Barack Obama would have you believe that John McCain has gone
through a sudden and shocking metamorphosis. According to the
Illinois Senator, the “once-principled” Republican presidential
nominee has by some mysterious alchemy become a pathological liar,
a shameless purveyor of “dishonest smears.” This theme has featured
prominently in Obama’s recent campaign ads, one of which describes
McCain’s campaign as “truly vile,” and it has been dutifully
repeated by his surrogates in newspapers, on TV talk shows, and in
the left-wing blogosphere.
Obama’s decision to pursue this line of attack demonstrates
considerable audacity, of course, but it will probably backfire.
First, as Karl Rove recently pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, the dishonesty charge is “one
of the last things the voters will believe about John McCain.”
Moreover, just as his comments about Sarah Palin’s lack of
experience highlighted the scantiness of his own resume, Obama’s
aggressive questioning of McCain’s honor invites examination of his
own probity. And the Democrat presidential nominee is no stranger
to prevarication. He routinely lies about McCain’s positions on a
wide variety of issues, including health care, Social Security, and
the mortgage crisis.
Among the most brazen of Obama’s whoppers are those he
repeatedly tells about McCain’s health care reform program. Obama
has, for example, consistently peddled the claim that McCain wants to impose a
stealth tax increase on American workers via their health
insurance: “He wants to tax your health benefits. Apparently,
Senator McCain doesn’t think it’s enough that your health premiums
have doubled, he thinks you should have to pay taxes on them too.
That’s a $3.6 trillion tax increase on middle class families.” This
is a deliberate distortion of McCain’s proposal to eliminate the
perverse tax incentives and inequities associated with our current
system of employer-based health insurance, a system that has been
decried by health care experts of all political persuasions.
Obama’s misrepresentation of McCain’s health care proposal has
been so over the top that even CBS News, an organization not
notable for its bias against Democrat presidential candidates, felt
compelled to debunk it in a “
Reality Check” segment. In the CBS piece, Wyatt Andrews points
out that “the impact on the middle class is exaggerated” by Obama
and that “most people will see tax cuts.” McCain would indeed get
rid of the tax break employers now receive when they buy insurance
on behalf of employees, but would replace it with individual tax
credits worth up to $5,000. The plan would thus enable people who
purchase insurance in the individual market to get the tax benefits
now enjoyed only by those who have employer-based coverage.
Obama’s whoppers are not, of course restricted to health care.
He has also misrepresented McCain’s Social Security proposals.
According to the New York Times, he recently told an audience of Florida seniors, “If my
opponent had his way, the millions of Floridians who rely on it
would’ve had their Social Security tied up in the stock market this
week….How do you think that would have made folks feel? Millions
would’ve watched as the market tumbled and their nest egg
disappeared before their eyes.” Thus, the candidate of “change”
revived the perennial Democrat campaign tactic of scaring the
bejabbers out of the elderly.
Obama’s sleazy fear mongering is not merely ironic, however. As
Ruth Marcus put it in another news outlet
conspicuously pure of Republican leanings, the Washington
Post, “[Obama’s charge] is simply false — even leaving aside
the incendiary language about ‘privatizing’ Social Security…the
private account plan suggested by President Bush and backed by
McCain would not have applied to anyone born before 1950.”
In other words, even if the stock market had dropped to zero there
would have been no effect whatsoever on the benefits of current
retirees. In his zeal to slander McCain, Obama wasn’t content to
merely demagogue sensible Social Security reform. He felt the need
to tell a transparent lie.
In addition to distorting McCain’s health care and Social
Security reform plans, Obama also does considerable violence to the
truth when discussing McCain’s positions as they relate to the
travails of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Last week, he accused McCain of opposing regulatory oversight
of the mortgage industry: “John McCain cannot be trusted to
reestablish proper oversight of our financial markets for one
simple reason: he has shown time and again that he does not believe
in it.” Predictably, he went on to repeat the charge that the
former CEO of Fannie Mae is a McCain crony.
The truth is that McCain is the only presidential candidate from
either party who called for tighter regulation of the mortgage
giants before the current crisis. On May 26, 2006, McCain signed on
as a co-sponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform
Act. This bill, which would have established precisely the
kind of oversight that Obama allegedly favors, was eventually
killed by the Democrats. His official statement on that occasion
shows that he was as prescient about the mortgage crisis as he was
about the Iraq surge: “If Congress does not act, American taxpayers
will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial
system, and the economy as a whole.”
Obama’s whoppers about McCain’s positions on health care, Social
Security, and the mortgage crisis do not by any means exhaust his
repertoire of mendacity. He still tells the stretcher about
McCain’s willingness to stay in Iraq “for 100 years,” he hasn’t
stopped misrepresenting the “$5 million” joke, and he continues to
distort McCain’s positions on Afghanistan and immigration. Most
ironically, he lambastes the Republican nominee for “lying.” Now
that’s true audacity.
