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01 May 2008 10:53 am

Policy Anyone?

Tyler Cowen on McCain's policy proposals:

Trade aside, so far I've yet to see many actual policy proposals from the McCain camp.  Mostly I've seen attempts to signal that they won't do anything too offensive to the party's right wing.  Very few of these trial balloons seem to be ideas that McCain had expressed much previous loyalty to.  I don't even think we should be analyzing these statements as policy proposals.  We should be wondering why the Republican Party has given up on the idea of policy proposals.

This seems a little excessive to me. McCain has offered several concrete proposals - but they seem rather muddled and political, rather than the product of a coherent worldview. The three-quarters-baked healthcare idea - which would, I suspect, be obliterated by either Democrat in the fall; the League of Democracies that wouldn't, for some reason, include India; the open-ended commitment to occupying Iraq; the gas tax holiday; and the strange melange of GOP idees fixes in the economic proposals: none of this is very encouraging, is it?

The underlying weakness of the McCain candidacy is a media blindspot right now. Because it involves explaining and thinking about policy, which is something we hacks are sometimes too lazy to do.

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