McCain vs. Bush

With the dead weight of the last eight years sinking his campaign, Republican presidential candidate John McCain yesterday made his most vigorous attempt yet to throw President Bush overboard.

McCain had previously relied mostly on zingers to counter the charge that he is running for a third Bush term. But perhaps recognizing that wasn't doing the trick -- the two men do, after all, share positions on core issues such as tax cuts and national security -- McCain is now describing his areas of disagreement with the incumbent in greater detail, and in so doing, adding his voice to the already considerable chorus of Bush critics.

Joseph Curl and Stephen Dinan write in the Washington Times: "Sen. John McCain on Wednesday blasted President Bush for building a mountain of debt for future generations, failing to pay for expanding Medicare and abusing executive powers, leveling his strongest criticism to date of an administration whose unpopularity may be dragging the Republican Party to the brink of a massive electoral defeat.

"'We just let things get completely out of hand,' he said of his own party's rule in the past eight years.

"In an interview with The Washington Times, Mr. McCain lashed out at a litany of Bush policies and issues that he said he would have handled differently as president. . . .

"'Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously,' Mr. McCain said in an interview with The Washington Times aboard his campaign plane en route from New Hampshire to Ohio.

"'Those are just some of them,' he said with a laugh, chomping into a peanut butter sandwich as a few campaign aides in his midair office joined in the laughter."

Curl and Dinan write that McCain "rejected Mr. Bush's use of issuing 'signing statements' when he signs bills into law, in which the president has suggested that he would ignore elements of the bills, labeling them potentially unconstitutional.

"'I would veto the bills or say, "Look, I don't like it but I'll obey the law that's passed by Congress and signed by the president." I think the signing statements was not a correct implementation of the power of the executive. I think it was overstepping,' he said.

"And Mr. McCain emphatically rejected Mr. Bush's claims of executive privilege, often used to shield the White House from scrutiny.

"'I don't agree with that either. I don't agree with [Vice President] Dick Cheney's allegation that he's part of both the legislative and the executive branch,' he said."

McCain also said Bush lacked the resolve of President Reagan.