One Democratic Debate, Nine Losers

That’s how Byron York describes the Arizona cage match last night. I only caught a couple of tidbits flipping back and forth from the baseball game, but I did see the moment when a small business owner said she was being squeezed by taxes. Dick Gephardt tried to answer this woman’s question by saying that if she would only support his health care proposal (and the higher taxes to pay for it), the health-care expenses for her employees would drop.

The problem was, almost anybody watching could guess that Bobby C's Lounge and Grille, like many small businesses, probably didn't have a full-scale employee health-care plan. Even John Kerry could figure that one out.

"I'm not sure that's even applicable here," Kerry said, jumping in to the exchange. "Do you even have health care for your employees?" Clayton nodded her head no, meaning that the answer Gephardt had just given her was resoundingly irrelevant to her actual situation. Sensing that he had scored a takedown, Kerry went on to tell Clayton that he would not raise her taxes.

But wait a second, Byron: I think you let Kerry off the hook. How do we know that Kerry, who has advocated repealing the Bush tax cuts for the “rich”, wouldn’t hike this woman’s taxes? We have no idea how much Joy Clayton makes at Bobby C’s Lounge and Grill – if she’s like many other small business owners, she may be classified as “rich” under the Kerry “plan” (which he’s never really fleshed out beyond the standard class warfare rhetoric).

Besides, to paraphrase an old joke: how can you tell a Democrat is lying? When he’s telling you he won’t raise your taxes.