ON DEADLINE: McCain Snared in Bush Trap

While John McCain works to avoid the campaign undertow of this President Bush, he's risking the political trap that snared the first one. When the economy is sliding toward recession, it is going to be the win-or-lose election issue, no matter how well versed a nominee is in matters of foreign policy and defense.

McCain is saddled with some early season confessions that he's no expert on the economy and, indeed, didn't understand it as well as he should have. He's since tried to disown those comments, unsuccessfully.

As the Republican presidential nominee, McCain promises a bold economic plan. So far, it is the orthodox conservative one - cut taxes, rein in spending and rely on the marketplace, with some kind of relief for blameless borrowers who face foreclosure in the current mortgage mess.

His current Bush problem is to hold the Republican line while fending off Democratic assertions that he'd represent a replay of the unpopular administration in power. "I'm not running on the Bush presidency," McCain said in an ABC television interview. "I'm running on my own service and my vision for the future."

Not that he is budging in his support for the current course in Iraq, the strategy he says is succeeding. Perhaps so, but politically, it is burdensome, with polls reflecting wide opposition to the war. That's a favored Democratic target, with Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton arguing that McCain would just be more of the same.

Nor will they let McCain forget that he once said he knows a lot less about economics than about military and foreign issues, and still needs to be educated. That was in a Wall Street Journal interview published Nov. 25, 2005. Then, on Dec. 18, 2007, he was quoted as saying the issue of economics is not one he understood as well as he should, although he did know the basics of it. Those were odd admissions for a senator who was chairman and then senior Republican on the economics-oriented Senate Commerce Committee.

When they were read back to him in a Jan. 24 candidate debate, he said he didn't know where those quotes came from. "I'm very well versed in economics," he said. "I was there at the Reagan revolution." That would be Reaganomics - cuts in domestic spending and taxes, and reduced federal regulation of the economy. Those are still the basics of McCain's economic plan, although he strayed in 2001 to vote against the George W. Bush tax cuts because he thought they were tilted too much to upper income Americans. He now supports making those tax cuts permanent.

That doesn't add up to a clearly defined program to deal with an economy slipping toward recession. But as McCain said in his own disavowed candor, economics is not his specialty.

Obama and Clinton are sniping at McCain as they try to outdo each other in the marathon campaign for the Democratic nomination to oppose him on Nov. 4. History teaches that a long, harsh campaign is a liability to the ticket that finally emerges. But history teaches also that the party in power when the economy is in or near recession is likely to lose the next election.

So it was for George H.W. Bush in 1992, and the parallel is the peril for McCain. The first President Bush once said he much preferred dealing with foreign policy rather than domestic issues. So he did, and suffered politically. Bill Clinton ran on the issue that became the clich?? of his campaign - "It's the economy, stupid."

Bush foundered from the start. "I know we're in hard times," he said in his State of the Union address that year, but didn't get around to saying what he'd try to do about it until months too late.

Republicans had a lot more to boast about in foreign and defense policy then than they do now. The Soviet Union had collapsed, the Cold War was over, the Bush administration had waged and won the Persian Gulf War.

But none of that could override or even balance the impression Bush left that he wasn't tuned in to the rigors and economic worries of the voters. He tried to change that in the fall by presenting a detailed economic plan, far too late. His distance from economic concerns came to be symbolized by a response to a confusing question about the national debt asked by a woman in the audience at a televised debate in Richmond, Va. "I'm not sure I get it," Bush blurted.

McCain needs to get it.

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EDITOR'S NOTE - Walter Mears covered presidential campaigns for The Associated Press from 1960 to 2004, winning the Pulitzer Prize for the 1976 race. He now lives in Chapel Hill, N.C. On Deadline is an occasional AP column.