There are many ways to address Barack Obama’s social security plan. There is the sophisticated analysis you see here. Or there is Hillary Clinton’s short and sweet style. Clinton had a knack of boiling down her opponent’s longwinded and high-sounding ideas to a cold, hard nugget: “It’s a $1 trillion tax increase.” It seems the McCain camp could learn a thing or two from Clinton.

Take a complex issue–social security or habeas corpus rights–and Obama will talk for paragraphs in high-flying language that ignores (or misstates) the underlying facts or the ramifications of his policy plans. Rather than argue the rhetoric, the McCain camp would do better to tell voters what Obama means. On social security, people making over $102K are going to pay a lot more taxes. On habeas corpus, terrorists are going to get never-ending and expensive trials and get-out-of-jail tickets if the government won’t give them access to all the information they want. Arguing in generic terms (e.g. “Obama has a pre-September 11 outlook”) just lends itself to a “No I don’t and you want more George W. Bush” response.

It seems that if you want voters to conclude Obama is a tax-and-spend, weak-on-terrorism liberal, you have to tell them what Obama is really proposing. Otherwise all the voters hear is the rat-a-tat-tat of charge and countercharge. Hey, if the Obama camp hired Patti Solis Doyle maybe the McCain camp could hire Hillary or Howard Wolfson. They were pretty good at this.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 3:34 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.