Indiana Holiday

May 3, 2008

Gail Collins, NY Times

Our question for today is: What does the debate over that cheesy plan for a gas tax holiday mean to the American voting public?

This all started with John McCain, who proposed suspending the 18.4-cent-per-gallon federal gas tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day in order to give regular hard-working Americans “a little relief.” In terms of rational policy-making, this is a little bit like announcing that you want to reduce tensions in the Middle East by drilling an enormous hole in Sweden.

Economists instantly pointed out that dropping the tax would cost the government around $9 billion, possibly add to the already obscene profits of the oil companies and do little or nothing to actually lower the price of fuel. Not to mention that it points us in the exact wrong direction on global warming and energy independence.

But, hey, nothing’s perfect.

McCain has taken to responding to criticism like this by saying that his proposal is not “the end of western civilization as we know it.” This is a little weird coming from the guy who spent the early primary season depicting Hillary Clinton’s attempt to get a million dollars for a Woodstock museum as a nuclear strike against the nation’s economic security.

The real point of the tax holiday proposal is, of course, to show sympathy for the little guy. It’s been a tough few months for McCain and the smallish folk, what with all those tax-cut plans for the wealthy. And then there was the health care speech when he told people to take responsibility for buying their own insurance policies and “watch your diet, walk 30 or so minutes a day and take a few other simple precautions” so they won’t get sick. We will think of this forevermore as his Let Them Not Eat Cake moment.

Sniffing at the Washington elite who make fun of his tax holiday, McCain told Joe Scarborough Thursday on MSNBC: “You know that the people who live in Georgetown could literally walk to work.” Yes, there is nothing worse than snobs who live close to the office making fun of a gas-tax holiday that would in the best possible circumstances save real hard-working Americans 30 cents a day. The point is particularly piquant when made by a guy who flies around the country in his wife’s private plane.

Meanwhile, to make up for the lost revenue, McCain says “all we need to do is cut out hundreds of millions and billions of dollars of pork-barrel projects.” These are presumably different pork-barrel projects from the ones McCain is going to cut in order to pay for $613 billion in permanent tax cuts.

Hillary Clinton, who jumped on the gas-tax holiday bandwagon posthaste, wants to pay for it with a windfall profits tax on oil companies. This makes her plan much more fiscally responsible. Not only does she balance the books, she turns a proposal that was unlikely to ever get passed into one that could not make it through the Senate if Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy both rose from the dead and hand-carried it there.

There are few things more satisfying than taking a strong stand in favor of something that is never going to happen. Free pander!

“I find it, frankly, a little offensive that people who don’t have to worry about filling up their gas tank or what they buy when they go to the supermarket think it’s somehow illegitimate to provide relief for ... millions and millions of Americans,” said Clinton the other day. She rammed the point home with a photo-op at a gasoline station while, as The Washington Post pointed out, her own fleet of S.U.V.’s ran their engines patiently right out of camera range.

Barack Obama thinks this is all incredibly stupid. He is certainly not pander-phobic himself. (See: Nafta, promise never to raise middle-class taxes.) But he drew a line on this one. In Indiana, his new ad calls it “a short-term quick fix that we can say we did something even though we’re not really doing anything.”

All this actually tells us something about the Democratic candidates, which has nothing to do with fuel prices. Obama believes voters want a sensible, less-divisive political dialogue, that the whole process can become more honorable if the right candidate leads the way. Hillary really doesn’t buy that. She has principles, but she doesn’t believe in principled stands. She thinks that if she can get elected, she can do great things. And to get there, she’s prepared to do whatever. That certainly includes endorsing any number of meaningless-to-ridiculous ideas. (See: her bill to make it illegal to desecrate an American flag.)

On Tuesday, root for the Democrat whose vision of the political process comes closest to matching your own. And I do not want you to be swayed by the fact that Hillary and Barack are finally having a policy debate, and it’s about the dumbest idea in the campaign.