Friday, June 13, 2008

What you say isn't what you say?

Here's another example of John McCain believing in something but not actually wanting to run the political risk of telling you he believes in something. Yesterday, it was with regard to his beliefs on Iraq and today it's Social Security.

It's rather maddening. Listen, though I may have ideological disagreements with McCain's efforts to partially privatize Social Security, I can respect that it's a legitimate issue worth debating and discussing, and I can even concede that such a proposal isn't without some merit. However, it's disingenous to go around and say that you don't support privatizing Social Security when, in fact, you actually do.

I mean, McCain spent the first minute of that video portion saying he doesn't support privatizing the program, but then completely pivots to say that, yes, in fact he does support it. And, to me, you know, whatever ... that's fine. It's an issue to debate and discuss, but it's dishonest to say you don't favor that policy when you actually do. In fact, it's an intentional effort to mislead the voters, presumably because proposals to privatize even a portion of Social Security are very politically unpopular with senior citizens, a key voting demographic, as well as the general voting population of the country.

The even weird thing is that McCain himself said it was good policy, as evident in this video footage.

I like Matthew Yglesias's take on it ...

In short, he stridently denies that he wants to favor privatizing Social Security. He just favors policies that are the same as the policies that were called "privatizing Social Security" before the GOP found out that privatizing Social Security is unpopular.

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