One thing leaped out at me in Wednesday night’s debate (aside from John McCain’s blinking and aggressively jumpy mien in those split screens): McCain is attempting to sell a set of default Republican policy proposals – tax cuts, spending cuts, health savings accounts – as the solution to our current woes. And this just isn’t credible. The first and most obvious reason is that, no matter how you package them, McCain’s proposals don’t address the financial crisis or the looming recession. Their Reagan-era provenance shows badly. Tax cuts for the wealthy won’t rescue the economy. Tax breaks for the middle class may help, but modestly at best. With the economy in the tank, we’re going to need more spending, not less. And introducing cracks into the employer-based health system is going to create more insecurity, not less. As Joe Klein notes:
I thought McCain was near-incomprehensible when talking about policy, locked in the coffin of conservative thinking and punditry. He spoke in Reagan-era shorthand. He thought that merely invoking the magic words “spread the wealth” and “class warfare” he could neutralize Obama. But those words and phrases seem anachronistic, almost vestigial now. Indeed, they have become every bit as toxic as Democratic social activist proposals–government-regulated and subsidized health care, for example–used to be. We have had 30 years of class warfare, in which the wealthy strip-mined the middle class. The wealth has been “spread” upward.
Part of this can be laid upon McCain’s disengagement from domestic policy. You get the sense his advisers just took all this stuff off the shelf of policies already pre-approved by all the Republican interest groups, tweaked it a bit, and voila.
But a better question is, why were these the only things on the shelf?
Being in power made Republicans complacent on the policy front. When you dominate the political scene, there’s not much need for new policies to expand your coalition. (And, in the case of the Rove project, you don’t believe you need to expand it at all.) But a more profound problem came in the disenagement of Bush himself, as well as the GOP congressional leadership, from pragmatic problem-solving. Normally, dealing with real-world problems is a good way to develop popular policies. The Bush administration, with its disdain for policy details and expertise itself, simply gave up on any meaningful, workable domestic policy innovation after the Medicare drug benefit passed. Bush’s one later attempt, the partial privatization of Social Security via stock market investments, was a disaster – and in retrospect, spectacularly off-base.
