One of the most irritating features of this primary season has been how
often candidates have gone negative by decrying their rivals' negativism.
Today, for instance, the McCain campaign sent out a press release accusing
the Bush campaign of making a 14-year-old boy cry with its negative "push
polling." This same release announced a new ad suggesting that, just as
the communists tortured McCain in Vietnam, now the special interests are
"coming after him here in South Carolina because John McCain will take the
government away from the special interests and give it back to you."
Accusing Bush of making children cry and linking him to evil special
interests, we guess, isn't negative.
But what difference does it make whether an attack counts as "negative,"
or who went negative first? The campaigns' focus on negativism - Bush is
guilty of it just as McCain is — distracts attention from the important
question: Which charges are true? Let's run through them one by one.
McCain Charge # 1: Gov. Bush sets aside no money for Social Security.
Actually, Bush sets aside excess payroll-tax revenues for Social Security.
At a projected $2 trillion over the next ten years, that's a nice chunk of
change. So now McCain is saying that those $2 trillion are already
supposed to go to Social Security; Bush's sin is not setting aside any
"new" money from income-tax revenues, as the senator proposes. Some of
McCain's premises here can be disputed, but the bottom line is that his
ads and rhetoric are misleading: Bush is hardly endangering Social
Security by not feeding it money that isn't slotted to go to it now.
McCain Charge # 2: Bush doesn't reduce the national debt. When money is
set aside "for" Social Security, what that means in practical terms is
that it is used to retire debt. Again, McCain is misleading.
Bush Charge # 1: McCain favors public financing of political campaigns.
The McCain campaign hotly disputes this, but the Bush campaign dredged up
5 votes by McCain for bills including public financing. McCain spokesman
Howard Opinsky told the Associated Press, "This is the same old Washington
Clintonian politics that voters have become so cynical about, trying to
twist John McCain's 17-year record of reform and consistent opposition to
public financing to Governor Bush's advantage." McCain's votes were all on
procedural motions, he said, to keep debate on campaign-finance reform
going. According to the Senate records, however, Opinsky is wrong: McCain
was voting for bills, not motions. Whatever McCain's theoretical
opposition to public financing, it stopped well short of making him
actually vote against it. Moreover, McCain has just endorsed Ron Unz's
campaign-finance initiative in California, which includes public
financing.
Bush Charge # 2: McCain would raise taxes on contributions to churches,
charities, and colleges. The provision of the McCain tax plan in question
concerns the donation of assets that have grown in value since originally
being purchased — say, a stock. Under McCain's plan, only the original
cost of the donation would be deductible, not the current value. Here's
McCain's press-release explanation of why this must be done: "The McCain
tax plan does not tax charitable contributions. Under current law, a
wealthy taxpayer can buy a painting for $10,000, have a 'friendly'
appraiser estimate its value at $100,000 and claim a deduction for the
higher value by donating it to a charitable institution. This practice
unfairly shifts the tax burden to middle income taxpayers." The scenario
McCain describes is already illegal as a form of tax fraud. His solution
is indeed a $9 billion tax increase on charitable contributions.
In these and other cases, figuring out who's telling the truth requires
some attention to policy details. In the Wall Street Journal yesterday,
poor Lawrence Lindsey went deep into the thickets to make the case that
McCain's numbers don't add up. Maybe it's a pointless exercise: McCain
knows that he can wing it and then spin his way out of trouble because
voters aren't thinking about issues. It would be nice if a few journalists
were.
