Think Progress

McCain Adviser Holtz-Eakin’s Favorite Campaign Pledge: We’ll Get Around To Details Later»

Today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) will give a speech on health care in Florida, where he will offer broad platitudes about “chang[ing] the whole dynamic of the current system” and addressing “the the fundamental problems of cost and access.” Yet when legitimate questions have been raised about his health plans, McCain — and his chief economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin — have been absent on specifics. “So, a little more detail, but remember, it is April, and the election’s in November, so not everything will happen tomorrow or this week,” Holtz-Eakin told reporters yesterday.

Punting on the issues seems to be the only firm commitment Holtz-Eakin will give, whether he’s discussing McCain’s approach to climate change, his tax plan, or his health care policy:

ON SPENDING CUTS
– “Mr. Holtz-Eakin says the mistake that people are making is treating the McCain platform as if it were a finished piece of work. ‘It’s April,’ he said. ‘We have until November.’ The campaign will later unveil ‘base broadeners’ in the corporate tax code — that is, loopholes it will eliminate — that will pay for the faster investment write-offs, for example.” [NYT, 4/23/08]

ON CLIMATE POLICY
– “He [McCain] certainly would revise the bill [Lieberman-Warner] in light of what’s transpired, and I expect he’ll put out, during the course of the campaign, something like an updated version of his view of how it should go.” [Holtz-Eakin interview with Grist, 4/21/08]

– “I’m just going to defer until he [McCain] puts out the climate policy.” [Holtz-Eakin interview with Grist, 4/21/08]

ON HEALTH CARE
– “‘We are working on it,’ said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s top policy adviser. ‘We’ll put out more details. As we do, it will be clearer to people.’” [Boston Globe, 4/3/08]

ON McCAIN’S TAX PLAN
– “Having secured the Republican nomination, McCain now also seems uncomfortable with the huge tax cuts he proposed months ago, and the campaign seems to be searching for a course correction. Holtz-Eakin has said that McCain ‘is by no means done making tax proposals.‘” [CBS News, 4/20/08]

The Straight Talk express apparently can’t navigate through specifics.

McCain On Whether Americans Are Better Off Under Bush: ‘Oh, No. No’»

This morning on NBC’s Today Show, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) attempted to distance himself from President Bush on the economy. When host Meredith Viera asked McCain whether Americans are “better off, by any means, than we were eight years ago,” McCain replied, “Oh, no. No.” Watch it:

McCain made a similar comment on Bloomberg TV on April 18, stating, “In fact, I think Americans are not better off than they were eight years ago, when you look at what’s happened to middle-income Americans.”

As ThinkProgress has previously noted, these comments contradict a claim McCain made last week, where he lauded the “great progress economically” during the past seven years of the Bush administration:

MR. COOK: You think if Americans were asked, are you better off today than you were before George Bush took office more than seven years ago, what answer would they give? […]

SEN. MCCAIN: I think if you look at the overall record and millions of jobs have been created, et cetera, et cetera, you could make an argument that there’s been great progress economically over that period of time. But that’s no comfort. That’s no comfort to families now that are facing these tremendous economic challenges.

So therefore, despite all this “great progress,” Americans are still not “better off.” In order to explain this logical inconsistency, McCain has resorted to blaming it on the American public. On January, he said that economic problems were just “psychological.”

Despite the admitted lack of economic progress over the past seven years, McCain wants to continue Bush’s failed policies — double Bush’s tax cuts, cut anti-poverty programs, and rehash a hands-off approach to solving the housing crisis.

Transcript: Read the rest of this entry »

McCain Bends His Pledge To Eliminate All Earmarks Again: I Will Judge Spending Cuts ‘On The Basis Of Need’»

On the campaign trail, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) makes a big show of claiming that he is the “worst nightmare” of Congressional spending and that if elected, he “will veto every bill with earmarks.” At the same time, McCain’s campaign has said it will “cut some $160 billion in discretionary spending” out of the budget, including $95 billion that “began life as an earmark.”

But in an interview with NPR’s Robert Siegel yesterday, McCain bent his earmark elimination pledge, indicating that he would consider making an exception for projects like the Gee’s Bend ferry that he recently visited in Alabama:

SIEGEL: Why should voters, particularly in those places, believe that you’d do any better by them than other politicians, especially when you might even take away the earmarks that might bring them a new construction project or something like that?

SEN. MCCAIN: I can assure them that the earmarks that they have received, which have been few and far between because they are not represented by powerful lobbyists and special interests in Washington, that we will judge any expenditure of the American people’s tax dollars on the basis of need. Someone pointed out several earmarks that have been fortunately gifted to some of the neediest people in comparison to the earmarks that have gone, first of all. For an example, at Gee’s Bend they put in a ferry a couple years ago, and that was an earmark.

Listen here:

Just as with his false claim that he is “the only one the special interests don’t give any money to,” McCain has a credibility gap whenever he makes a sweeping statement that he will eliminate all earmarks.

As Think Progress has noted, in order to fulfill his pledge, McCain would need to cut U.S. aid for Israel and military housing. Faced with this reality earlier this week, McCain told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos that he would make an exception for such programs.

Thus far, McCain refuses to “name programs he’ll cut” and when challenged on particular programs, he seems to always make an exception. Is that what he calls “straight talk?”

Transcript: Read the rest of this entry »