posted June 11, 2008 01:39 PM            

In 1999, McCain was in New Hampshire, campaigning for the GOP nomination as a moderate. He proclaimed himself a pro-life candidate, but told reporters that “in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade.” He explained that overturning Roe would force “women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations.” Yesterday, campaigning for the GOP nomination as a conservative, McCain said the opposite.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me ask one question about abortion. Then I want to turn to Iraq. You’re for a constitutional amendment banning abortion, with some exceptions for life and rape and incest.

MCCAIN: Rape, incest and the life of the mother. Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So is President Bush, yet that hasn’t advanced in the six years he’s been in office. What are you going to do to advance a constitutional amendment that President Bush hasn’t done?

MCCAIN: I don’t think a constitutional amendment is probably going to take place, but I do believe that it’s very likely or possible that the Supreme Court should — could overturn Roe v. Wade, which would then return these decisions to the states, which I support…. Just as I believe that the issue of gay marriage should be decided by the states, so do I believe that we would be better off by having Roe v. Wade return to the states.

The old McCain didn’t want an amendment and didn’t want Roe overturned. The new McCain completely disagrees with the old McCain.

It’s worth noting that politicians’ opinions on abortion can, and often do, “evolve” over time. Dick Gephardt and Al Gore, for example, both opposed abortion rights before eventually becoming pro-choice. With this in mind, McCain’s unexpected shift may simply reflect yet another pol whose thinking has changed over time.

Or, far more likely, McCain is once again abandoning any pretense of consistency and integrity, and is now willing to say literally anything to win.

Let’s return, once again, to McCain’s flourishing flip-flop list, which is now a Top 11 list.

* McCain criticized TV preacher Jerry Falwell as “an agent of intolerance” in 2002, but has since decided to cozy up to the man who said Americans “deserved” the 9/11 attacks. (Indeed, McCain has now hired Falwell’s debate coach.)

* McCain used to oppose Bush’s tax cuts for the very wealthy, but he reversed course in February.

* In 2000, McCain accused Texas businessmen Sam and Charles Wyly of being corrupt, spending “dirty money” to help finance Bush’s presidential campaign. McCain not only filed a complaint against the Wylys for allegedly violating campaign finance law, he also lashed out at them publicly. In April, McCain reached out to the Wylys for support.

* McCain supported a major campaign-finance reform measure that bore his name. In June, he abandoned his own legislation.

* McCain used to think that Grover Norquist was a crook and a corrupt shill for dictators. Then McCain got serious about running for president and began to reconcile with Norquist.

* McCain took a firm line in opposition to torture, and then caved to White House demands.

* McCain gave up on his signature policy issue, campaign-finance reform, and won’t back the same provision he sponsored just a couple of years ago.

* McCain was against presidential candidates campaigning at Bob Jones University before he was for it.

* McCain was anti-ethanol. Now he’s pro-ethanol.

* McCain was both for and against state promotion of the Confederate flag.

* And now he’s both for and against overturning Roe v. Wade.

It’s not exactly a newsflash that McCain is veering ridiculously to the right in a rather shameless attempt to reinvent himself, but Dems should take advantage of the situation and help establish the narrative now. Despite his rather embarrassing record of late, we still have major media figures telling the public that “no one would accuse McCain of equivocating on anything.”

Now is the time to begin characterizing McCain — accurately — as a man with no principle beliefs. Dems should not only criticize McCain’s constantly evolving opinions on nearly everything, they should openly mock him for it now, so that the storyline becomes second nature (like the GOP did with “serial exaggerator” Al Gore).

The nation is seeing McCain 2.0, and we like the old one better.

posted June 11, 2008 01:40 PM            

Back in 2005, a friend asked if I should be careful about praising John McCain for his votes against George W. Bush's upper-income tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. After all, he warned, he might become the next Republican presidential nominee.

My reply was, suppose McCain maintained his position that, as he put it in 2001: ``I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief.''

Suppose he did hold to his 2003 opposition to increasing the deficit through tax cuts during a time of war. On what grounds could I criticize him?

In spite of the advice from my friends, I went ahead and applauded McCain for both stands in my 2005 book ``The Pro-Growth Progressive.''

This is now a non-issue. McCain, who would like us to see him as holding a consistent and principled stance on tax cuts and fiscal discipline, is engaging in the mother of all economic policy flip-flops.

If McCain's opposition to Bush's tax cuts was based on the unseemliness of letting deficits balloon for the benefit of top earners in a time of war, then his opposition should have grown stronger. Instead, it grew weaker and then collapsed. Since McCain's votes, we have witnessed budget surpluses turn into projected $400 billion annual deficits.

How do those intervening developments lead McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, to now support permanently extending more than $100 billion in high-income tax cuts he once opposed?

Just the Beginning

And that is only the beginning. With the public debt expanding, corporate profits near records, and family incomes down since 2001, McCain has made his signature economic proposal a corporate tax-relief package that will cost $2 trillion to $3 trillion over 10 years.

In the New York Times on June 1, former Bush economic adviser Greg Mankiw defended this indefensible fiscal policy by pointing to two purely theoretical studies to posit that lowering the corporate-tax rate by a third is really about helping typical workers.

He didn't mention that the Congressional Budget Office, Treasury Department, and Joint Committee on Taxation all assume that the owners of capital get the benefit of a corporate-tax cut. He also neglects to mention that the CBO estimates that a whopping 59 percent of the benefits of such a reduction would go to the top 1 percent of earners.

Distorted Picture

This is more regressive than the policies that led McCain in 2000 to blast Bush for having ``38 percent of his tax cut go to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.''

Mankiw paints an even more incomplete and distorted picture of the fiscal impact. He says McCain's plan to cut the corporate- tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent will cost only $100 billion a year in lost revenue, but benefits to the economy will cut that cost in half.

Yet, even the Bush Treasury Department suggested that the costs of a smaller corporate-rate cut -- from 35 percent to 28 percent -- would cost at least $130 billion annually.

Most profoundly, Mankiw ignores the explosive costs of McCain's proposal to have 100 percent immediate expensing -- instead of depreciation -- for business investment while maintaining the deductibility of interest. This would make it possible for companies to deduct far more than they invest and thus shelter income. Put another way, this amounts to a negative tax rate.

Do the Math

Bush's Advisory Panel on Tax Reform stated that this would ``result in economic distortions and adversely impact economic activity.''

While the Urban Institute's Len Burman estimates this would cost only $75 billion per year, University of Michigan economist Reuven Avi-Yonah figures that the rate cut and expensing together ``would open up almost unlimited opportunities for sheltering income'' and reduce corporate tax revenue by 75 percent. Jason Furman, head of the centrist Hamilton Project, calculates the combined costs of the rate cut and income sheltering at more than $300 billion a year.

So let's do a little math: Start with $100 billion for extending current tax cuts for the highest earners. Add to that an additional $50 billion it would cost to eliminate the alternative minimum tax for the highest earners, another McCain proposal. Throw in $200 billion to $300 billion in corporate-tax cuts and you have a cost of $350 billion to $450 billion a year. That works out to $3.5 trillion to $4.5 trillion over 10 years.

National Debt

This isn't even the full cost of the McCain tax agenda. Rather, these huge additions to our $5.3 trillion national debt are on top of the cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for families earning less than $250,000 -- a policy that McCain and Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all support.

``Straight talk'' from McCain would acknowledge these proposals would swell the national debt or cause painful spending cuts to pay for them. The McCain camp instead offers vague and unrealistic promises to cut unspecified spending and eliminate earmarks. McCain makes a lot of this last point, even though banning earmarks would only pay for less than a half of 1 percent of his high-income tax-cut proposals.

Where have you gone, fiscally responsible John McCain?

(Gene Sperling, formerly President Bill Clinton's top economic adviser, is a Bloomberg News columnist. He is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and advised Hillary Clinton in her bid for the 2008 presidential nomination. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Gene Sperling in Washington at

posted June 11, 2008 09:06 PM            

The real John McCain has been kidnapped,
and a cyborg doppleganger has been planted in his place.

Yup.