The Wonk Room

McCain And The (Ir)relevant Concord Coalition

Among other odd comments in his National Review article, Douglas Holtz-Eakin on Wednesday declared that the Concord Coalition, whose director had criticized McCain’s agenda, had “largely lost relevancy.”

Funny that Holtz-Eakin should pick out the Concord Coalition, a national bipartisan organization dedicated to fiscal responsibility. The co-founder and chairman of the Concord Coalition is Pete Peterson, an old friend of Senator McCain, an early supporter of his 2008 run and a member of the McCain campaign economic strategy team. When asked this January, during a GOP presidential debate, how he would make economic policy, McCain responded:

I as president, as every other president, [would] rely primarily on my secretary of the Treasury, on my Council of Economic Advisers, on the head of that. I would rely on the circle that I have developed over many years of people like… Pete Peterson and the Concord group.

Just four years ago, Peterson bestowed upon John McCain the Coalition’s annual Economic Patriot Award at an event sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. Peterson explained why he had set up the “Concord Coalition devoted to long-term fiscal responsibility and generational equity.” McCain in turn thanked Peterson for his “continued crusade for fiscal sanity and stability on behalf of our children and grandchildren.”

So has the Concord Coalition become largely irrelevant? Or have its principles and goals become largely irrelevant to Senator McCain’s newfound agenda of deficit-financed tax cuts and unbalanced budgets?