Clinton and McCain Pander; Car Owners Pay the Price
John and Hillary’s gas tax holiday (emphasis mine):
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton lined up with Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, in endorsing a plan to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for the summer travel season. But Senator Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic rival, spoke out firmly against the proposal, saying it would save consumers little and do nothing to curtail oil consumption and imports.
While Mr. Obama’s view is shared by environmentalists and many independent energy analysts, his position allowed Mrs. Clinton to draw a contrast with her opponent in appealing to the hard-hit middle-class families and older Americans who have proven to be the bedrock of her support. She has accused Mr. Obama of being out of touch with ordinary Americans who are struggling to meet their mortgages and gas up their cars and trucks.
In other words, she’s pandering:
I’d say there’s approximately a zero percent chance that Hillary Clinton or John McCain actually believe this is good policy. It would increase oil company profits, it would make hardly a dent in the price of gasoline, it would encourage more summertime driving, and it would deprive states of money for transit projects. Their staff economists know this perfectly well, and so do they.
But they don’t care. It’s a way to engage in some good, healthy demagoguery, and if there’s anything that the past couple of months have reinforced, it’s the notion that demagoguery sells. Boy does it sell.
But why isn’t it good policy?
… It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.
How can McCain and Clinton get away with such glaring demogoguery?
Number one, they watched Bush and learned:
Clinton and McCain have learned a destructive lesson from the Bush era: as Bill Clinton said in 2002, it’s better politically to be “strong and wrong” than thoughtful and right. The goal is to depict Barack Obama as an out-of-touch elitist. By any means necessary.
Number two, they used Obama for cover and advantage:
So why are McCain and Clinton doing this? Because when they learned that Obama had supported a similar suspension of the Illinois gas tax in Springfield, Ill., before realizing it was a bad idea, they saw an opening. It was like Hillary’s whiskey shot in the bar, only sleazier. Try to show that the guy just doesn’t get it.
Of course, McCain and Clinton do get it. They get that people are hurting and want some relief, even if this form of it makes no sense. They get that voters have been conned into believing that both candidates are responsible public servants because they’re not as bad as some others, so they can trade on that reputation. They get that smacking Obama is more important than anything else on the planet right now, and that for Obama to respond by calling them panderers will take Obama about as far as it took Paul Tsongas in 1992 when he leveled the same charge at Bill Clinton.
In sum, McCain and Clinton get that the media will let them get away with this. You can’t forgive them on this one, Lord, for they know exactly what they do.
