McCain Reverts to Tax Attack

 

McCain Reverts to Tax Attack

In politics, the more things change the more they stay the same.

With less than seven weeks remaining before the November presidential election, John McCain is turning to a tried and true tactic: attacking Barack Obama as a serial tax raiser who favors a "massive government".

McCain makes the case in a new ad released this morning:

"Obama and his liberal congressional allies want a massive government," insists the ad's narrator, adding that the Illinois senator favors "billions in spending increases" including "painful income taxes, skyrocketing taxes on life savings, electricity and home heating oil."

"Can your family afford that?" the narrator asks at the commercial's close.

McCain's campaign is also held a conference call today focused on the economy with the stated purpose of exploring Obama's "claims that paying higher taxes is 'patriotic'".

On that call, McCain senior policy adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin alleged that Obama has voted to raise taxes 94 times in the U.S. Senate and had proposed more than $800 billion in additional spending during the presidential campaign. "He has no credibility in his promises," insisted Holtz-Eakin.

The tax attack is not only rooted in decades of successful Republican campaigns -- from the statehouse to the White House -- but also backed by polling that seems to show people believe Obama would raise their taxes.

In the Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted earlier this month, more than half of those tested (51 percent) said that if Obama was elected federal taxes would go up; compare that to the 34 percent who said taxes would go up in a McCain Administration. The New York Times/CBS News poll released last night echoed the findings of the Post survey. Forty-nine percent said they believed their taxes would go up if Obama was elected president while 34 percent said their taxes would rise if McCain wins in November.

Given those gaps, it's easy to see why McCain is focusing on the issue in the final weeks of the race. As we have written many times before, successful political strategies are almost always rooted in playing on the preconceived notions about the two parties.

For Republicans, that means portraying Democrats as advocates of a nanny government that is involved in every part of your life and is funded by huge tax increases that take money from your pocket.

For Democrats, it's casting Republicans as favoring a go-it-alone, every-man-for-himself attitude and driving that message home specifically on domestic issues like health care and the economy.

The reality of the two candidates' economic plans then is secondary to the preconceived notions voters bring to the issues. (Again, we aren't saying this is the "right" way for politics to operate, merely acknowledging that it is the way politics works. Looking for a good, objective breakdown of what the McCain and Obama tax plans mean to you? CNN does it well.)

The big unknown when it comes to the tax question in this election is whether Obama's bet that people are, at their core, sick and tired of politics as usual is the right one. Obama has centered his campaign around the idea that the GOP attacks against Democrats that worked in the past won't work this time around due to the damage done to the Republican brand by President George W. Bush.

If Obama is right, McCain's attacks will fall on deaf ears as people will no longer see Republicans as credible messengers on the economy and taxes. That, in a nutshell, is what happened in the 2006 midterm elections when Republican candidates realized too late that casting their opponents as tax-and-spend liberals was not enough to win races.

Have things changed in the intervening two years? We'll know the answer to that question in 47 days.

By Chris Cillizza |  September 18, 2008; 11:23 AM ET