McCain: Why Does He Do It?

Why is it that Senator John McCain’s is most impressive when sliming other Republicans?

First, he’s been accusing Mitt Romney of being on the cut-and-run side on the war. Which is baloney, as Kathryn Jean Lopez makes clear.

In a debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, he continued to insist, as he had just before the Florida primary, that Romney was on the side of defeat in Iraq.

Not exactly, Senator McCain.

Now he’s ginned up a day-before-the-election hit on Rush Limbaugh, by having former Senator Bob Dole send an email to Rush extolling McCain’s conservative credentials from back in the early 1990s.

By Monday evening, the Rush memo was being billed as “Dole Scolds Limbaugh” and McCain was going after Romney. Again. Reports Calvin Woodward:

"Well, it’s probably the last person I would have wanted to have write a letter for me," Romney said on Fox News, likening McCain’s candidacy to Dole’s losing 1996 presidential bid. McCain called on his rival to apologize. "This is no way to end up this campaign," McCain said, "by attacking a genuine American war hero."

Er, excuse me? If you disagree with Bob Dole you are attacking a genuine American war hero?

There’s only one way to characterize this sort of political mudslinging. Clintonian.

Just how does John McCain expect the conservative base to go out and campaign for him this Fall after he’s been channeling the Clintons?

Big Spending Increase in US Budget

It’s "Dead on Arrival." That’s what the Democrats like to say when a Republican president sends them a Budget of the United States Government.

What they mean is that they intend to make a few changes on the margin, and make sure that a few more Democrats get their noses in the federal trough. This is called compassion.

But here at Road to the Middle Class we have a better way of analyzing the president’s budget. We have usgovernmentspending.com.

Already, within hours of the official release of the federal budget for Fiscal Year 2009, usgovernmentspending.com has the new budget numbers up online.

You know the headline news. President Bush’s final federal budget has cracked the $3 trillion barrier, at $3.107 trillion.

What you might not know is that the federal budget includes a spreadsheet, Table 3.2 — Outlays by Function and Subfunction: 1962—2013 that includes estimates of expenditure for FY 2009 made a year ago. Let’s see how the estimates for 2009 changed in the year since President Bush last sent a budget to Congress.

Estimated Federal Spending for Fiscal Year 2009

Change from FY08 to FY09 Budget

Amounts in $ billions

Item 2008 budget 2009 budget Change Pensions 765.2 767.9 0.35% Health Care 712.6 712.7 0.01% Education 97.4 99.9 2.57% Defense 723.9 805.0 11.20% Welfare 266.1 283.1 6.39% Total Spending 2,985.5 3,107.4 4.08%

Oooh. That does hurt. Defense spending is up 11 percent over the estimate made last year. Of course, a lot of that comes from bringing the Iraq war fully on-budget.

And overall spending is up four percent. This is not the natural increase in annual spending. This is the change in the estimate for FY 2009 spending totals made between last year and this.

I’ll have to think about that.

Ted Kennedy Calls The Clintons Out

It is certainly a moment, when Ted Kennedy comes out for Barack Obama and disses the Clintons.

The implication is clear.  The Clintons are corrupt and it is time for the Democratic Party to move on.  Kennedy, according to Peggy Noonan, is part of

a great rebellion, a coming together of former officials, members of the commenting class, and the Kennedy family to stand athwart the Clintonian future and say, Stop.

Well, maybe.  Actually it is more accurate to say that in the last couple of weeks the Clintons have held up a mirror to the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party didn’t like it.

Bill Clinton played the race card, and everyone swooned with disgust.  Oh yeah?  But the Democratic Party for the last 40 years, from the day after the signing of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, has been the party of race baiting and of race counting.  What’s new about Bill Clinton’s efforts in South Carolina? 

Only that he was playing the race card against another Democrat.  That was too much for Ted Kennedy.

Clinton Corruption?   Please.  The Democratic Party since at least the days of the big city political machines has been the party of corruption, that is, using government money to buy votes.  When the buying of votes is limited to the odd subsidy, you could say it was pretty harmless.  But when you are buying votes with 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent of GDP, then you have created an almighty stench that corrupts everything.

It is an especial irony that it is Ted Kennedy who has called out the Clintons on their corruption.  Ted Kennedy is the uber-liberal who has spent a life voting for programs to hand our money-for-nothing to Democrat-voting Americans.  The consequence is that half the country is corrupted by an addiction to government programs and the other half is in a foul mood about paying for a bunch of addicts to get their fix.  The human cost of Ted Kennedy’s political career is incalculable.

But Ted draws the line at the Clintons.  That’s a comfort, if you like.

Three Legs Good, Six Legs Better

Ken Blackwell reminds us that the conservative coalition is not a just the three-legged stool of the Reagan Coalition but something bigger.

Here’s his enumeration of the honored members of the conservative coalition and their number one issues.

1. Social conservatives — judges
2. Christian conservatives — judges, religious freedom, home schooling
3. Second Amendment conservatives — judges
4. Economic conservatives — taxes and spending
5. Philosophical conservatives — limited government
6. National Security conservatives — terrorism

I don’t know what you call that, but it ain’t a three-legged stool. You could call it a big tent. Or you could call it six-pointed star, Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, begging American Jews to come on in.

Here at the Road to the Middle Class we count ourselves as libertarian conservatives, but we respect and honor all the other members of the coalition. We say: Your issues are our issues.

Now. How many of the six points of the conservative Star do you think that John McCain respects and honors?

Against McCain

As he campaigns for the nomination of the Republican Party Senator John McCain certainly does a good job of infuriating the conservative base of the party.

For instance, you’d think, crafty politician that he is, that he’d have learned how not to talk like a Democrat, playing the class warfare card, and all.

But no. Last night at the Republican California debate at the Reagan presidential library, he did a good job running as John Kerry against Mitt Romney.

I know how to lead.


I led the largest squadron in the United States Navy. And I did it out of patriotism, not for profit.

Oh, I see. So Mitt Romney’s career, including a long stint at Bain Capital creating jobs and wealth, just doesn’t measure up?

Then there’s the Wall Street bashing bit, getting a late hit in on the mortgage meltdown.

I think that there’s some greedy people on Wall Street that perhaps need to be punished.

Actually, I think there are some people on Capitol Hill who need to be punished. Who is it that passes laws to keep sluicing money and subsidies at the housing market? Who is it that has been bullying the lending institutions for decades to lend money to minorities? Who is it who cranked interest rates down to one percent in the early 2000s? And who is it who was carrying water for politically-connected S&L magnate Charles Keating back in the 1980s? And what was Senator McCain doing two or three years ago when it was obvious that the real-estate boom was getting out of hand?

It fascinating how pols like Senator McCain go for Wall Street all the time. It’s all smoke and mirrors, of course. Wall Street runs the government bond market, the market that floats the government’s paper out to the world. Wall Street is the most important thing in the world for the government and for the Senators that slosh the feed into the government’s trough.

I’d say that if there’s someone that’s really greedy and really needing to be punished it is the pols that vote to run big deficits, and get Wall Street to push Treasury Bills and Treasury Notes and Treasury Bonds out into the world to fund the deficits. And then with the other hand they sit around doing nothing while the Federal Reserve lets the dollar decline so that bond holders are left holding dollar-denominated bonds worth a lot less today than they were a few yers ago.

Heck of a deal for the US government and its senatorial functionaries. Heck of a deal for Wall Street. But not so good for the folks that bought the bonds.

Who’s the greedy one there, Senator?

Seriously, do we really want this guy in the White House where he can govern like a Democrat and have the Republicans take the fall for more bloated government and more attacks on the First Amendment?

Florida: McCain over Romney

It seems incredible that the “maverick” Senator John McCain is the Republican frontrunner. How could this moderate senator from Arizona be leading the the fight for the nomination in the conservative Republican Party?

The answer, I think, came in South Carolina when non-activist conservatives seemed to be going for McCain out of buyer’s remorse. Voters were wondering if they were really right to choose George W. Bush back in 2000. The sensible thing to do seemed to be to vote for McCain.

Anyway, write Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, McCain can win and Romney can’t.

McCain has a much better chance of winning the election than does former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R).

And they are probably right. Conservatives may think of President Bush as a not very conservative president, but the American people think of him as conservative, right-wing, and Republican. After all the ups and downs of the past seven years, they think it is time for a change, and they are right.

So it is time to think strategically. If, as seems likely, the Republican candidate loses in November, would it be better to lose with a full-spectrum candidate like Romney or a maverick, media favorite like McCain?

In my view, the voters need a dose of Democrat. Republicans aren’t going to get a chance to do real conservative reform until the current promise of “Change” has passed its sell-by date.

Democrats don’t stand for Change. They stand for more government, more bureaucracy, more subsidies, more waste. In another four years voters will have been robustly reminded of this.

Fox Focus Group Response to SOTU

In his last State of the Union speech President Bush seemed to be a confident man, hardly the broken, failed president that he critics imagine.

And you could tell that from the reactions of the focus group assembled by Frank Luntz for Fox News.  Few in the focus group had a positive opinion of the president coming into the speech, but nearly all had a good impression after the speech.  Now how could that be? 

Could it be that the media (including the presidential candidates) combine to render a negative verdict on the president?

Luntz highlighted the group reaction to two presidential proposals.  Everyone in his group approved when the president proposed to end 151 failing and wasteful federal programs.  But when the president proposed to make his tax cuts permanent only the Republican-leaning participants strongly approved.  The Democrat-leaning participants strongly disapproved.

There’s a lesson in that.