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McCain displays ignorance on economics
CHAPEL Hill, NC (AP)
ASSOCIATEIATED PRESS
While John McCain works to avoid the campaign undertow of the current President Bush, he’s risking the political trap that snared the first one. When the economy is sliding toward recession, it is going to be the win-or-lose election issue, no matter how well versed a nominee is in matters of foreign policy and defense.
McCain is saddled with some early season confessions that he’s no expert on the economy and, indeed, didn’t understand it as well as he should have. He’s since tried to disown those comments, unsuccessfully.
As the Republican presidential nominee, McCain promises a bold economic plan. So far, it is the orthodox conservative one: cut taxes, rein in spending and rely on the marketplace, with some kind of relief for blameless borrowers who face foreclosure in the current mortgage mess.
His current Bush problem is to hold the Republican line while fending off Democratic assertions that he’d represent a replay of the unpopular administration in power. “I’m not running on the Bush presidency,” McCain said in an ABC television interview. “I’m running on my own service and my vision for the future.”
Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton argue that McCain would just be more of the same. Nor will they let McCain forget that he once said he knows a lot less about economics than about military and foreign issues, and still needs to be educated. That was in a Wall Street Journal interview published Nov. 25, 2005. Then, on Dec. 18, 2007, he was quoted as saying the issue of economics is not one he understood as well as he should, although he did know the basics of it. McCain needs to get it.
