FORT MADISON, Iowa
John McCain has pulled off a rare three-fer for conservatives in advocating an economic policy that reforms Social Security, cuts taxes for the middle-class, and supports the prospering economy instead of threatening it.
McCain has also challenged what remains of right-wing orthodoxy by daring to make a proposal that doesn't place marginal tax rates for those few at the top of the earnings curve at the center of the universe. For this, talk of apostasy is in the air, but it is the essence of reformers like McCain not to notice.
The question remains whether McCain's bold move will help him in his long-shot attempt to pull off another three-fer - whether he can survive his formal absence from the caucuses here, win the New Hampshire primary, and add tangible momentum next month in South Carolina, Michigan, and his home state of Arizona.
There are at least two clues - one from Steve Forbes, the other from George W. Bush - that he may be on to something.
Forbes has gone to ground here, off on a perpetual motion bus tour that treats each stop as a dry-run exercise in mobilizing attenders to the Jan. 24 caucuses.
When the Forbes caravan arrives, abortion is the big topic. Forbes tries to convince people that his conversion to pure right-to-lifers from the libertarian of 1996 is for real and that they shouldn't waste a vote on Gary Bauer or the current hot candidate in the boonies, Alan Keyes. When he talks, litmus paper fills the air - about vice presidential picks, judicial nominees, and the hardline policy plank in the GOP platform. Behind the campaigning, the bulk of the Forbes money here is being spent on an emotion-tugging antiabortion TV commercial.
Taxes almost never come up. The guy who got on the map in '96 with tax-cutting as his mantra rarely sells it.
The reason is that hardly anybody cares. Forbes is trying to reach normal people, at least by economic standards. The theory is endlessly repeated that taxes, especially income tax rates, are the defining issue for the Republican Party and that therefore McCain is courting disaster by proposing the smallest of the GOP tax cut plans. Out here it is obvious that this isn't true. The focus of McCain on Social Security, on the middle-class, and on not throwing the entire anticipated budget surplus at one target is more down-to-earth.
The clue supplied by Bush is just as interesting because it is almost entirely off the point. The message is the same in person and in his advertising: The choice is between giving the surplus back to the people or leaving it in Washington to be spent by the hated bureaucrats.
Apart from its silliness, Bush's recitation - along with an untrue denial that his own tax proposal would blow the entire non-Social Security surplus - gives McCain an opening through which he is trying to move. Three points stand out.
In the first place, McCain's economic plan is unique in its dedication of more than 60 percent of the non-Social Security surplus to an additional investment in Social Security. By doing this, he provides the funds to pay for a transition to an idea most conservatives favor - letting workers dedicate a fifth of their Social Security taxes to investment funds they would control. By not doing this, Bush guarantees that when the country's demographic time bomb explodes, some kind of reduction in existing benefits levels will be unavoidable. In conservative terms, in other words, McCain has a Social Security position that is both more responsible and forward looking than Bush's.
McCain would also dedicate a large chunk of change - more than 10 percent of any surplus - to shoring up Medicare, whose solvency, again within existing benefits levels, will disappear in roughly 15 years unless tough choices are made now. He also will please conservatives by having proposed an expansion of tax-favored savings accounts for medical expenses. By contrast, health care is not even on Bush's radar screen.
Finally, McCain has concentrated his limited tax-cutting on the middle-class - by doubling the child care tax credit (as Bush does), by offering a large increase in the standard deduction, and by widely spreading the applicability of the lowest (15 percent) income tax rate.
What true believers claim is ''class warfare, '' McCain calls common sense. Bush wastes most of his tax cut by slashing the top and middle rate, thus putting 60 percent of the bucks into lower taxes for the top 10 percent in income-earners and roughly one-third to the top one percent. By aiming more carefully at the middle-class, McCain strikes a blow for the hoary and apparently out-of-date conservative concept of fiscal responsibility.
The Bushies are convinced McCain has given them the nomination. We'll see, but there's no reason McCain's emphasis on Social Security and Medicare won't appeal to relatively elderly states like New Hampshire and even Iowa. But the best evidence is Forbes and Bush. Their reactions to McCain reek of defensiveness, and the Arizona senatorhas yet to retreat an inch.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
