To John McCain's promises to (a) wage more wars abroad and (b) cut taxes for the rich while (c) limiting domestic spending cuts to waste, fraud, and abuse he has now added a promise to balance the budget by 2013--a promise that his substantive policy advisorrs had been trying to keep him from making all winter and spring. Their view was that George H.W. Bush's promise in 1988 not to raise taxes had brought him little short run political gain and had done so at the price of making his presidency a failure (cf Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes).
How does America's press react? Well, in a way that makes me say: "Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?" For today we have an edition of the Politico Death Spiral Watch...
Mike Allen writes, apropos of John McCain:
McCain promises to balance budget: McCain’s emphasis on balancing the budget is likely to excite conservatives, who have remained skeptical of his candidacy, and provoke derision from Democrats, who will argue that it’s a warmed-over version of proposals that President Bush failed to enact...
Mike Allen is on record on what the role of a journalist is. As Matthew Yglesias reported:
He Said / She Said: (Reporters,) I said, aren't... giving... "just the facts, ma'am."... Rather, they're trying to act as neutral arbiters between contending parties.... (C)ontroversy about a basically factual subject ("what's the effect of X on the deficit?")... goes unresolved by (the) news writer.... (who) gives us a set of meta-facts -- "Joe says 'X' but Sam says 'Y.'" Bloggers... think the facts are partisan. When I say that the Bush Social Security plan involves a huge quantity of transition debt that risks provoking a fiscal crisis, I'm trying to state some facts... not offering "opinions" as such....
Allen took issue.... He said that news writers are trying to present both sides' points-of-view, hence the "he said, she said" quality to it, but that they're trying to present these points-of-view in such a way so that a discerning reader can tell who's right based on reading the story...
Is McCain's newfound "emphasis on balancing the budget" a joke, to which the only proper response is derision and laughter, or it is a serious statement of policy intentions that should excite fiscal conservatives like me who think the budget should be much closer to balance?
Let's see how Mike Allen does at planting clues in his article so that a "discerning reader" can tell who is right:
Paragraph 1: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) plans to promise on Monday that he will balance the federal budget by the end of his first term by curbing wasteful spending and overhauling entitlement programs, including Social Security, his advisers told Politico...
No clues as to who is right here...
Paragraph 2: The vow to take on Social Security puts McCain in a political danger zone that thwarted President Bush after he named it the top domestic priority of his second term...
No clues as to who is right here...
Paragraph 3: McCain is making the pledge at the beginning of a week when both presidential candidates plan to devote their events to the economy, the top issue in poll after poll as voters struggle to keep their jobs and fill their gas tanks...
No clues as to who is right here...
Paragraph 4: “In the long-term, the only way to keep the budget balanced is successful reform of the large spending pressures in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” the McCain campaign says in a policy paper to be released Monday.
No clues as to who is right here...
Paragraph 5: “The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.”
No clues as to who is right here...
Paragraph 6: The pledge is a return to an earlier position he'd later backed away from. On April 15, McCain backed off a February pledge to balance the budget in his first term when asked about it by Michael Cooper of The New York Times, who reported that McCain said “at a news conference … that ‘economic conditions are reversed’ and that he would have a balanced budget within eight years.”
No clues as to who is right here...
Paragraph 7: McCain advisers admit that the document is a repackaging of previous policies, without dramatic new initiatives. Some Democratic officials had thought McCain might try to make a splash by proposing a bold middle-class tax cut.
