350 Tax Increases? Bush applies Powell Doctrine for re-election. (Kinsley)

[coda]

350 Tax Increases?
President Bush applies the Powell Doctrine to running for re-election.
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Tuesday, March 23, 2004, at 10:27 AM PT


Offensive tactics

President Bush seems to be running his re-election campaign on the basis of the Powell Doctrine: Go in with overwhelming force from the start, and strike a blow from which the enemy can never recover. Like the United States in Iraq, the Bush campaign has superior fire power and far more money. The lesson of Vietnam, articulated by Colin Powell, is: Use your superiority—don't fritter it away in gradual escalation.



One of the weapons in Bush's arsenal is an old family heirloom. Bush fired it himself at his big Florida rally over the weekend. He asserted that John Kerry had voted for higher taxes 350 times during Kerry's 20 years in the Senate. Vice President Dick Cheney and other presidential surrogates have been using this statistoid for several weeks, and it has been picked up and repeated in the conservative media echo chamber. In 1992, Bush's father charged that Bill Clinton, as governor of Arkansas, had raised taxes 128 times. This shabby and deeply disingenuous allegation ultimately became an embarrassment to the elder Bush, but it took weeks and months of pounding by the media and the opposition to make it this way. I'm hoping to spare us all that with a Powell-Doctrine-like strike early on.



The purpose of a phony statistic like this one isn't really to persuade people of its own accuracy. The purpose is to trap your opponent in a discussion he doesn't want to have (in this case about his past votes about taxes), bog the discussion down in silly details that few people will follow, and leave a general impression that where there is smoke, there must be fire. And certainly, if what matters to you above all else is paying fewer taxes, you'd be a fool to choose Kerry over Bush. But this isn't about taxes; it's about honesty. Honesty means more than factual accuracy, it means avoiding disingenuousness: not talking crap when you know it's crap. If that matters to you above all, you may be out of luck with either candidate this election. But if you wish to measure comparative crapology, this 350-tax-increases business may be hard for Kerry to top.



Counting tax increases is an absurd way to measure a candidate's general propensity about taxes. George the elder's list about Clinton tax increases included things like an extension of dog-racing season, on the logic that a longer season meant more tax revenue. George the younger's first item asserts that "In 1995, Kerry Voted For Resolution That Said Middle Class Tax Cuts Were Not Wise." This turns out to be a vote in the midst of that nearly forgotten frenzy, the Gingrich revolution. It was a vote against a particular tax cut of $700 billion, on a resolution declaring with almost tautological justice that subtracting $700 billion from revenue would make it harder to balance the budget. The resolution passed the Republican-controlled House and Senate, but a decade later the Republican president uses it to tar his Democratic opponent.



more......

http://slate.msn.com/id/2097656/