OK, maybe not "hidden" but John McCain is anything but the swashbuckling, larger-than-life independent Republican he casts himself as. In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd think he was planning on running again...so anxious is he to continue to curry favor with the nuts who form the shrinking(and shrieking) base of the Republican party.
When you put your life, your money and soul into winning a presidential nomination, what is it you think you're winning? Don't you maybe get to decide the direction your party takes, what issues are most important to you, what platform your party runs on?
It would appear not. One of the few Republicans to speak out about President Bush's plans to offer tax breaks to the wealthy simultaneously with trying to conduct a war in Iraq, McCain has accepted the Republican mantra of never seeing a tax cut they didn't like hook, line and sinker. He even offered his own stimulus plan in opposition to Obama's. From Faiz Shakir:
And now, on Tuesday, McCain is unveiling his new proposals, going back to the well of tax cuts for the rich. McCain will announce plans to "cut the capital gains tax on stock profits in half, from 15 percent now on stocks held a year or longer to 7.5 percent — a $10 billion proposal." The Wonk Room’s James Kvaal noted the impact of cutting capital gains:
Households earning less than $50,000 a year collected a mere 2.5 percent of capital gains in 2005, according to the Tax Policy Center. Families earning more than $1 million a year collected 59 percent of capital gains. Moreover, most middle-class families with capital gains hold their investments in retirement accounts shielded against capital gains taxes.
For a candidate already promising $175 billion tax cut for corporations, including $4 billion for oil companies, handing out a new tax cut for millionaires and calling it a "Pension And Family Security" plan is oddly appropriate.
At the same time, neither McCain nor his sidekick Lindsay Graham, who seems to channel Gomer Pyle, lets an opportunity go by to criticize Obama's Making Work Pay tax credit. Sneering about the credit being a government giveaway(a euphemism for welfare), McCain laments the shrinking tax base, something that doesn't seem to bother him when proposing that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy be made permanent.
The Republicans oppose sending money without restrictions on its use to people who don't pay tax, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain's senior economic policy adviser. And the GOP doesn't like paying for it by increasing taxes on wealthier Americans, which they say is another example of Obama's ideological drive to redistribute wealth, he said.
"It's pretty clear what's going on here," Holtz-Eakin
said.
Except that the so-called non-taxpayers do pay taxes: sales tax, gas tax, property tax and payroll tax if they still have a job.
Where's the guy who claims to take on his party? Having once opposing a tax cut isn't being a maverick; he's a one trick pony.