Edwards caves on Kerry's vast spending promises

Here's a snippet from the veep debate that got less attention than it deserved:

John Edwards: ""We are committed to cutting back anything in our programs that need to be cut back to get us back on a path to fiscal responsibility."

Made you do a double-take, didn't it?

The first reason why is that word "anything." Given that Kerry's new spending proposals total some two TRILLION dollars over ten years OVER AND ABOVE current spending growth levels, and that he's also pledged to "cut the deficit in half" in his first term, "anything" would pretty much have to be "everything." Everything meaning domestic programs, since it's a foregone conclusion that he won't be proposing additional military spending. Everything also meaning a great deal over and above junking his entire rafter of programmatic promises, since his tax increases would stall the recovery, drive up unemployment, and create even greater pressures for deficit spending.

But leave all that aside. What strikes me about Edwards' (apparent) concession is that it looks like nothing so much as the domestic policy version of Kerry's admission the other day that France and Germany aren't going to ride to the rescue in Iraq. Some or all of these nice, juicy, new programs, whetting the appetites and watering mouths of the parasitic class, now aborted by the Dem ticket itself within less than a month of the election? Sacrificed on the alter of the very deficit fetish that obsessed Republicans for so many years, to their own political detriment? Even if, as it highly likely, this is just more BS, and it would all come back after a Kerry-Edwards victory, why pretend that they're dumping even a token portion of the vast largesse they've promised the masses? Don't they know that the federal deficit is the holy grail of a wonkish few and an impenetrable abstraction to everybody else? When has a national election ever turned on that issue, or an incumbent lost primarily or soley because of it?

This just makes no political sense to me. It as much as says that the Dems have abandoned any discernable proactive domestic agenda (other than raising taxes, I guess - which would never get through a GOP congress in any case), just as they've dropped all pretense of having an Iraq policy as well. It isn't even describable as a "flip-flop," because there's no apparent flop that follows the flip.

I can't fathom to what voter bloc this angle is meant to appeal. The "mystery" voters, perhaps? The ones with their own "magic hats"? The "Karnac constituency"?

George Bush isn't the world's greatest orator, but as he says, "You all know where I stand." John-John may be able to talk the ears off a bull elephant, pump the air full of mellifluous prose, but they never actually say anything, quite apart from their ingrained dishonesty. Less than four weeks from Election Day, and their platform is little more than a blank slate.

"Kerry-Edwards: they have a plan...and they're it...."