John McCain, Winging It

At this point, columnist Robert Novak stepped forward, noting that the single moms in question already paid at the 15 percent rate. Thus they wouldn’t get a tax cut from McCain, but would from Bush’s proposal to drop the rate to 10 percent. Well, McCain said, he’d ease their taxes by eliminating the marriage penalty. But we’re talking about single moms, not married mothers, said Novak. Oh, McCain shot back, then I’d cut their taxes by broadening the earned income tax credit for the working poor. And he wound up by joking about paring taxes for old people.

McCain was playing fast and loose with tax policy. He had never called for extending the earned income tax credit, though aides later said he might do that in a speech on taxes and Social Security sometime in January. He sounded unserious. So how did the press handle McCain’s trouble in explaining his position on tax cuts? Reporters and commentators didn’t mention his stumbling at all. They gave McCain a free ride on taxes, as they have on virtually every substantive issue — including health care, defense policy, his knowledge of foreign and domestic leaders — since he announced his bid for the Republican presidential nomination last September.

Now, consider what the mainstream media would have done if Bush had been caught making up his tax policy on the fly. He’d have been pilloried by reporters and pundits for not understanding the tax issue. His ability to function effectively at the national, rather than the state, level would have been questioned. Further doubts about his basic intelligence would have been aired. And he would have been likened to Dan Quayle, or at least to the press’s caricature of the former vice president. In short, Bush would have been held to a far higher standard than McCain.

The point here is not only that the media’s double standard is unfair to Bush, which it is. But in the long run, the press isn’t doing McCain a favor either. It treats McCain as an attractive leader and strong challenger to Bush. By giving him a pass on issue after issue, however, the press fails to take him seriously on important policy matters. McCain is relieved of media pressure to get his act together on domestic policy. (He knows foreign policy cold.) The result is he doesn’t have a credible health care policy or a set of tax cuts that have been well thought out or a defense plan that comes close to matching the goals of his foreign policy.

For sure, the media aren’t the only cause of McCain’s sloppy policymaking. But they are a cause, and a significant one. Normally the agenda of a major candidate like McCain would be subjected to sharp and relentless scrutiny. Bush and Democrats Al Gore and Bill Bradley face such scrutiny and wouldn’t dream of free-lancing on domestic policy, if only because the press would clobber them for even minor mistakes. This doesn’t happen with McCain. But while reporters have failed to examine his positions adequately, the Democratic presidential nominee won’t make this mistake. McCain has been left vulnerable, should he win the Republican nomination, to being picked apart by Gore or Bradley.

Look at several of McCain’s low moments that the media all but ignored. In Charleston, S.C., on December 14, McCain unveiled his health care plan. He had difficulty answering questions about it, but that wasn’t the biggest problem. His campaign aides handed out a paper entitled “McCain Health Care Plan Costs.” It was supposed to spell out exactly what various parts of the plan would cost over time. But, for the fifth year anyway, almost all the numbers were wrong. They were corrected only after reporters expressed doubts about their accuracy. Still, this glitch was not cited in press reports about the plan, a favor Bush would never have been granted.

Nor have reporters or columnists raised questions about McCain’s defense plans. In sketching his foreign policy on December 1, he insisted the United States must continue to be the preeminent power in the world. Yet in outlining his military plans days later, McCain made increasing the pay of uniformed personnel his top priority. He said readiness, weapons research, and other underfunded areas of the military could be improved with minimal increases in total defense spending. Outside estimates of how much spending needs to be raised range from $ 25 billion to $ 100 billion a year — far more than could be saved through McCain’s proposed cuts in supposedly wasteful programs. But the press has never called on him to reconcile his very modest defense buildup with his aim of keeping America the dominant superpower.

And remember the embarrassment Bush suffered when he could answer only one of a Boston TV reporter’s questions about the names of foreign leaders? That moment in November was played up by the entire national press corps, sowing doubts about Bush’s qualifications for the presidency. McCain suffered a similar embarrassment on December 19 in Vermont. He was asked to name the prime minister of Ireland and the governor of Vermont. He named every other Irish leader he could think of, but never got the prime minister (Bertie Ahern). And someone had to feed him the first name of Vermont’s chief executive (Howard Dean). Only a single newspaper, the New York Times, reported McCain’s struggle to answer, and its story was buried near the bottom of an inside page.

On taxes, McCain has followed the practice of endorsing practically every tax cut imaginable — except a reduction in the top marginal rate on individual income. He’s for a flat tax, a tax credit for good teachers, elimination of the estate and gift taxes and of all taxes on saving and investing, an end to the marriage penalty, and, of course, that extension of the lowest income tax rate, 15 percent, to levels at which many taxpayers now pay 28 percent. All these proposed cuts would have to be paid for from a quarter of the budget surplus — the rest goes for Social Security and Medicare — and from slashing “pork barrel” spending. There’s not a chance this would be enough to cover all the tax cuts. But, again, McCain hasn’t been forced to justify his tax plan.

In fact, McCain now says he doesn’t really have a “tax plan,” though he’s been using that phrase for months when citing the various tax cuts he proposes. After the discussion of taxes in the December 13 debate in Des Moines, Iowa, McCain’s field director in New Hampshire, Dean Ouellette, declared that Bush’s “gotcha” didn’t work because “John McCain hasn’t announced his proposal for tax reform yet.” That same day, the “tax relief” section on the McCain 2000 website was changed. Added under the heading of “The McCain Plan” was this sentence: “John McCain will propose a tax relief plan in January.” What he’d been talking up for months, it turns out, were only ideas he’d advocated “earlier this year.” The media paid no attention to any of this chaos in the McCain camp.

McCain has run a brilliant campaign from the standpoint of strategy. He’s attracted the best operatives in the business: strategist Mike Murphy, media consultant Greg Stevens, campaign manager Rick Davis, political director John Weaver, spokesmen Dan Schnur and Howard Opinsky. What he needs are policy advisers with the same talent and seriousness, and he needs to spend as much quality time with them as he does with reporters. So far, he’s gotten by with a seat-of-the-pants policy operation because political writers adore him too much to mention his shortcomings. McCain may think reporters will always constitute a cheering section, but he’s wrong. If he doesn’t find this out now, it will be made painfully clear to him should he win the nomination and face a Democratic presidential nominee.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.