How Did John McCain Get the Reputation as a Fiscal Hawk Anyhow?

I’m honestly baffled by otherwise skeptical conservatives when it comes to the subject of John McCain and federal spending. John Hawkins is one of those conservatives who, so far as I can tell, are taking McCain’s fiscal hawkishness completely on faith. Here’s what he says:

Then there’s McCain, who has one of the best records of fiscal conservatism in the Senate and who “has proposed relatively little new spending.”

And that, really, is all that can be said about McCain’s career in the Senate. He hasn’t proposed a lot of new spending. Well, good for him. But what else has he done? He’s managed to find time to sponsor bills with a Democratic buddy to curtail free speech, to bring about “immigration reform”, and to strangle our economy with a Cap and Trade global warming scam that’s not working in Europe already. When did he find time for a McCain/Some Democratic Senator Spending Reduction Act?

Answer? Not in the past ten years, if ever.

Hawkins continues:

Controlling spending is like securing the borders.

Umm…given John McCain’s stance on a border fence, this is probably the worst analogy he could have used. Then again, it does seem to match his history of talking big and doing not much at all on spending, so maybe it works here.

Every politician says that they want to do it, but then when it comes right down to it, you find that most of them don’t believe what they say. Given that he’s proposing all that new spending, Obama certainly isn’t going to cut the deficit. On the other hand, McCain is promising to balance the budget in four years and he has proven time and time again that he will walk the walk on this issue.

No, he hasn’t.

John McCain has done absolutely nothing to meaningfully slow down, much less push back, the relentless expansion of the Federal government. In fact, his biggest proposals in the past five years would have require more spending and bigger government. Oh sure, he’s talked a big game from time to time, but when his fellow Senators were busting their tails to try to just slow down earmark bribery, McCain was nigh-invisible. When Congress was loading up the pork into a farm bill that should have embarrassed everyone who voted for it, Johnny Mac was nowhere to be found.

I’ve asked this before and I’ll ask it again. When has John McCain put any political capital at risk to hold the fiscal line in the Senate? When has he put his mad bipartisan skillz to building a coalition so he could go to the President and tell him to veto some spending bill with confidence that his veto would stick?

He hasn’t. When it comes to fiscal responsibility, John McCain is all talk. The only question is whether or not you believe that he’ll do as President something he couldn’t be bothered to do as a Senator, when he had real opportunities to do something significant.

I don’t trust him. I don’t understand how normally pragmatic and principled conservatives can.

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Category: Project Hero, The World At Large