Paging through John McCain's health care proposal, Tyler Cowen comments, "so far I've yet to see many actual policy proposals from the McCain camp. Mostly I've seen attempts to signal that they won't do anything too offensive to the party's right wing. Very few of these trial balloons seem to be ideas that McCain had expressed much previous loyalty to. I don't even think we should be analyzing these statements as policy proposals. We should be wondering why the Republican Party has given up on the idea of policy proposals." I've been struggling with this too. McCain's domestic policy ideas are so half-baked, and so DOA to Congress, that it's very hard to conceive of them as actual policy papers rather than targeted campaign documents. I don't really believe, for instance, that McCain honestly thinks he can convince Congress to blow a multi-trillion dollar hole in the deficit, nor that he honestly thinks he's going to get a Democratic Senate to slash Medicare and SOcial Security in order to fund more tax cuts. This, I think, accounts for some of the soft coverage McCain's proposals have received in the press. They're bad, sure, but no one really thinks he's going to try and carry them out. They're just rhetoric. But it's not for us in the press to decide what is and isn't a real policy proposal. These are the ideas the McCain camp is offering to the general electorate. They need to be taken seriously and examined in detail. And that needs to be the norm, for all candidates, so they realize that they have to offer campaign policy honestly. An accurate understanding of a presidential candidates agenda is, after all, critical information for voters. When the press lets candidates slide by with incoherent or internally contradictory or simply unworkable plans, it cements the impression that candidates can use policy as they'd use ads, or direct mail -- as a simple form of voter targeting.
