The 2008 presidential election campaign will likely hinge on the war in Iraq and the domestic economy. John McCain seems determined to be wrong about both.
Five years into the Iraq war, the reason for the invasion is still a work in progress. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There is no prospect of "transforming the MIddle East" by establishing a western-style democracy, friendly to the U.S., in Baghdad. Asked directly whether the war has made us safer, General Petraeus declines to say it has. More than 4000 of our soldiers have been killed, more than 30,000 others wounded, many of those maimed for life, and we have spent something like $500 billion. Our stature on the international stage has been diminished. The war is clearly a colossal blunder, yet McCain supports it still.
On the economy, McCain, despite his reputation as a "maverick," toes the Republican line. This means that, no matter the question, the answer is tax cuts. In the Senate, McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts, but now he wants to make them permanent. We've been down this path before. After twelve years of Reagan-Bush had left the American economy in shambles, Bill Clinton was elected president and proposed an economic stimulus and deficit reduction package that included a tax hike on high earners. Not a single Republican in either the House or Senate voted for it. They had a lot of chicken-little predictions about what the dire consequences would be if the bill passed. Unemployment would spike upward. The stock market would slump. Inflation would rear its ugly head. People would be talking about the misery index again. Democrats, however, were in the majority in the House, where the bill passed narrowly without a single Republican vote. In the Senate, Vice-President Gore broke a tie. Clinton signed the bill into law, and none of the Republican predictions came true. In fact the Clinton years were characterized by an almost unprecedented economic expansion. Republicans turned their attention from economics to the president's sex life.
Then came Bush again. The tax-cut orthodoxy was back in vogue, and Democrats were ineffectual in their opposition. In the way of tax policy, Bush has gotten everything he wanted. So where are we after almost eight years of it? The budget is back in deficit. Consumer confidence is as low as it has been for a generation. Economists debate whether we are in a recession, or only headed into one. The housing sector is in a deep funk and homes are being foreclosed at record rates. McCain's answer is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent.
When Republicans are called fundamentalist, the context is usually religious, but the rigidity and tunnel vision apply across the board. They don't care what works. They have a creed.
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