After gently bashing the Straight Talking One yesterday, it seems only fair to share this little bit from Jonathan Rauch’s defense, from the May Atlantic, of John McCain as a Burkean (as in Edmund Burke) conservative:
McCain voted against Bush’s big tax cuts, but now says he supports extending them rather than risking damage to the economy. Flip-flop? Not if you believe, as Burkeans often do, that sudden and large policy changes deserve skepticism, but that when a policy becomes well established and woven into everyday life, as the tax cuts have, continuity should get the benefit of the doubt.
As someone who likes to think of himself as Burkean conservative (but really has no right to, as I’ve never gotten further than the first ten pages of Reflections on the Revolution in France), I’ve got to admit there’s something to this. Simply letting all or even most of the Bush tax cuts expire over the next couple of years would be a major negative shock to what will probably still be a struggling economy. And saying that it’s all the fault of Bush and the Republican Congress for making those cuts without even trying to figure out how to pay for them, while entirely correct, won’t really help anybody.