Friday, May 16, 2008 - Posts
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While national security issues have gobbled up most news space over the past week, a couple of harsh analyses of John McCain’s economic plan have sailed under the radar.
The Center for American Progress Action Fund* released a study yesterday concluding that McCain’s plan would create a cumulative debt of $12.7 trillion by 2017—the highest debt since 1951. Corporate tax cuts, a repeal of the Alternative Minimum Tax, and an extension of the Bush tax cuts—all staples of the McCain plan—would cost significantly more than the senator’s proposed earmarks cuts and discretionary spending freeze would provide, the study argues. (PDF here.)
Also this week, FactCheck.org calls McCain’s suggestion that he can balance the budget while extending Bush’s tax cuts “dubious at best.” The main problem: Getting rid of earmarks doesn’t mean the money won’t get spent. It just means it doesn’t happen in the form of earmarks. As the writers phrase it, “earmarks often simply tell agencies how to spend money that they are already getting.” And when it comes to discretionary spending, McCain hasn’t detailed what areas he would cut. He says he would exempt military spending, so that’s out. And because the nondefense budget is only $540 billion, he would still have to convince Congress to “slash 18.5 percent of the funding for everything else in the discretionary budget—things like veterans' health benefits, highway construction, elementary and secondary education, and immigration services.”
McCain’s economic plan has its defenders. But neither they nor the McCain campaign has produced numbers to back up the budget-balancing claims. (At least not that I’ve seen.) The argument seems to be that cutting taxes raises revenues, but even McCain’s own senior policy adviser has rejected that claim in the past. Spokesman Brian Rogers dismissed the CAP study as coming from “a left-wing Democratic front group” but did not provide alternative figures. “The fact that they falsely criticize Sen. McCain’s policy proposals is unfortunate, but it’s hardly surprising,” he wrote in an e-mail.
*Clarification: We originally credited the Center for American Progress. In fact, it's the Action Fund, the center's 501(c)(4) sister affiliate, that published the report.
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The John Edwards endorsement spawns imitators, and Republicans set
their sights on Obama. Clinton's chances wane another 0.1 points to 1.7 percent.
Obama
nabbed a slew of endorsements yesterday on the heels of Edwards'
announcement, including California duo Reps. Henry Waxman and Howard
Berman. Waxman's backing doesn't carry the weight of a Pelosi or a
Reid, but as chair of the House oversight committee, he's considered
one of the most powerful congressmen around. (His may be the most feared mustache
in Washington.) Berman chairs the chamber's foreign-affairs committee,
lending Obama another bit of global-policy cred. Today, fellow
California Rep. Pete Stark followed suit.
That puts Obama 127.5 delegates away from the nomination (or 121.5 if
you count seven pledged delegates who previously supported Edwards).
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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Mike Huckabee’s penchant for dark humor was a minor obsession of ours back when he was still in the race. So it’s good to see he’s still making people uncomfortable. Look what he just told an audience of NRA members after hearing an offstage noise:
"That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he's getting ready to speak," said the former Arkansas governor, to audience laughter. “Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor."
Maybe Huckabee didn’t get the memo, but assassination jokes aren’t exactly kosher right now. (Not that they ever are, but Obama supporters voice legitimate concern.) It also highlights another reason why Huckabee isn’t a serious vice-presidential pick. Combine his loose lips with the Obama campaign’s umbrage hair trigger and a gaffe-hungry media, and we’d have quips like this splashed across Drudge every week.
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A miniflap bubbled up earlier this week when Barack Obama said that the Iraq war was occupying Arabic translators who could otherwise be working in Afghanistan. OK, so he didn’t quite say that, but he almost said it. (Video here.) It was close enough that ABC still called it a “gaffe,” sparking a testy back-and-forth with campaign spokesman Bill Burton.
But there are a couple of other details Obama might want to get straight before the general election. Here’s his full quote:
So we just don’t have enough capacity right now to deal with—and it’s not just troops by the way, it’s like, Arab, uh, Arabic interpreters. Arab language speakers. We only have a certain number of them. And if they’re all in Iraq, then it’s harder for us to use them. And obviously they may not speak Arabic, but the various dialects that they speak in Afghanistan, oftentimes people who speak Urdu or Pashtun or whatever the languages are, they’re going to be needed in those areas. And a lot of them have ended up being placed elsewhere.
In fact, Urdu is the national language of Pakistan but isn’t spoken in Afghanistan, according to the trusty CIA World Factbook. The Obama campaign points to the presence of foreign fighters in Afghanistan, but it seems clear that’s not what Obama meant by “the various dialects that they speak in Afghanistan.” And Pashtun, which is the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, is not a language. The language is Pashto, sometimes rendered as Pashtu.
Democrats hyperventilated when John McCain appeared to mix up Sunnis and Shiites during his Middle East trip last month. But Obama is considered more vulnerable on foreign policy than McCain is. Slip-ups, however minor, will get interpreted by some as indicators of ignorance or inexperience. Even if Obama's larger point is valid—that Iraq is sucking resources from other conflicts—it's the details that may come back to bite him.
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