McCain Running on Biography, Not Policy

Jonathan Cohn writes in The New Republic that John McCain's acceptance speech at the Republican Convention was less about policy than about biography.

Of course, McCain's primary argument about the economy has never been about specific policies. It's been about character. And tonight's speech hit those themes over and over again. I'm a maverick. I buck my own party. I will clean up Washington.

But will he really? McCain's tax cut proposal looks an awful lot like President Bush's. So does his plan for oil drilling. So do his health insurance reforms. When it comes to economic policy, McCain is just another Bush Republican.

In the end, tonight's speech merely confirmed what many of us knew along: McCain just doesn't have good answers to our troubled economy. I don't know whether the voters will care about this, but I do know they should.

Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post and Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo made similar observations. So did Steve Clemons of Washington Note, adding this about foreign policy.

But this was mostly about war and definiing America through conflicts and unfinished wars and occupations. Though he said he wanted to build a lasting, enduring peace -- McCain gave the outlines of a neoconservative national security agenda fashioned by Fred and Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Randy Scheunemann, and others that I feel will further undermine's America's global standing and position. His long time aide and alter-ego Mark Salter wrote the speech, but while Salter is a strong national security advocate, he's not yet a part of the most inner sanctum of neoconservative thinking and designs.

I just don't believe he understands how important it is to see that this is a major moment of historical discontinuity for the world and for the United States. To preserve America's constructive global role and to offset more calamity at home and abroad -- we need to talk about more than drilling off the coast, and keeping down taxes (while oddly continuing to beef up the US military and its obligations without regard to receipts to pay for this).

--Ballard Burgher