McCain Sticks By Cap-N-Trade

Larry Kudlow is happy because he thinks John McCain has consigned his signature cap-and-trade carbon emissions proposal to the basement:

So I picked up the phone and dialed a senior McCain official to make sure these old eyes hadn’t missed it. Sure enough, on deep background, this senior McCain advisor told me I was correct: no cap-and-trade. In other words, this central-planning, regulatory, tax-and-spend disaster, which did not appear in Mac’s two recent speeches, has been eradicated entirely — even from the detailed policy document that hardly anybody will ever read.

Jill Hazelbaker, McCain's communications director, calls the notion that McCain is abandoning or minimizing his support for cap-n-trade "totally false."

I think I can reconcile the two views: McCain's talking about jobs this week, not cap-n-trade. When he talks about energy -- as he did two weeks ago, he talks about cap-n-trade. Kudlow considers cap-n-trade to be a critical (and negative) part of McCain's economic policy; McCain considers it part of his energy policy; in campaigns, these type of issues tend to sort themselves into silos, reasonably, and so it ought not surprise anyone that McCain's focus on jobs and taxes doesn't tilt too far into energy policy precincts.