Politics and Policy II: Next Convention, Any Consequences ?
Well now that we're past the Republican convention it's time to try our first pass summary and
interpretations. Like the Democratic conventions there were many things that surprised me, only this time not as positively on the whole. There are at least three clusters of things being woven together at any convention. First, there's the political business to be done. In Denver the challenge was to bring everybody together, bridge the Billary gap and get everybody energized and marching together. McCain had a similar and longer-standing challenge with the far right so-called base (it wouldn't be the base if it hadn't been pandered to for years by a politics of divisiveness; nor would the Republicans have lost their grip on the center as they have). Second the candidate and the key speech makers have to establish the themes, key messages, elements of substance and lines of policy and strategy on which they're going to attempt to close to the finish. In 2004 the Dims convention was dismal at this, represented by the long, disjointed, dis-organized and incoherent speech of the candidate. It went downhill from their. This time both candidates, conventions and parties did enormously better. The Democrats did superbly IMHO while the Republicans did so so at best for reasons we'll get into. If you want to check out my summary take from the D's try this: Politics and Policy: Convention to Consequences.
The third thing, building on the line of policy and strategy development is that the candidates have to establish enough substance to their policies to move from arm-waving to serious issues. It's in this area that the D convention was enormously surprising to me - first how well the basic themes were introduced and coordinated in one giant weaving across all the speakers, Hillary but not Bill excepted. But no matter, by the end she was under control, her partisans were in the tent and she and her bitterness became irrelevant. Especially after Gov. Palin spoke and proved that breaking the glass ceiling don't require chips on both shoulders and knee-spikes. Now in the prior post we referred you to our YouTube playlist for the D's with the comment that you really need to listen yourself. That playlist selected the key speeches that I thought were and are worth your time; they're all excellent. The RCon speeches are now also in a YouTube playlist courtesy of C-Span. This time though I can't recommend listening to them all, and that gets to the heart of the matter.
Reflections and Observations
In no particular order but as they occur to me here are some observations, buttressed by the readings you'll find after the break, which are divided into two groups. Political analysis (with several David Brooks columns - one of which is the single worst I've ever seen him write using very clever sophomoric humor to parody Barry's speech and the rest of which meet his usual exceptional standards of writing, insight and wisdom. One can take his terrible Barry column as a bad day and confirmation of my argument that the substance of the speech was outstanding; and therefore scary to a conservative).
1. The three best speeches were Palin's, Johnboy's and Joe's. Palin's in fact was funny as the dickens and well worth your time to listen to as the collection of one-liners delivered with humor and without malice are a refreshing change all around. They're also dead on zingers that will eventually have to be answered. The attacks on Palin prior to the speech were, IMHO, greatly out of line and are going to backfire. The people making them are too narrow in their grasp of what they rest of America is like. There's a whole post here on cultural differences from somebody who grew up in the West and lives in the Northeast but trust me - a women who can clean her catch and dress her kill while still being charming, cute, intelligent and forceful is a tribute to our society. Not an indictment of it - and the left-wingers who've reversed five decades of feminist rhetoric when confronted with a women who really does do it all do nothing but embarrass and indict themselves. Fortunately Joe Biden and Barry are class acts and stood up in her defense. A new chapter in Hofstadter's book on fanatics is being written for the posthumous new edition.
2. Similarly Johnboy and the the other speakers showed a great deal of class in praising their opponents as opposed to the last twelve years of demonization. A refreshing change, long overdue and getting to the heart of what we need to do to move forward (Pastor Rick's points about tolerance and civic responsibilities). They struck me as very sincere but in point of fact who cares - as long as they act that way that works for me. Outstanding. We're lucky in general to have these people - all four of them. And the Rips in particular are lucky to have Johnboy without whom they would be deservedly in the wildnerness.
3. Personally I couldn't listen to many of the other speeches - political hackmanship with no style, grace or foward-looking substance. Giuliani and Romney in particular made backward looking partisan speeches, which we know they don't really believe in from their own candidacies (though in Mitt's case who knows what he believes in). But they spoke to the heart of the traditional Rip, as opposed to Reps, concerns. This was Newt the Grinch's partisan polemics at it's propagandistic worst. And is fully captured in the ideologies embedded in the Rip platform. The gap between what Johnboy's been saying and the ideological purity of that platform and those speeches is wider than the gap between John and reality or Barry. In fact on many of his key points he, Gov. Barracuda and Joe L. sounded remarkably like their opponents.
4. Particularly when they started talking about representing America, not a party. And critiquing the Ripoffs for eight years of corruption and malfeasance. Below in the readings you'll find several pieces related to that, including the one on Jack the Ripper's (many puns intended) most recent sentencing hearings at which he expressed great remorse. Meanwhile of course penning his memoirs blaming it all on everybody else - talk about your self-centered, self-serving, cynical opportunist !
Brief Policy Observations
You won't find much if any of that in the commentariat's discussions - hence the need to listen for yourselves. But what's maybe an hour - you'll spend more time than that making up your next grocery list. As you listen bear in mind what we've been saying about the layers of meaning - conventions are the time to inroduce policy directions and themes, not detailed proposals. But if you listen reasonably, but not too much so, carefully you'll hear a lot to like and agree with in Johnboy's speech. In fact the differences between him and Barry on key issues is pretty narrow. He started with different priorities and was really light, i.e. non-existent, on the economy. And not as comprehensive, organized and substantive as Barry. (Barry's speech was a policy wonk like me's ideal political speech). Nonetheless...
1. Johnboy started with foreign policy, building off a very candid and revealing discussion of his personal history, as you'd expect. But when you parse it out the differences between him and Barry on Iraq are now, as the result of the Surge and COIN tactical innovations, very narrow. Both are for withdrawl with a permanent long-term presence, both want to move on and so forth. In case you didn't know btw Pakistan is in the process of putting Bhutto's widower into the Presidency so that he can restore the kleptocracy that brought down the last civilian governments. Anyway Barry and Johnboy are just about on the same page with regard to Russia and Johnboy went out of his way to emphasis the importance he places on "softpower" and diplomacy. (Iraq Resartus (Readings): Stability, Progress and Will,Brave New World: Non-Flatness, History and Challenges)
2. While John was more than a little disingenuous on many of the policy issues regarding his opponent - in fact in most of the places where he accused Barry of something it not only wasn't true but was contradicted. But again you have to listen to both speeches.
- Energy - actually both are for a balanced national energy policy aiming at long-term independence using offshore drilling, alternative source, coal and nuclear as well as the green stuff. You can tick down our list of a balanced energy strategy and find they both hit every point with reasonably proper weightings. They both even used the same $700B can't be exported quote ! (In Search of a Nat'l Energy Policy: Check the Mirror Pogo)
- Education - more agreement in not despite John's accusations to the contrary. In fact nearly identical upto and including Barry's use of the line that bad teachers need to find another line of work which John then turned around and re-used.(Readings(Education): the Single Most Important Domestic Policy Issue)
- Healthcare - you won't belive how close the both are to the same policy and how close that closet policy is to what the majority of knowledable experts and economists think it should be. Fortunately there's a great blog post we've listed that walks you thru that.
3. Economy - well one of Barry's great strenghts, both in terms of putting it first, listing out all the components and coming up with a resonable set of recommendations. Johnboy was very weak here overall and passed over it too lightly. This will be and is the central issue in this election. BtW - in case you missed it Fannie and Freddie (Frannie) are having a major rescue mounted this weekend before their collapse takes Western Civilization into a new dark age (not really kidding in any way about this - see the link the readings). (A Little Off-Topic: the Credit Crisis, the Economy & You) Barry proposed major re-thinkings of our regulatory infrastructure which is vital. He also linked his efforts to grow the economy to long-term energy and other innovation investments.
Strangely enough their recommendations for how to deal with trade adjustments and globalization were identical. That is we can't escape a global economy but we can help people find new jobs - in fact Johnboy's detailed program (his most) wouldn't have sounded too out of place from Robert Reich a few years back. Amazing. And correct. In fact, wheter you believe it or not, they both support market economies, institutional reform and helping the winners compensate the losers while investing in future jobs thru innovation, technology and education. (Standing Corrected: Education 2nd Avoiding Economic Collapse 1rst, Readings (Economy): It Really is the Economy, Stupid Frog)
This is, collectively, the most rational discussion of economic policy by politicians in a major, in fact THE,forum I've heard in my lifetime.
Politics
Biden says Palin family is off limits to critics Republican presidential nominee John McCain began his final drive for the White House on Thursday with a boost from running mate Sarah Palin while Democratic opponent Joe Biden declared her family "off limits" and suggested that some news media coverage of her had been sexist.Palin and her husband, Todd, announced this week that their 17-year-old unmarried daughter was pregnant and would be marrying her boyfriend, saying they were making a private matter public because of Internet rumors. Biden said the Democratic campaign was not attacking Palin over her family. "It is off limits to talk about her family," Biden said in an interview with "Fox and Friends" on Fox News Channel. "Every family has difficulty as they're raising their children. I think the way she's handled it has been absolutely exemplary." Asked if some of the criticism aimed at Palin has been sexist, Biden said: "Yes, by you guys in the media. ... When I heard that media response, you know, this coming from some of the right-wing guys, saying that, 'Well, how can you be a mother and a vice president at the same time?' ... I mean, millions of women in America are going through exactly what she (is going) through. And guess what? They can handle it." Meanwhile, McCain's wife, Cindy, said she doesn't agree with Palin's opposition to abortion in cases of rape and incest. She also parts ways with Palin on sex education.
- Palin wows GOP, puts Dems on notice, Media swoon over Palin's fiery speech, A Knockout - Morrissey
- Sarah Palin can have it all
John McCain's idealistic dilemma The great riddle of John McCain has always been that he is a man more about ideals than ideas. Wars must be won. Country comes first. And who else could transform all the moral ambiguities of America’s bloody Vietnam experience into a symbol for service? Enticed by his maverick style, Washington’s neoconservatives often see in McCain a blank slate on which to write their ideas. But in 2005, on the gut issue of torture, his ideals famously rebelled against the same White House interrogation policies that the Weekly Standard’s intellects had rationalized. McCain’s idealism is his great strength — but it can also be a weakness when he becomes cocky, even abusive, about his image and lets judgment slip into anger. In 2000, his message of reform and service caught fire with voters, fat with economic success but hungry for inspiration after the scandals of Bill Clinton. Today, he faces a very different landscape: troubled markets that put a premium on smarts, not idealism, and an opponent, Barack Obama, whose historic candidacy threatens to steal the music that was all McCain’s eight years ago. Alone then on his campaign bus in South Carolina — when all the fury of the Republican right was just crashing down — McCain turned to this reporter, whom he knew as a fellow Vietnam veteran, and broke into laughter. “David,” he said, “We have unleashed the dogs of war!” With real wars now in Iraq and Afghanistan, nothing is so carefree. And the most important battle for this campaign is within McCain himself. His life story — that of the rebel without a cause who found one in a Hanoi prison — will be central to McCain’s speech Thursday night to the national convention in St. Paul, Minn. And he may well use the occasion to chide his fellow Republicans for losing their compass.
David Brooks: What the Palin Pick Says John McCain is not a normal conservative. He has instincts, but few abstract convictions about the proper size of government. He’s a traditionalist, but is not energized by the social conservative agenda. As Rush Limbaugh understands, but the Democrats apparently do not, a McCain administration would not be like a Bush administration. The main axis in McCain’s worldview is not left-right. It’s public service versus narrow self-interest. Many people are conditioned by their life experiences to see this choice of a running mate through the prism of identity politics, but that’s the wrong frame. Sarah Barracuda was picked because she lit up every pattern in McCain’s brain, because she seems so much like himself. So my worries about Palin are not (primarily) about her lack of experience. She seems like a marvelous person. My worry about Palin is that she shares McCain’s primary weakness — that she has a tendency to substitute a moral philosophy for a political philosophy. There are some issues where the most important job is to rally the armies of decency against the armies of corruption: Confronting Putin, tackling earmarks and reforming the process of government. But most issues are not confrontations between virtue and vice. Most problems — the ones Barack Obama is sure to focus on like health care reform and economic anxiety — are the product of complex conditions. They require trade-offs and policy expertise. They are not solvable through the mere assertion of sterling character. But if you are going to lead a vast administration as president, it really helps to have a clearly defined governing philosophy, a conscious sense of what government should and shouldn’t do, a set of communicable priorities. If McCain is elected, he will face conditions tailor-made to foster disorder. He will be leading a divided and philosophically exhausted party. There simply aren’t enough Republican experts left to staff an administration, so he will have to throw together a hodgepodge with independents and Democrats. He will confront Democratic majorities that will be enraged and recriminatory. On top of these conditions, he will have his own freewheeling qualities: a restless, thrill-seeking personality, a tendency to personalize issues, a tendency to lead life as a string of virtuous crusades. He really needs someone to impose a policy structure on his moral intuitions. He needs a very senior person who can organize a vast administration and insist that he tame his lone-pilot tendencies and work through the established corridors — the National Security Council, the Domestic Policy Council. He needs a near-equal who can turn his instincts, which are great, into a doctrine that everybody else can predict and understand.
'Broken man' Abramoff gets 4 years in prison Broken and disgraced, lobbyist Jack Abramoff will spend four years in prison for his role in a corruption scandal that upended Washington politics and contributed to the Republicans' loss of Congress in 2006. The once powerful Washington insider, at times choking back tears during his sentencing hearing Thursday, appeared crestfallen as a judge handed down a longer sentence than prosecutors had sought. Over the past three years, Abramoff has come to symbolize corruption and the secret deals cut between lobbyists and politicians in back rooms or on golf courses or private jets. The scandal shook Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to Capitol Hill. "I come before you as a broken man," Abramoff said at his sentencing before U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle. "I'm not the same man who happily and arrogantly engaged in a lifestyle of political and business corruption." He added later that, "My name is the butt of a joke, the source of a laugh and the title of a scandal." Already two years into a prison term from a separate case in Florida, Abramoff, 49, will have spent about six years in prison by the time he is released, far longer than he and his attorneys expected for a man who became the key FBI witness in his own corruption case. With Abramoff's help, the Justice Department has won corruption convictions against former Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, former Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles and several top Capitol Hill aides. Defense lawyers predicted more convictions would follow.
Masters of Sleaze Down in the depths of the netherworld, where Tammany Hall grafters and Chicago ward heelers gather amid spittoons and brass railings, a reverential silence now spreads across the communion. The sleazemasters of old look back into the land of the mortals and they see greatness in the form of Jack Abramoff. Only a genius like Abramoff could make money lobbying against an Indian tribe's casino and then turn around and make money defending that tribe against himself. Only a giant like Abramoff would have the guts to use one tribe's casino money to finance a Focus on the Family crusade against gambling in order to shut down a rival tribe's casino. Yet it's important to remember this: A genius like Abramoff doesn't spring fully formed on his own. Just as Michelangelo emerged in the ferment of Renaissance Italy, so did Abramoff emerge from his own circle of creativity and encouragement. Back in 1995, when Republicans took over Congress, a new cadre of daring and original thinkers arose. These bold innovators had a key insight: that you no longer had to choose between being an activist and a lobbyist. You could be both. You could harness the power of K Street to promote the goals of Goldwater, Reagan and Gingrich. And best of all, you could get rich while doing it! As time went by, the spectacular devolution of morals accelerated. Many of the young innovators were behaving like people who, having read Barry Goldwater's "Conscience of a Conservative," embraced the conservative part while discarding the conscience part. Abramoff's and Scanlon's Indian-gaming scandal will go down as the movement's crowning achievement, more shameless than anything the others would do, but still the culmination of the trends building since 1995. It perfectly embodied their creed and philosophy: "I'd love us to get our mitts on that moolah!!" as Abramoff wrote to Reed.
A Glimpse of the New Political parties usually reform in the wilderness. They suffer some crushing defeat, the old guard is discredited and the pain compels turnover and change. John McCain is trying to reform the Republican Party before a presidential defeat, with the old guard still around, and with a party base that still hasn’t accepted the need to transform. The central drama of this week’s convention was the struggle by reform Republicans to break through the gravitational pull of old habits and create something new. The convention thus sat on a knife-edge. And then Palin walked onstage. And what was most impressive was her speech’s freshness. Her words flowed directly from her life experience, her poise and mannerisms from her town and its conversations. She left behind most of the standard tropes of Republican rhetoric (compare her text to the others) and skated over abortion and the social issues. There wasn’t even any tired, old Reagan nostalgia. Instead, her language resonated more of supermarket aisle than the megachurch pulpit. More than the men on the tickets, she embodies the spirit of the moment: impatient, fed up, tough-minded, but ironical. Even in attack, she projected the cheerfulness of someone confident about the future. In those 40 minutes, the forces of reform Republicanism took control, at least for a time. Republicans started talking about Palin, Bobby Jindal and a brighter future for their party. In his own speech on Thursday, McCain showed that he is not naturally the smoothest of speakers. He did not have an over-arching story to describe how the world has changed in the 21st century and how government must adapt.But he described traditional conservatism-plus: low taxes and free markets with some activism built on top; compensating workers for lost wages when plants close; a grand national project for energy independence. Through it all, he communicated his burning indignation at the way Washington has operated over the last 12 years. He communicated his intense passion to lift government to a plane the country deserves. His policies are still not quite there yet, but McCain has the heart of an insurgent. John Sidney McCain III: Serving a Cause and a Desire to Succeed
Policy
A new social contract for America Malaise has made a comeback. How else to describe the results of a recent Rockefeller Foundation/Time magazine poll in which 49 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds surveyed said that America was a better place to live in the 1990s and will continue to decline. Nine in 10 of all respondents agreed that just getting by is as hard as or harder than ever before.At the root of such pessimism is the failure of the nation's social contract – the policies and institutions that support Americans as they pursue their economic and personal goals – to keep pace with the dizzying changes of the past two decades. We've seen an explosion in information technology. The end of the cold war has unleashed massive amounts of human capital. Trade in goods and services is fully globalized. Medical advances are spurring gains in life expectancy. The return on higher education, measured by the difference in mean wages for those with and without advanced degrees, has grown 100 percent since 1974. And the traditional nuclear family is increasingly uncommon. The programs designed to help Americans navigate the economy were conceived for a static, relatively closed economy in which higher education was valued but not essential, retirement was significantly shorter, and two-parent, single-income families predominated. In other words, the current social contract is as antiquated as the typewriter it was written on. It is no surprise, then, that Americans are awash in insecurity. To bring the social contract up to speed with the 21st-century economy, we need bold policies that satisfy one or more of the "Four F's:"
Frannie From Pan to Fire: Rescue Me...Us...the System ? Our fear is that once we move beyond the perennial Pollyannas and into more realistic territory there's still a limited grasp of what a breakdown in Frannie, let alone the whole system, would mean for the economy. Shucks...:) We're not even sure we get it and we've been flapping our gums for months. Certainly if the XLF keeps getting run up like this though our fears of a major breakdown are very far afield from the common understanding. In other words there's still a lot of piping to pay for and Bill and Paul are telling us the bill's coming due. There's a lot of words being bandied about that this is yet another example of socialist intervention in the markets. Instead they screwed up, let them fail. Well this is disingenuous at best and also ignorant both of how one thing leads to another and what underpins markets. Here are some things to think about that'll help you correct that. As the chart makes clear a Frannie failure would turn a nightmare Housing market into a catastrophic collapse and be a systemic threat to the entire financial system. BSC was a Sunday park stroll as compared to the Mongols' visit to Baghdad in comparison. But that's not the worst of it - because the full faith and credit of the US government was involved and exploited the credit-worthiness of the US Treasury was and is at stake and the Chinese have fired more than one public warning shot.
How not to rescue the Big Three Car owners know the tough call: When do you stop putting money into a rickety auto? Congress faces a similar decision this month. Should it put money into a failing US car industry? The answer would be simple if Midwest swing states weren't up for grabs in the presidential election. To persuade US lawmakers to pass an emergency loan for them within weeks, executives from General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler were out in force at the party conventions in St. Paul, Minn., and Denver to plead that the industry is "deserving" of government credit. Deserving? Years of mismanagement, high executive salaries, and overly generous worker benefits have indeed hurt the Big Three. Last month, their new car sales were down by double digits compared with a year ago. The decline has left them with low credit ratings, making it difficult to borrow. But guess what. Despite a slowing US economy, Toyota and Honda saw only single-digit losses in their August sales. Nissan's sales were up. Those companies know how to run successful auto manufacturing plants in the US and aren't asking for help. They can sell good cars at reasonable prices with labor compensation packages at $40 to $50 an hour per American worker. GM is still stuck with "legacy costs," or past agreements that leave it paying $70 an hour, and has to heavily discount prices on auto sales. But many foreign carmakers are already there, or going there, with nimble, innovative, and smarter responses to a shifting market and to congressional fuel-economy mandates. They didn't make the big mistake of focusing on trucks and SUVs as Detroit did and then asking for a loan that may end up simply becoming a bailout.Detroit is no more deserving than many other US industries – textiles, furniture, toys – that have failed to compete well against foreign companies. But if Congress does decide to risk money on the US automakers – and overcome President Bush's opposition – it ought to at least demand big changes from the Big Three and their unions. Congress shouldn't rescue an auto industry and its unions that aren't doing enough to rescue themselves. The federal government is already trying to save one public-private partnership, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It doesn't need to become a credit master to another faltering industry.
How to Exit Iraq JOHN McCAIN spoke of his hopes for Iraq’s future last night. When we traveled around Basra recently escorted by Iraqi Army soldiers and a handful of coalition advisers, we glimpsed a model of post-American Iraq that he and Barack Obama would do well to consider. This world, defined principally by more capable Iraqi security forces taking the lead with coalition support and an increasingly confident Iraqi government, defies the simplistic “all in” or “all out” way that Iraq is debated in Washington. With the Bush administration now working out an agreement on having American troops out by 2012, understanding how this withdrawal will proceed is vital. Basra is as an example of what an exit strategy might look like — and of the dangers of getting it wrong. After the 2003 invasion, control over southern Iraq was handed over to British forces. Without adequate troops to protect the population, security in Basra deteriorated, the British withdrew and Shiite militias took control. In late March of this year, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki launched an offensive in Basra to clear the city of militias, but the Iraqi Army quickly got bogged down. American special operations forces and combat advisers reinforced Iraqi units, providing crucial air and fire support and detailed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. As a result, Iraqi security forces turned the tide and now control the city. The lesson of Basra is clear: a rapid withdrawal risks a resurgence of violence, but a responsible drawdown and a reorientation of the mission away from combat and toward advising Iraqi forces stand a good chance of advancing our interests in Iraq at acceptable cost. Under this model, embedded military advisers would provide just enough help to give Iraqis what they need on the battlefield, but not so much that it stymies their development and perpetuates a view of Western occupation. Yet this transition is risky. Security gains could come undone if Iraqis fail to strike political deals on elections, oil revenues and disputed territories. Sectarian conflict could also reignite if the Shiite-dominated government fails to accommodate the predominantly Sunni “Sons of Iraq,” the 100,000 security volunteers, many former insurgents, who have taken up arms against Al Qaeda. The biggest challenge America will face is our rapidly diminishing leverage. Iraq’s government is increasingly asserting sovereignty, demanding a new bilateral security relationship with the United States with more constraints on how American forces operate — and limits on how long they can stay. Mr. Maliki and his advisers have inflated confidence in the ability of the Iraqi forces to maintain security that has reduced our influence.
Cram School Confidential: Korean Students Becoming World's Best I saw a lot of amazing things on my recent trip to Seoul, Korea. In addition to interviewing President Lee at the Blue House and touring the DMZ, I also got to experience another culture.One of the most incredible phenomenons is hagwons, or cram schools. Hagwons are so successful in helping Korean students perform better on standardized tests, they've multiplied to become a booming cottage industry that rivals the nation's public school system. "There are hagwons for everything," a Seoul-based mom told me. "There are hagwons for arranging hagwons, and hagwons to enhance appreciation for arts for kids, too, so anything goes here." Unlike in America, though, where parents choose between paying for private school or using the public system, the majority of Korean kids attend both. The result: 12- to 14-hour days are typical for Korean schoolchildren. But there's a high price to pay for all this academic success, as you'll see in this accompanying video.
The Things Campaigns Do to You "The most promising way to move forward in all three dimensions – coverage, cost, and long-run fiscal situation – is to replace the employer exclusion with a tax credit, a step that has been proposed many times before (e.g., Butler 1991 and Pauly and Hoff 2002). Firms would still be allowed to deduct the cost of their contributions to employee premiums, just as they can deduct wages and other expenses today for the purpose of calculating taxable income. But workers would now have to include employer contributions to health insurance in their earnings for the purpose of calculating taxes (precisely which taxes is discussed below). In exchange for, workers who purchased qualifying insurance would get a refundable tax credit. Qualifying insurance would be along the lines proposed by the President in his standard deduction for health insurance, including limits on out-of-pocket payments, coverage of a general range of medical care, and guaranteed renewability by the provider (Treasury 2008)." This is a pretty fair description of the McCain health care plan. The funny thing is, this is not be found in McCain campaign literature or on his senate website, but rather in a paper written by Jason Furman, Obama's Economic Policy Director, who now is arguing about the perils of this very plan. Now Furman would probably be right to respond that the McCain plan doesn't go far enough to facilitate risk pooling in the individual market and maybe that the tax credits are insufficient. But the general thrust of the McCain plan is one that he championed before he became an Obama staffer, now his job is to criticize that very plan.