Today John McCain, he who married into a $100 million dollar beer fortune, who claimed until very recently that the economy was "fundamentally sound", and who took three tries to realize that people might need some help from having their homes foreclosed, claimed that Barack Obama is "insensitive to the poor" because he opposes a "gas tax holiday" and because he has proposed increasing the capital gains tax.
What McCain betrayed is these remarks is, in fact, just how stunningly out of touch he is. First of all, with regard to the "gas tax holiday", it reveals that McCain thinks Americans are dumb. He thinks that if you throw Americans a few crumbs in the short term, that when the holiday's over, they'll just forget about how high gas prices are. While McCain is trying to inject the American body politic with morphine to temporarily alleviate the hurt from gas prices, Obama is trying to find a way to cure the disease that's causing the pain in the first place. But for trying to take an approach that would fundamentally deal with the problem instead of pandering to people by slapping a band-aid on the problem, somehow it is Obama who is out of touch with poor people. In short, McCain thinks that if you let the American people eat a little cake, they'll forget how screwed they are.
Secondly, it displays an utter lack of self-awareness and irony on the part of McCain that he can accuse Obama of being out of touch with the concerns of poor people because Obama favors increasing the capital gains tax. Does McCain really believe that people who are struggling to make ends meet give a flying fuck about the capital gains tax? Even Warren Buffett, not an income redistributionist by any means, knows how ridiculous it is that his secretary pays a larger percentage of her income in tax than he, a mega-multigazillionaire, does. Yet McCain thinks the problem is that the Warren Buffetts of the world pay too much in taxes? That in fact poor Warren Buffett's unfair tax burden is the cause of the problems of poor people? We've been slashing the taxes of the rich for 7 years and all people have to show for it is less money and higher prices. But McCain thinks that what poor people are really concerned about is that the rich might have to pay higher taxes on their capital gains.
I think poor, working class people and even the middle-class are more concerned that the wealthiest Americans are getting the tax breaks but they seem to have plenty of money to spend on gold plated fishtanks and boob jobs, yet they, the average working stiffs, are paying a higher percentage of their money in taxes than the rich, but they need to work two crappy jobs just to pay the bills, and by the way the schools their kids go to and the roads they use are falling apart so the rich people can have more money to enrich themselves.
It's this kind of mindset on the part of guys like McCain, this fundamental misunderstanding and mischaracterization of what average people have to deal with, that causes them to think that the estate tax, for example, is a populist issue that average working folks care about. It's this mindset that causes them to think that the problem with health care in this country is that Americans are getting too much health care, or that there is too much government intervention and that if the free market, for profit health care system was just more free and more profitable, it would magically heal itself. It's this mindset by the McCains of the world that believes your bowling score or whether you order orange juice instead of coffee determines how much in touch you are with the concerns of poor, working class people. For McCain, average people are like that guy in the movie "The Jerk" who begs Steve Martin's character for money so he can fly his friends to the Super Bowl like a man.
So frankly I hope McCain keeps hammering away on how much poor people are concerned about the capital gains tax. All it does is make average working folk recognize that the Republicans like McCain, for all their talk about "elitism" on the part of Democrats, are the real elistists, and that taking shots of whiskey and going hunting aren't going to cut it for them anymore.