The McCain campaign is apparently withering in confusion over what, if anything, they should do to advance some sort of economic message, besides "suspending" their campaign, which continues to look like it may be the smartest move they could make. Over the past few days, The Politico, having apparently drunk of the McCain camp's Spin-brosia right from the teat, launched a pair of contradictory exclusives -- the most wrong of which is still online -- purporting to capture the campaign's economic reboot, but this morning they've finally been forced to conclude that McCain isn't offering anything new, yet.
ThinkProgress has the blow-by-blow of what transpired after Mike Allen and Jonathan Martin first launched their "exclusive," in which they somehow reasoned that proposed tax cuts for capital gains and dividend income constituted "additional economic measures aimed directly at the middle class." As ThinkProgress notes, "...under the current capital gains and dividends rate, 98.3% of the benefits go to the top 20% of taxpayers. The other 80% of taxpayers see only 1.7% of the benefits of today's rate. 93.9% of the benefits go to the top 5%, and 84.8% to the 1%."
Happily, the reality of tax policy did not elude the Politico entirely, as they did put up a new story yesterday afternoon which correctly captured these measures as a means of "lur[ing] investors back to the stock market." From that point, however, the problem became the fact that the McCain camp actually couldn't decide on what to do, and so decided to do nothing:
Presented with 30 options for new economic measures, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has - at least for now - chosen none of them.
His campaign had been planning to roll out new proposals this week that would be aimed at restoring confidence in financial markets and encouraging investors to return.
So, if you are keeping track at home, there are, so far, no new tax proposals from the McCain camp. Meanwhile the Politico has one story up saying as much, along with another extant story that says otherwise still online. And, of the two incorrect stories the Politico could be leaving up online, uncorrected, for the sake of nostalgia or something, they've strangely chosen the more wrong of the two -- the one that bizarrely suggests that the middle class benefits from capital gains tax cuts.