Thursday, July 31, 2008

McCain Talking Out of Both Sides of His Mouth

To make up for my two day hiatus, here is another interesting article on McCain from of all sources the Wall Street Journal; an editorial by Daniel Henninger entitled "Is John McCain Stupid?":

On Sunday, he said on national television that to solve Social Security "everything's on the table," which of course means raising payroll taxes. On July 7 in Denver he said: "Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won't."
This isn't a flip-flop. It's a sex-change operation.
He got back to the subject Tuesday in Reno, Nev. Reporters asked about the Sunday tax comments. Mr. McCain replied, "The worst thing you could do is raise people's payroll taxes, my God!" Then he was asked about working with Democrats to fix Social Security, and he repeated, "everything has to be on the table." But how can . . .? Oh never mind.
Yesterday he was in Aurora, Colo., to wit: "On Social Security, he [Sen. Obama] wants to raise Social Security taxes. I am opposed to raising taxes on Social Security. I want to fix the system without raising taxes."

I doubt that McCain is stupid, though he does seem to have some of the aloofness to issues and general political knowledge another candidate once showed (you might remember him, he got a job as the leader of the free world). The problem is that the very subset of the American public that will probably decide this election is more likely to have a view of Brittany Spears in their head than a list of the inconsistencies in McCain's positions from one day to the next. Obama should make those inconsistencies clear to the public through a series of TV ads that highlight the real flip-flopper in this election, and the fact that while flip-flopping is not that bad if based on changing circumstances; is a character flaw when based solely on political expediency.

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