The Difference
A friend on another blog recently suggested that there was little difference between what Obama is doing now and what McCain would have done as president. I highly disagree, in tone and tenor much more than anything else. I like having a president that tries to let off the steam of mad populism and stamp it out. Having just read a biography of Washington, and seeing how much he worried about the US revolution turning into the French one, it really drove home the point to me that generating fear to uphold your rule is really only going to produce backlash.
But that is a subtle difference that we can’t really know would have been different, given the other choice. A tangible verifiable difference: The EPA has its teeth back. Three items, first an immediate hold on mountaintop removal coal mining. Second, no more unregulated pollutants in streams. Finally and most importantly: greenhouse gasses have been declared harmful to human life. This means that the new administration is now required by law to regulate the release. I simply don’t see any of those things having happened under McCain.
It’s entirely possible that a President McCain would have gone after greenhouse gasses-since he’s talked about going after them before. He’s singing a different tune right now, but that’s John McCain for you.
Most of the differences have been cosmetic and are probably meaningless-Lord knows, the big government program of the Obama admin (the TARP) hasn’t been all that different from what the Bush admin did.
There is, however, one major difference: I do not think a McCain admin would have ever released the Bybee memos, especially not so little redaction.
I personally think we could use a lot more populist furor in policy right now (the TARP is essentially a way of transferring losses from the super-rich to the public in general, as is the Fed’s current inflationary policies). It could get out of control, to be sure, but so can anti-populism. Think of the administration that followed Washington, which was so concerned about the possibility of Americans imitating the French Revolutionaries that it decided to act like George III on one of his good days.