I want a seaplane.

Army Times, which is not--last time I checked--a radical left wing publication, takes John McCain to task for changing his position on the Future Combat Systems program. This is yet another example of how running for President has driven McCain off the deep end. In the past, he was one of the more consistent voices against foolish Pentagon weapon systems. Here's a program that McCain previously wanted to end. Then Obama says he wants to slow-walk it...and McCain--reflexively, it appears, and unable to recall that he previously opposed it--decides to support it.

A lost opportunity, I'd say: If McCain really wanted to prove his reform credentials, he would have said, "Sen. Obama has proved how little he knows about weapons systems. We don't need to slow-walk FCS. We need to kill it."

Hannity.

UPDATE: Not so likely any time soon: "The View"

It's been really enjoyable watching the neoconservatives splash and play in the mud and defecation of the McCain campaign. Now, Noemie Emery of the Weekly Standard has attacked me for predicting that win or lose McCain will eventually try, once again, to apologize to the press for the sleaziness of his sex education ad.

Only she never mentions the sex education ad.

And she never mentions the last time McCain apologized, for supporting the confederate flag atop the South Carolina state house. She does quote me, semi-accurately--boy, these neocons love ellipses!--describing (quite accurately, I believe) McCain's rising July frustration over the fact that his bellicose Middle East policy had been overwhelmed by events this summer: the Iraqis decided to favor Obama's troop withdrawal, the Bush Administration decided to talk to Iran...and, most recently, decided to chase after Al Qaeda and Taliban on the "Pakistani" side of the non-border--a line drawn peremptorily by the British--with Afghanistan, a policy that Obama favored and McCain called "naive."

Actually, I"m proud of having written that. It was prescient. McCain's sludge fiesta began immediately after, with the intent of obscuring the fact that Obama had proved right in this crucial policy area and McCain had proved wrong (with, I was careful to note, the exception of his support for the use of counterinsurgency tactics By General Petraeus, which had helped improve the security situation in Iraq). Seeing how successful they could be with smears, and how easily diverted the media were, the McCain campaign has gone--you'll excuse the pig metaphor--hog-wild with mendacity this month. And, on The View today, McCain continued the Not-So-Straight Talk, defending his sleazy sex ed ad and the other lies peddled by his campaign.

Emery's attempt to smear me falls quite neatly into the wingnut canon: neoconservatives style themselves as intellectuals, but they shy away from proper conversations about facts and ideas. Though some are erudite, and some even polite, their public face in magazines like the Standard and Commentary--with a few notable exceptions--is quite different: they are, at base, ideologues not intellectuals, propagandists not journalists, thugs not thinkers.

This woman clearly has no idea what she's talking about. What an embarrassment.

Update: Jim Fallows spells it out.

The Obama campaign this morning is warning folks that they mean business – and they are taking the gloves off (again). As far as they're concerned, the General Election starts today. In a memo, campaign manager David Plouffe says:

A debate about delivering change is a debate we're happy to have. Because no matter how many times McCain and Governor Palin use the word “change” or try to reinvent their own records, one thing stays the same: the fact that when it comes to the economy, education, Iraq, or the special interests' stranglehold on Washington, they both are stubborn defenders of the past eight years and they both promise more of the same.

Except for a note at the end demanding that the media vet Palin, this is the only time in the memo that Plouffe mentions Palin: Plouffe makes it clear this is a race between Obama and McCain. It's been two weeks since McCain named his running mate and the Obama campaign's response has been spotty at best. She has sucked all the oxygen out of the room and for the first time Obama in 19 months has had little success being heard unless he's talking about Palin (I wonder if Bill Clinton told him over lunch, now you know how I felt in the primaries?). This is not something Obama can give a speech to get out of.

Taking the gloves off, or saying they will, has been a successful tactic for Obama in the past. But his attacks never devolved into the personal kind like we saw the GOP wield so successfully earlier this week with the lipstick ridiculousness. Today, Obama took his first steps into the world of personal attack politics, launching two commercials, one of which is called “Out of Touch”:

ANNCR: 1982. John McCain goes to Washington. Things have changed in the last 26 years. But McCain hasn't. 


Source: New York Times, 7/13/08

He admits he still doesn't know how to use a computer, can't send an email. 

 

Boston Globe, 12/18/07


Still doesn't understand the economy.

 

Tax Policy
Center, Analysis of Candidates' Tax Plans, 8/15/08


And favors two hundred billion in new tax cuts for corporations, but almost nothing for the Middle Class. 


After one President who was out of touch… We just can't afford more of the same. 

 



BARACK: I'm Barack Obama and I approved this message. 


Plouffe also says Biden will take a larger role in “both in pushing back on the lies that we'll continue to see from our opponents, and in keeping the debate focused on delivering for everyday Americans.” I can't imagine, though, how Biden, who has been in the Senate a decade longer than McCain, will label McCain out of touch. Plus, if any one is suffocating from the lack of oxygen in the room, it's Biden.

In the last two elections, taking control of the message out of the convention gate was key. Both Gore and Kerry faltered during this crucial time, so it's no wonder there's been a lot of hand wringing by Dems. Obama's late to the game here and for all his cool-minded, above the fray, issues-based sentiments, he's still got to show the American people how much he really wants this job.

Plouffe's full memo is after the jump.

(more...)

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Director of the Congressional Budget Office and current chief McCain economic advisor, is an honest man--which means he's something of a liability on the Straight Talk Express. A few months ago, he admitted to my colleague, Michael Scherer, that Barack Obama's economic plan would reduce taxes for most people. And now, in a forthcoming book by Fortune columnist Matt Miller, he makes it clear that the next President is going to have to raise taxes.

"If you do nothing on the spending side, you're going to have to raise taxes whether you're a Republican, a Democrat or a Martian," he tells Miller...and then he immediately makes it clear that the "spending side" part of the argument is nothing more than a political fig-leaf.

"It's arithmetic." Federal revenue today is 18.8 percent of GDP and federal spending is 20 percent. Holtz-Eakin observes that "the pressure are there" to lift spending [on entitlement programs, mostly] and taxes to 23 or 24 percent of GDP by around 2020, and to as much as 27 percent if health costs remain out of control.

Miller does the arithmetic: that's an annual tax hike of $550 to $700 billion, well beyond the range of any spending cuts that McCain has or might propose. (Those vaunted earmarks cost about $20 billion per year.)

It should be noted that Obama's proposed middle class tax cuts are nearly as foolish--and unlikely, in the long term--as McCain's, although Obama claims to pay for them by closing corporate loopholes and raising the top marginal tax rates to Clinton-era levels.

But it's John McCain who has opposed any and all tax increases, sort of--as I reported yesterday, McCain would tax employer-provided health care benefits. (He would also raise energy costs significantly with his cap-and-trade carbon emissions reduction program.)

Miller concludes:

So why does tax-cutting mania persist among Republicans, I asked Holtz-Eakin, the McCain adviser--given...that, as Holtz-Eakin himself explain to me, taxes soon have to go up substantially in any event?
"It's the brand," he said, "and you don't dilute the brand."

Miller's book, The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, will be published by Holt in January 2009. I'm about halfway through reading an advance copy and, as is always the case with Miller, this is a smart, sane and extremely well-written account of our current economic mess.

Update: What Holtz-Eakin admitted to Scherer was that the Obama's plan represented a net tax reduction over ten years.

My new story up at Time.com:

A prominent Washington lobbyist who has worked for every Republican president since Richard Nixon has been tapped by the McCain campaign to conduct a study in preparation for the presidential transition, should John McCain win the election, according to sources familiar with the process.

William E. Timmons, Sr. is a Washington institution, having worked in the Nixon and Ford administrations as an aide for congressional relations, and assisted the transition teams of both Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George W. Bush in 2000. He was also a senior adviser to both Vice President George Bush in 1988 and Senator Bob Dole in 1996.

Timmons is the chairman-emeritus of Timmons and Company, a small but influential lobbying firm he founded in 1975, shortly after leaving the White House. According to Senate records, he registered to lobby in 2008 for a wide range of companies and trade groups, including the American Petroleum Institute, the American Medical Association, Chrysler, Freddie Mac, Visa USA, and Anheuser-Busch.