events in the world. Either McCain is the victim of bad luck, or else he’s the victim bad conservative policies producing bad results, but however you see that it’s pretty far-fetched to think that more clever campaign gambits could have pulled this out for him.

The Shadow Knows

Last night at the debate, John McCain kept insisting that he’ll get Osama bin Laden and he knows how to do it:

If McCain knows how to get Osama, I can understand his reluctance to describe the details of the plan to a globally televised audience. But couldn’t he have taken the opportunity sometime over the past seven years to tell George W. Bush?

McCain’s First Letter to Edwin Gray

This may be shocking to learn, but back in the 1980s we had a situation where a lot of financial firms that made a ton of money through real estate investments that eventually went bad and wound up leaving taxpayers to hold the bag. Why didn’t someone do something to stop them from putting taxpayer money at risk? Well, in part because the moneymen were able to curry favor with politicians who benefited from their largess, and those politicians were, in turn, able to help stymie regulatory efforts. For example, when John McCain wasn’t partying with Charles Keating at the latter’s resort in the Bahamas, he was signing letters like this one to Edwin Gray, Chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board:

The purpose of this letter is to express our concern over Board Resolution No. 84-227, which would impose arbitrary limits on the ability of an insured state-chartered savings and loan association to invest in real estate, service corporations, and equity securities. While we appreciate the FHLB’s concern over FSLIC’s responsibility for insured institutions, we question whether the approach expressed by this proposed rule is the correct one.

Of course the purpose of the “arbitrary” limits was to reduce taxpayer exposure to the risks Keating was taking. But Keating wanted to make as much money as possible playing with house money. And McCain wanted as much of Keating’s money as was possible. So McCain wrote the letter, and taxpayers wound up paying the bills once the shit hit the fan.

Of Authors And Books

Newsweek’s Jon Meacham on John McCain:

John McCain is a man of accomplishment and curiosity, of wide and deep reading, travel and experience. He is smart without being a snob. He has authored legislation and books. He is a man of parts—the kind of figure whom one could effortlessly imagine being president.

Um . . . Mark Salter wrote those books. I wrote a book. Meacham’s written books. McCain, not so much. Barack Obama really wrote Dreams From My Father and Jim Webb’s written books, but other politicians’ sign their names to work done by professionals. I think that’s a sensible thing to do, but surely we don’t all need to go pretend that’s not what’s happening. Give McCain credit for the fact that every copy I’ve ever seen of one of “his” books features Salter’s name pretty prominently. There’s no big secret here.

Rep. Edwards Blasts McCain on Veterans’ Health

During the Presidential debate last week, John McCain made the following puzzling claim about his veterans’ policy:

I know the veterans. I know them well. And I know that they know that I’ll take care of them. And I’ve been proud of their support and their recognition of my service to the veterans. And I love them. And I’ll take care of them. And they know that I’ll take care of them. And that’s going to be my job.

Or, rather, the puzzling thing is that there’s no actual claim about his veterans’ policy here. Just an assertion that he loves veterans and therefore veterans know he’ll take care of them. In fact, veterans groups are deeply concerned about the specific proposals McCain has put forward on veterans health care. Vice President Representative Chet Edwards was in the office last week and talked about this:

Igor Volsky has more.