Necessary Roughness

Senator McCain pledged not to raise taxes were he elected President, CNSNews.com reports:

“So on taxes, are you a ‘read my lips’ candidate, no new taxes, no matter what,” host George Stephanopoulos asked the Arizona Republican on ABC’s “This Week.”

“No new taxes,” McCain affirmed, before making an argument that taxes ought to be cut if the economy deteriorates.

“But under circumstances would you increase taxes?” Stephanopoulos asked in a follow-up question.

“No,” said McCain.

Count me as concerned. If I am having episodes of déjà vu in my thirties, I will probably be a stark raving lunatic by fifty.

The first President Bush, Bush-41, made the same pledge. When he broke it, we fired him in the next election, and H. Ross Perot picked up his biggest vote total. Bush-41 blamed the Democratic Congress that kept spending and spending. We have another one of those now.

The mother of all broken Republican promises, and McCain makes it. Unbelievable.

That’s not to say I don’t hope it’s true. Stephanopoulos wants the same Republican implosion that happened under Bush-41, so he’s going to bring up that issue of trust as many times as possible. It will have to be fixed by painting Bush-41 as someone who trusted the Democrats to keep spending down, and reiterate that they didn’t.

He has to attack the Democratic Congress because the Republican Party, which holds spenders like Ted Stevens and until last year Lincoln Chafee, spent like Democrats. House Minority Leader John Boehner has launched a new web site, Earmark Reform, but this is an awfully small rudder for such a big ship. The reputation of big-spending Republicans will not go away soon. It wasn’t helped when Republican porkbuster Jeff Flake was denied a seat on the House Appropriations committee.

McCain has a lot in common with Bush-41, and the need to make this pledge ties the two together further. Bush-41 was a president whose mistakes Bush-43 was said to have learned from. This is one tie to the past we didn’t need to see.