Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

OK, I’ll be upfront. I didn’t watch the entire debate, and I slept for about 20 minutes. I found it incredibly boring, and with the exception of a few crazy things McCain said, totally unenlightening. The most exciting part for me was seeing the gaggle of Koreans who live in my dorm boo Obama for portraying Korean manufacturing as a threat to the American worker, and cheering McCain when he said that South Koreans are, on average, three inches taller than their North Korean counterparts. But here were the three moments that made me think that McCain isn’t just a flawed politician with bad ideas, but someone who has a very basic disconnect with the issues the country faces or who just doesn’t care.

1. In the opening section on the economy, and then on government spending, McCain continuously harped on 18 billion dollars of earmarks. Sure, earmarks probably aren’t the best way to spend money (even if they don’t actually increase the budget, they merely redirect other appropriations), but 18 billion dollars pales in comparison to the cost of the Iraq war (approaching 1 trillion dollars), pales in comparison to the 600 300 billion or so in revenue loss that McCain’s tax cuts for the rich would lead to. It’s chump change compared to the 700 billion we’ll have to spend initially on the bail out. The point is, you can do all you want about earmarks and save a small amount of money and prevent some petty corruption. If McCain actually claimed to care about federal spending, he wouldn’t be proposing massive tax cuts, he’d think about military spending in a more holistic way (more on that later) and would actually say something about entitlement reform.

But McCain seems to lack the ability to think about policy in a systemic, big picture way. He instead just sees greed and corruption among those Congressmen who request earmarks. He thinks that if we “know their names” and he whips out his great veto pen, spending will miraculously fall. We merely have to be virtuous. Too bad that government spending is nearly all entitlements and defense. Entitlement spending is mandated by Congress, and defense spending isn’t going to be cut under a McCain administration. So all he can to is pontificate about earmarks, while ignoring the herd of elephants in the room.

2.The second bizarre thing McCain said was proposing a “spending freeze” on all non-discretionary, non defense and non veterans spending. So either McCain is bullshitting (likely) or he’s actually proposing to freeze Pell Grants, Head Start, unemployment benefits and a whole host of government programs that have near universal support among the public. Obama should be pointing this out. Mark Schmitt has more on just how extreme a promise this is. 

The last bizarre thing McCain said was his impassioned rant about cost overruns in defense spending. Surely, this is a real problem that ought to be addressed, but really, a weapons program that is slated to cost 180 million and ends up costing 400 million isn’t that big a deal. Especially compared to the fixed cost of maintaining military bases all over the world, of staying in Iraq (once again, nearly a trillion dollars), or of getting these weapons systems in the first place. If I heard McCain said that we should cancel a weapons program (say, new submarines, drastically cutting back our F-35 and F-22 order), I might have been impressed. But because McCain can’t think about questions of government spending in a big picture way, and he can only focus on small, marginal instances of greed and incompetence, it would be incomprehensible for him to bring up defense spending that actually mattered. This approach would make sense for a senator who’s closely involved with the defense appropriation process, but a president has to set large-scale priorities, and that doesn’t mean mucking around in exactly how much a given weapons project is going over its initial estimate.

We all know that McCain’s ideas (confrontation in foreign affairs, league of democracies, tax cuts for the rich, throwing everyone into the individual market of health care etc etc etc ) are bad, but this debate showed that his very approach to politics and policy is fundamentally flawed and should disqualify him from being president.

There’s a reason that I’m much more interested in Northwestern’s 22-17 over Iowa, putting us at 5-0 for the first time since 1962. For all of Northwestern’s flaws – and they are numerous – they at least treat the game seriously, which is more than I can say about McCain*

*You should notice that I was able to go on a long, impassioned rant about John McCain’s lack or seriousness and fundamental personality flaws without mentioning Sarah Palin.