Obama Puts Veterans Benefits on the Front Burner

Posted by Steve Benen, The Carpetbagger Report at 7:57 AM on May 26, 2008.

One of the week’s more contentious disputes came between Barack Obama and John McCain over benefits for the troops, highlighted by McCain’s opposition to a bipartisan expansion of the GI Bill. Obama questioned McCain’s priorities; McCain lost his cool and attacked Obama for not having served in the military; and the dispute got a little nasty.

But Obama isn’t backing down, and seems anxious to make this a key campaign issue.

Barack Obama told veterans Saturday that he can’t understand why Republican John McCain opposes legislation that would provide college scholarships to people who have served in the U.S. military.

“Now, let me be clear: No one can dispute John McCain’s love for this country or his concern for veterans. But here’s what I don’t understand. I don’t understand why John McCain would side with George Bush and oppose our plan to make college more affordable for our veterans,” the Democratic presidential candidate said. “George Bush and John McCain may think our plan is too generous. I could not disagree more.” […]

Obama, speaking to reporters aboard his plane Saturday, countered that the idea that he can’t speak on veterans’ issues because he didn’t serve in the military “makes no sense whatsoever.”

“I didn’t serve, as many people my age, because the Vietnam war was over by the time I was of draft age and we went to an all-volunteer Army. But obviously I revere our soldiers and want to make sure they are being treated with honor and respect,” he added.

This may seem counter-intuitive. McCain, given his military record and background, would seemingly have a lock on issues like veterans’ benefits. Obama, in this sense, should avoid the issue that should cut automatically in McCain’s favor.

But the reality is, Obama has found a key vulnerability for McCain, and he’s taking advantage of the opportunity.

His media-driven reputation notwithstanding, McCain’s record on veterans’ issues is actually something of an embarrassment. Brian Beutler reported in The Nation:

Times have changed since McCain needed veterans services so urgently. And for many of those thirty-five years, McCain, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, the candidate who talks the best talk on veterans issues, has demonstrated a tendency to work against veterans’ interests, voting time after time against funding and in favor of privatizing services — in other words, of rolling back the VA’s improvements by supporting some of the same policies that wrecked Walter Reed.

Likewise, the estimable hilzoy took a close look at McCain’s voting record on veterans’ issues and came to a similar conclusion.

I put the wonky results, with links to all the roll call votes, below the fold. Short version: during the last four years (all I checked), McCain has supported basic appropriations for vets. However, when there are two competing proposals, he generally chooses the cheaper one, and often, when only one proposal to increase benefits is available, he opposes it. But, as Beutler says, this doesn’t seem to be because he is in general in favor of fiscal discipline: in 2006, in particular, he voted against several bills that actually tried not just to increase spending on vets, but to pay for it, in one case voting for an identical bill that was not paid for.

If you think that we ought to be spending more money on veterans’ benefits and health care, it’s not a very good record.

All of this, of course, leads to the question of why McCain has such a weak record when it comes to veterans’ benefits. Yglesias speculates:

One sort of wonders why this is. McCain’s clearly not some kind of dogmatic libertarian, and he certainly seems to have a great deal of emotional attachment to the military. I believe the particular military family in which he grew up was a bit idiosyncratic in actually being composed of life-long military officers rather than veterans (Webb, by contrast, is also from a military family and is clearly very influenced by his military background but after graduating from the academy put his time in then took advantage of veterans’ benefits to move on to other things) as such. Or maybe he just takes very seriously the idea that we can’t make the benefits too generous lest it undermine our ability to endlessly prolong the war in Iraq.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad to see Obama take McCain to task on the issue. There’s no reason to cede this ground to McCain at all.

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Tagged as: obama, veterans, mccain, gi bill