At least Mr. McCain fesses up to and explains his changes. ~Karl Rove

Rove is remarkably clumsy in his defense of McCain on his changed position on tax cuts.  The official McCain mantra today is that McCain (always heroically) opposed Bush’s tax cuts because they were not offset with spending cuts.  His reliable stooge on talk radio, Michael Medved, repeats this deception on a regular basis.  The trouble is that Rove reminds his audience why, in fact, McCain opposed them:

He’d voted against them at the time, saying in 2001 that he’d “like to see more of this tax cut shared by working Americans.”

You might think that this would be something you would want to emphasise in an election year such as this, and you might think this is a perfectly good reason to offer opposition to tax cuts, but it’s not that simple.  Before McCain could become the nominee he had to portray himself as opposed to tax cutting simply because he was such a zealous budget hawk, rather than acknowledge that he had opposed a major Bush initiative out of 1) petty resentment over his primary defeat; 2) a boundless desire to get good media coverage, which tweaking a Republican President would do; 3) phony “bipartisan” concern about the inequities of the tax plan. 

The funny thing is that this is not lost in the mists of time.  You just need to type in the phrases “Bush tax cuts,” “John McCain” and “class warfare” into any search engine and you are inundated with conservative editorials and articles against McCain’s risible excuse-making on his changed position on taxes.  Here’s a Human Events attack on McCain from January.  What’s amusing about this is that McCain could really benefit from being portrayed as a tax-cutter for the working- and middle-class and a foe of “unfair” tax cuts, but the very “class warfare” attacks on McCain during the primaries that forced him to adopt his phony explanation for opposing the 2001 tax cuts prevent him from acknowledging what his real position was.  That this is revealed in a Rove op-ed designed to show the differences between the “flip-flops” of McCain and Obama is particularly rich, but it is also inevitable given McCain’s long record of changing positions on domestic policy to suit the moment.

If it is a matter of integrity and honestly acknowledging a change in position, rather than the relative merits of this or that policy view, the last thing you would want to highlight is McCain’s changed position on tax policy.

Filed under: politics