McCain promises to leave Iraq by 2012

By Fester:

The Politico is reporting that John McCain is promising to leave Iraq in 2012 but that is not their lede:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) plans to promise on Monday that he will balance the federal budget by the end of his first term by curbing wasteful spending and overhauling entitlement programs, including Social Security, his advisers told Politico.

The vow to take on Social Security puts McCain in a political danger zone that thwarted President Bush after he named it the top domestic priority of his second term.

As James Joyner notes, the non-interest, non-Social Security and non-Medicare part of the budget is not that large. The proportion of the budget that is non-interest, non-OASDI, non-Medicare and non-defense is smaller than the projected deficit if John McCain was to get all of tax policies implemented. The only big pool of money that is left out there is the Iraq and Afghanistan supplementals and the increase in defense baseline spending. Therefore if John McCain is serious about balancing the budget in the face of a recession and does not want to lame-duck himself on Day-1 by attacking Social Security (especially as the Boomers who are about to retire lament their lost decade for their 401(K)s and the decimation of the defined pension era) and Medicare, then he is implicitly proposing to leave Iraq in a very short time frame. The only other option is that he is wishing for ponies.

What this policy actually is a sign of the fragmentation of the Republican Party that Demcrats who ran for office in 1982 can empathize with. The McCain campaign realizes that they need to placate the portion of their base that gets turned on by Gramm-Rudman so they make a speech. It does not matter that this speech directly contradicts speeches given that placate the bed wetters and the bombs for Viagra crowd.

http://www.newshoggers.com/blog/2008/07/mccain-promises.html