McCain's Economics Advisors II

18 Feb 2008 04:30 pm

[Patrick Appel] Matt makes a good point about the Andrew Ferguson article I mentioned earlier:

Under the right circumstances, having advisors from competing schools of thought would probably be an asset...The best policies can often secure support from a variety of different perspectives, and certainly complicated undertakings tend to be improved by accepting some critical input. The trouble is that to make something like this work you need the person in charge to actually be capable of assessing different kinds of advice and ironing them into something resembling a coherent policy and there's little in McCain's background to suggest that he has any idea of how to season a policy with a touch of Kemp and a dollop of Peterson.

I have no problem with McCain, or any candidate, having a variety of advisors, but I have yet to see evidence of McCain's ability to synthesize disperate viewpoints into a sound economic platform. If he wants to weather the inevitiable Democratic attacks against his admitted weakness in economics, he is going to have to do a hell of a lot more than name his advisors.

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