Will McCain Run from Economic Issues in Tonight’s Debate?

by Seth Michaels, Oct 7, 2008

It seems as though Sen. John McCain has given up any pretense of addressing substantive issues in his run for the presidency. 

Over the past few days, McCain aides have been increasingly clear that they plan to stop talking about real issues—especially the economy.

“We’re looking forward to turning the page on this financial crisis,” McCain aide Greg Strimple told The Washington Post. “If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we’re going to lose,” an unnamed aide told the New York Daily News.

McCain thinks he can run for the highest office in the nation without addressing issues that top the concerns of working families, like jobs or the economy.

Hello? The nation has seen nine straight months of job losses, with some 760,000 jobs lost so far this year. Paychecks are stagnant while the price of health care is rising fast. More than 2 million homes were foreclosed on in just the first half of 2008. The decline in the stock market is hurting pensions and retirement savings. But McCain thinks that if he throws out enough baseless smears and irrelevant, misleading attacks, he can distract voters from what’s actually going on in their lives.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, yesterday, said these tactics are an affront to working families.

Families are struggling with a long-running economic squeeze, the totality of which is still unknown. So what is John McCain’s response? He thumbs his nose at the real issues facing working people—issues for which he has no good answer because his record of support for the Bush financial agenda is indisputable. He turns to Bush fear-mongering tactics to try to change the subject. 

The McCain/Palin tactics are not just false, they’re offensive. Sadly, they’re more of exactly what we’ve come to expect from the Bush White House—neglect of the economic issues that are reshaping working families’ lives. Perhaps it should not come as a surprise from the presidential candidate who voted with George Bush 90 percent of the time. 

Maybe McCain doesn’t want to talk about the economy because his proposals don’t come close to addressing what’s wrong with the economy. In fact, his plans show he’ll continue along the Bush-era path that has rewarded corporations and squeezed middle-class family budgets.

• McCain has proposed $300 billion in tax cuts to the very wealthiest and corporations, but millions of workers wouldn’t see any benefits from these cuts.
• McCain supports bad trade deals that ship jobs overseas.
• McCain’s health care plan, which creates a new tax on health benefits, could push millions of us out of our current employer-based health care coverage and leave us at the mercy of an unregulated, consumer-unfriendly private insurance market.
• McCain wants to gamble Social Security funds on the stock market, putting retirees at risk.

What’s more, as working families have moved away from the Bush agenda, McCain has only embraced it more. In 2001 and 2003, McCain said he couldn’t “in good conscience” support tax cuts so heavily weighted toward the wealthy. Now, as a presidential candidate, his tax giveaways are even bigger and more tilted toward the very wealthiest than were those of Bush.

Sen. Barack Obama, on the other hand, is pushing hard for both short-term economic stimulus and long-term economic solutions.

• Obama supports extending unemployment insurance and giving aid to struggling homeowners, to help workers recover from the immediate effects of the crisis.
• Obama knows that expanding access to affordable health care will be good for both workers and businesses.
• Obama wants to invest in infrastructure and clean energy, to create millions of new, sustainable jobs.
• Obama supports the Employee Free Choice Act to help workers form unions and bargain for better wages and benefits.

According to the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, voters are extremely concerned about the economy and paying close attention to it this election.

• Some 77 percent of voters say the country is on the wrong track.
• When asked, on a scale of 1 to 10, how closely they’re following the election, 72 percent of voters say “10.”
• About 59 percent of voters say the economy is the top issue.

Other polls show similar results: Voters are worried about the economy, are following it closely and making it the deciding factor in how they view the election.

When McCain takes the stage tonight to debate Obama for the second time, will he have the courage to talk about what actually matters to millions of working families—our jobs, our homes, our ability to give our kids a good education and the health care they need?

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Paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, www.aflcio.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

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