It's Not About Progressive Taxation

Ross Douthat is still painfully oblivious to the actual point of the McCain campaign's tax argument.  He questions the wisdom of "pinning their hopes on a working-class backlash against the progressive income tax." But that's not at all what the McCain campaign is doing.

If all the rhetoric about "turning the IRS into a giant welfare agency" and "taking from one group of Americans and giving to another" is too subtle for him, here's another big clue: McCain continues to insist that Obama will raise taxes on everyone who makes more than $42,000 a year. Here's what he says in his stump speech:

Senator Obama has made a lot of promises. First he said people making less than 250,000 dollars would benefit from his plan, then this weekend he announced in an ad that if you're a family making less than 200,000 dollars you'll benefit -- but this week, Senator Biden said tax relief should only go to "middle class people -- people making under 150,000 dollars a year." Just today, Bill Richardson said it applied to families making 120,000 dollars a year. It's interesting how their definition of rich has a way of creeping down. Senator Obama voted 94 times for tax increases or against tax cuts. At this rate, it won't be long before Senator Obama is right back to his vote that Americans making just 42,000 dollars a year should get a tax increase. I'm not going to let that happen.

The argument here is not that there's something wrong with taxing the rich more heavily than the middle class. The argument is that--despite what he says--Obama is really going to tax the middle class and give their money away to poor minorities. As Sarah Palin puts it in her stump speech.

[W]hat you have to do is really listen to our opponent's words. You have to hear what he is saying, his plans. Because he is hiding his real agenda of redistributing your hard-earned money. 

And here:

[Obama] voted 94 times for higher taxes, even on hard working middle class Americans making just $42,000 a year. . . .

Now, you have to really listen to our opponent's words through all of this. He says now that he is for a tax credit, which in his world what he's talking about is government taking more of your money to give it to someone else according to his priorities.

Again, the message here is not that progressive taxation is wrong. The message is that Obama is going to take money away from everyone making over $42,000 and give it away to the poor "according to his priorities."

This is a message that is plainly directed at white working class voters (who, not coincidentally, make up most of the remaining undecided vote), the very same people who Republicans used to woo to their side by railing against "welfare queens." It is a message that has nothing to do with allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire on those making over $250,000 a year, which has been Obama's official policy for years.

This entire line of argument is dripping with racial subtext and it's amazing to me that intelligent conservatives like Douthat cannot bring themselves to see it.

Which brings me to a final, related complaint. In watching the Sunday shows today--and CNN and MSNBC afterward--I must have heard journalists say a half dozen times that McCain "deserves credit" for not having made Obama's race an issue in this campaign. Obviously, for the reasons stated above, I think the McCain campaign has in fact made Obama's race an issue in this campaign.

But even if that weren't true, how absurd is it to suggest that McCain "deserves credit" for not going racial? Talk about low expectations. As Chris Rock would say, you’re not supposed to exploit your opponent's race. You're not supposed to play to people's racial prejudices. 

Good grief.  John McCain has run one of the more sleazy and dishonest campaigns in modern presidential history. But we’re supposed to believe he deserves praise for not having gone overtly racial in his rhetoric?