CNN just played the Social Security portion of John McCain’s interview with Wolf Blitzer. And two key points stood out.
First, McCain fabricated an alternative history of the 2005 Social Security battle in order to create a new tax talking points. According to McCain, and he repeated this again and again, “the [Social Security] talks broke down because the Democrats insisted as a precondition that we raise taxes.”
That’s very weird. First, there were no Social Security talks. And the Democrats didn’t make any demands to raise taxes. They didn’t even propose raising taxes. As many of you know, I followed that debate extremely closely. And McCain just made this stuff out of whole cloth. Really bizarre.
Second, Blitzer asked if McCain still would have favored President Bush’s privatization plan, as he did in 2005, that we see how volatile the stock market it is. McCain repeatedly refused to answer the question and instead repeated the tax precondition fib.
Blitzer actually complicated the matter by misstating what Bush proposed — claiming he proposed allowing people to put 10% of their Social Security funds in the market rather than just under 20%. But the key point remains — after standing behind privatization as recently as a few weeks ago, now McCain refuses to say he still supports it.
