McCain: No Solutions to fix a "Washington that's not Working"

Okay, so here's the other side:

"Mr. McCain cannot escape the burdensome shadow of President Bush because his policies offer no real change. On the all-important issue of the economy, Mr. McCain has no prescription for ending the mortgage-driven crisis or for fixing the huge fiscal problems Mr. Bush has bequeathed the nation. He wants to make even deeper cuts in corporate taxes, eliminate the alternative minimum income tax and make permanent the Bush tax cuts that vastly favor the wealthy and that he once correctly opposed.

His only idea for balancing the budget seems to be controlling earmarks, which Republicans now denounce with the sort of single-minded fervor they used to reserve for Democratic-appointed judges.

Permanently extending the tax cuts would reduce tax revenue by $1 trillion over four years. If Mr. McCain eliminated every earmark (including money for the gas pipeline that Ms. Palin wants to build in Alaska), the savings would total about $18 billion a year. He hasn’t offered any idea of where he’ll get the rest of the money.

He has not explained how he plans to rein in out-of-control financial firms and avoid a repeat of the mortgage disaster. Mr. Bush’s ideological opposition to sound government regulation is in large measure to blame for the economic crisis, but when Mr. McCain talks about fixing Washington, that subject never comes up.

Mr. McCain also has yet to explain to voters how he intends to go on paying for the war in Iraq — and also fix a dangerously stretched and overburdened military. Mr. McCain talks about energy independence. But his primary solution is not a solution: drilling and more drilling."

NYTimes Editorial