“The choice in this election is stark and simple,” McCain said at the Denver town hall. “Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won’t. I will cut them where I can.”

But according to a respected, independent group of tax-policy experts, McCain’s plan would balloon the deficit and provide a windfall to the wealthy while affording only nominal relief to middle-class taxpayers. McCain has moved toward the Republican base on a handful of issues this campaign season, but his tax plan might actually shift the erstwhile deficit hawk to the right of the current president.

A 2004 study by the Congressional Budget Office found a full third of Bush’s controversial 2001 and 2003 tax cuts went to the top 1 percent of earners. McCain’s tax cuts would be more massive than Bush’s, and appear to skew even more to the wealthy. President Bush touted his breaks as providing a boost for the economy, but some tax-policy experts credit Bush’s tax policy with shifting the tax burden to the middle class, ballooning budget deficits, and contributing to a widening disparity in personal wealth.

In addition to permanently extending Bush’s tax cuts, the major features of McCain’s plan include slashing the corporate tax, reducing the estate tax, giving companies a deduction on new equipment and increasing the child tax credit. McCain also wants to extend relief from the gas tax this summer and the alternative minimum tax (AMT), which has been hitting upper-middle-class families with higher tax rates in recent years.

McCain’s most sweeping proposal is allowing taxpayers to figure their taxes under an optional alternative system. McCain’s campaign hasn’t fleshed out the details, but said it will offer a large standard deduction and an increased personal exemption.

To get a sense of McCain’s ambition, his tax cuts would cost the federal budget as much as $4 trillion from 2009 through the end of 2018, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. That’s eight times the size of the Pentagon’s base budget this year. Bush’s cuts would cost only $1.6 trillion if extended to cover the same ten-year period.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, the national co-chair of McCain’s campaign, summed up the candidate’s current thinking succinctly during a June interview on ABC’s “This Week.” Host George Stephanopoulos asked Graham how McCain’s tax and healthcare policy compared to Bush’s.

Stephanopoulos: “John McCain is calling for an extension or maybe even an enhancement of the Bush policies?”

Graham: “Yeah, absolutely.”

The most in-depth comparison to date of McCain and Barack Obama’s tax plans was performed by the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the center-left Brookings Institution and Urban Institute that is nonetheless staffed by both Republicans and Democrats — co-director Eugene Steuerle was a deputy assistant secretary under Ronald Reagan — and is known for its methodological rigor. Its 38-page analysis found that McCain’s proposals would make the tax system even “more regressive” than permanently extending the Bush tax cuts of 2001 to 2006. McCain would accomplish this by following Bush’s blueprint and then supersizing it: providing “relatively little” tax relief to low- and middle-income earners, while giving “huge tax cuts” to the highest income brackets.

The Tax Policy Center’s computations show stark differences between the Obama and McCain plans in their relative impact on middle-class and high-income taxpayers. A middle-class family making $66,000 a year would see their taxes drop by $319 a year under McCain’s proposal, while a wealthy family making $604,000 a year would see a cut of $45,000. By contrast, Obama offers the biggest breaks for taxpayers at the bottom and in the middle of the income spectrum, while imposing sizeable tax increases on some of the highest earners — those making more than $250,000 annually. Under Obama’s plan, the middle-income family would receive a tax break that is three times larger than McCain’s — $1,042. The wealthy family would see a tax increase of $116,000 a year.

McCain’s campaign did not respond to Salon’s requests for comment, but McCain’s economic advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin called the analysis “misleading on the whole and wrong in some particulars” in a response on the Tax Policy Center’s blog. Holtz-Eakin’s main argument was the analysis did not give enough weight to the spending cuts that will offset McCain’s tax cuts.

McCain would likely be making any economic proposals to a hostile Democratic Congress, so his ability to implement new tax cuts is questionable. But observers on the right have offered praise for McCain’s intentions anyway. Conservative anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist called McCain a “tax-increasing Bolshevik” in 2005, and slammed him early in this election cycle for balking at signing a no-tax-increase pledge. Now he lauds McCain. When asked by Salon if he preferred the McCain or Bush tax plan, Norquist answered quickly.

“The McCain tax policy is to continue the Bush tax cuts and add three more, so I prefer McCain,” Norquist said. He paused for a moment and then added. “McCain’s is bigger, better.”

But Norquist concedes there is little chance — at least initially — of McCain’s tax plan making it through a Democratic Congress in 2009. “They will mangle it,” Norquist said. However, he believes Democrats might go for aspects of McCain’s plan, such as AMT relief and extending some of Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. In the long run, he is optimistic Democrats will warm to McCain’s entire plan.

If he were somehow able to implement it, the biggest question surrounding McCain’s plan is how he would pay for it. The bill is staggering, per the Tax Policy Center’s estimates. If McCain succeeded in extending Bush’s existing tax cuts, it would cost the government $1.6 trillion from 2009 to 2018. Reducing the corporate tax rate would dock revenues by $735 billion, and abolishing the AMT would cost $1.1 trillion.

On Monday, McCain reiterated a pledge to balance the budget by the end of his first term in 2013. (After making the proposal earlier in the campaign, he had backed away from it in April.) To achieve that goal, McCain said Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid reform are needed. He also plans to propose a year-long moratorium on new discretionary spending (except for defense and veteran-related costs) and to veto bills with earmarks.

However, the Tax Policy Center found McCain’s offsets would not come close to paying for his tax cuts. To be fair, the Center’s analysts are also dubious about how Obama will pay for his tax breaks. They found that both presidential candidates’ plans would add massive sums to the national debt: $4.3 trillion over a decade for McCain and $3.3 trillion for Obama.

Both proposals come as Bush’s tax cuts, war spending and a weak economy have sent the federal budget zooming into the red. The 2008 deficit is likely to reach $400 billion — a near record. The liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates the yearly cost of AMT relief and making Bush’s tax cuts permanent alone will be more than $400 billion. That price tag would exceed the 2007 budgets of the Department of Education, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Veterans’ Affairs, State, Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency.

“We’re not in as good a fiscal shape as we were in January 2001,” says Alan J. Auerbach, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, “because of the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 primarily … We are much closer to falling off a cliff now than we were [prior to the Bush administration] because of the retirement of the baby boom generation, which is a very big increase in entitlement spending more or less mandated by Social Security and Medicare in the coming years.”

Auerbach, who has endorsed Obama’s tax plan, predicted a coming budget crunch, and said McCain’s plan to balance the budget is dubious. “I don’t know how he could possibly do that with his tax policies. He’d have to make unrealistic cuts.”

Even conservatives acknowledge McCain will have a daunting challenge to balance the budget. “Bottom line is it’s plausible, but wouldn’t be easy,” said J.D. Foster, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former Bush administration official in the Office of Management and Budget. Foster said McCain would have a tough time getting spending cuts through a Democratic Congress.

The most striking aspect of McCain’s new tax policy is how far the candidate has traveled from where he once stood on the issue. Former Republican Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee, who joined McCain as one of only two Republicans to vote against Bush’s tax cuts in 2001, believes McCain’s move is a political calculation.

“He’s tailoring [the tax cuts] to a Republican base,” said Chafee, who now identifies as an independent and has endorsed Obama for president. “That requires a pretty much 180-degree turn on his part.”

As George W. Bush’s $1.35 trillion tax cuts neared a final vote in 2001, McCain rose on the floor of the Senate to denounce the signature domestic policy proposal of the leader of his own party.

“I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief,” McCain said. He tried to reduce the cuts for the wealthiest taxpayers and then cast a “no” vote.

It was an essential chapter in the story of the “maverick” McCain. He polished that reputation again in 2003 when Congress clashed over another round of Bush tax cuts, this time a $350 billion package. McCain lobbied to reduce the size of the cut, before joining with only two other Republicans in voting against it.

McCain has also built a reputation as a deficit hawk, which could be endangered by his tax plan. The Arizona senator has regularly chided the Pentagon for pork in its budget, railed against earmarks, and opposed Bush’s prescription drug benefit, calling it an “unfunded liability.”

McCain’s evolution on taxes and a host of other issues may have made him a more mainstream Republican and could win him conservative votes in November, but it’s odd coming from the man who issued the following warning during the debate over Bush’s 2003 tax cut:

“At a time of war, at a time of economic stagnation, at a time of rising national debt … one might expect our national leaders to pursue policies calling for shared sacrifice to achieve shared benefits. Regrettably, that is not the case.”

So Wallace, following a 92nd Street Y panel last night, said this:

“There will be pressure to elevate a woman but there will be an equal amount of pressure to pick someone who is prepared,” Wallace said.

And then she said this:

Wallace flagged one female official in particular who she thinks would be a good choice this year.

“Nikki Haley — she’s great,” she said. “She’s the most effective surrogate Romney has.”

If the Sarah Palin problem was a problem of preparation and vetting, Haley … might present some issues? Specifically an odd and mostly unsubstantiated sex scandal and also these rumors that she might at any moment be indicted on tax charges. The tax thing might be bullshit and the affair story was the product of a self-promoting creep but they’re “out there,” as they say.

More important, Haley has been governor of South Carolina since January of 2011. As in very slightly longer than one year. And slightly less time being a governor than Sarah Palin had in 2008. It’s almost as if Wallace is making a pick not based on the principle of Who Would Be Best For the Nation but on demographics and optics?

Wallace also apparently suggested Carly Fiorina, which, lol. Romney/Ex-CEO who famously received a giant golden parachute when she was forced out of her company 2012, everyone! Just the ticket for the new economy.

That is sort of a shame. The Palin thing is the most heavily over-covered story line of the entire 2008 campaign, so focusing on it might be totally logical from a marketing perspective, but it’s unfortunate from an artistic one. The film re-creates various moments of YouTube campaign ephemera very well — remember when that old white lady called Obama an Arab and McCain looked uncomfortable? When it takes us behind closed doors, it’s to witness scenes any moderately close observer of the election and its aftermath could’ve dreamed up him- or herself. It might have been fun to see a TV movie about the Democratic primary fight; the personality clashes of the disastrous Clinton campaign would have made for entertaining television, and Mark Penn is surely a creature crying out for a grotesque Emmy-winning portrayal by, say, Paul Giamatti.

Instead, McCain has won the nomination three-and-a-half minutes into the film. Soon we’re watching Julianne Moore watch Tina Fey on TV. You remember the “SNL” sketches making fun of Palin, right? In case you don’t, “Game Change” airs lengthy chunks from most of them. It also has tons of actual footage from CNN and MSNBC and Fox News, and it re-creates debates and speeches and the Couric interview and the Charlie Gibson interview and a bunch of other things you saw either live or on YouTube when they happened.

Moore’s performance is not just fair but maybe even flattering. (For one thing, she doesn’t hit those flat upper Midwest vowels as gratingly as the real Palin.) Woody Harrelson plays strategist Steve Schmidt — the film’s protagonist — as a grizzled, “too old for this shit” campaign veteran called back to the trail against his better judgment. Jamey Sheridan is given barely anything to do as Mark Salter, McCain’s “conscience.” Salter, the primary author of his “Maverick” mythos, is limited, after the Palin selection, to making a hilariously over-telegraphed face of concern as everyone else in the war room applauds her first speech.

But the film is about Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace because they were pretty clearly Halperin and Heilemann’s primary sources, and we watch them become horrified by the depths of Sarah Palin’s ignorance at exactly the same time as everyone else in America became horrified by her ignorance.

Because it’s Hollywood, there’s very little politics in the film’s depiction of politics. Policies are simply things for Sarah Palin to write on note cards and not memorize. Operatives confidently declare, in faux Sorkin-ese patter, that if this or that meaningless decision is made, it means “we’ll lose by five.”

There is a sheen of faux cynicism (McCain swears like a sailor!) but it masks complete naiveté: Everyone is basically honorable and decent. Nicolle Wallace — a member of the Bush administration communications team — is sincerely alarmed at the prospect of someone as dangerously ignorant as Sarah Palin in the White House. On election night, she breaks down in tears as she admits to Schmidt that … she didn’t vote. They embrace.

The film subscribes to the simplest theory of Sarah Palin: That she is childlike, vain and incredibly ignorant but also an essentially decent person and wonderful mother. The moments that come closest to “unfair” — Sarah Palin doesn’t know that the head of Great Britain’s government is the prime minister, not the queen — are basically plausible. This isn’t Andrew Sullivan’s conniving, dangerous pathological liar. It’s an overwhelmed working mother whose most unhinged moments are explained by a crash diet. Her convention speech is largely stripped of its snarling attack lines, imagining a world in which it appealed to “the base” because of Palin’s heartfelt commitment to special-needs children and not because she was very good at saying mean things about Obama. (The film actually repeats the bullshit story that her teleprompter broke midway through, and she kept going.) Even when the film has her take a major heel turn — “if I am single-handedly carrying this campaign, I am gonna do what I want!” — after “winning” her debate with Joe Biden (played by video footage of Joe Biden), she is still basically an innocent seduced by the adoration of riled-up crowds and national attention. (Todd Palin barely does anything.)

The constant use of actual news footage adds a bit of verisimilitude but also constantly raises the question of why this lightly fictionalized version of the election actually needs to exist. “Game Change” is not really for serious political junkies, who remember all the stuff that did happen and will scoff at the stuff that didn’t. (At one point, John McCain answers his ringing iPhone in the middle of the night. He used a BlackBerry, HBO.) But if casually politically involved people want to see their assumptions about Sarah Palin reinforced, well, there are still those “SNL” sketches.

In the end, the Republican operatives who foisted Sarah Palin on an unprepared nation are rightly horrified that they created a monster, but at no point does anyone act concerned that their actual candidate was himself an angry, warmongering old crank with extremely fungible principles. Sure, Sarah Palin didn’t know what the Fed did. Do we have any proof John McCain knew what it should’ve done? Maybe everyone actually was totally unfair to poor Sarah Palin.

Rice, the national security advisor in George W. Bush’s first presidential term and secretary of state in his second, is currently a professor at Stanford with the requisite right-wing think tank fellowship. She has not said or done anything “political” in years. But Curl has been hearing things!

America’s first black female secretary of state is quietly positioning herself to be the top choice of the eventual Republican presidential nominee, ready to deliver bona fide foreign-policy credentials lacking among the candidates. The 56-year-old has recently raised her profile, releasing her memoir in November and embarking on a monthlong book tour.

After 2 1/2 years as a professor at Stanford, Miss Rice is reportedly getting “antsy” to get back into the political game. “She’s ready to go,” said one top source.

Oh, a month-long tour in support of her book about her time in the Bush administration! She must be running for vice president, along with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Scott McClellan and George W. Bush.

There’s more. (And not just the part where Curl calls Rice “a spicy Rice dish” and waxes fetishistic about “her guns” being “a match for those of our first lady Michelle Obama.”)

Plus, her selection would be a giant chess move to counter the expected replacement of Vice President Joseph R. Biden with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Sure, the White House denies and denies, but that should really make any political watcher more suspicious. One White House insider even told me that the position swap was the only reason Mrs. Clinton joined the administration in the first place.

Curl has so many inside scoops packed into this column! I had no idea that our first presidential running mate swap since Ford’s 1976 campaign was basically a foregone conclusion and not just a weird Beltway journalist fantasy! But yes, I can see why the still  un-chosen GOP candidate would definitely be looking pretty closely at Rice — who’s been strongly making the case for her selection by not explicitly denying interest in the position — in case Obama replaces Biden with Clinton, which he will surely do.

The column gets worse (“Funny thing is, she is, unlike Barack Obama, an ‘American black’”) but that’s not really important. What’s important is exploring how someone like Condoleezza Rice ends up a perennial name on the fantasy ticket list.

Rice has been a subject of these columns since 2005, when she became Bush’s second secretary of state, and the White House tasked communications operative Jim Wilkinson — previously known best for inventing the false story of Jessica Lynch* — with getting Rice (and her boss) some much-needed positive press. Wilkinson did his job beautifully (remember when Rice’s knee-high boots were a topic of actual serious news coverage for weeks?) and Rice began receiving the “rock star” treatment.

In the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, author of the 2007 Rice bio “The Confidante,” summarized the exact moment of the birth of the presidential speculation:

In March 2005, before Rice sat for an interview with the Washington Times, Wilkinson slipped a note to the editorial page editor, Tony Blankley, suggesting that she be asked whether she would consider running for president. It was an audacious proposal — she had been secretary for only six weeks — but such speculation would bolster Rice’s image as a leader. (Wilkinson and Blankley said they do not recall the incident, but others present said they saw Wilkinson’s note.)

Oh, the Washington Times.

Shortly thereafter, Dick Morris wrote a book claiming — nay, insisting — that 2008 would be “Condi vs. Hillary.”

As Iraq descended into a violent civil war in 2006, Rice-for-president buzz bizarrely grew. There was enough of a false grass-roots movement for a paint-by-numbers AP trend piece with a silly nickname and everything. Tim Russert asked her point blank. As always, she said no in no uncertain terms.

Then, of course, everyone began to speculate that she’d be McCain’s running mate. Robert Novak claimed as much on Fox. Dan Senor said she was pushing for the pick on some Sunday show. Hendrik Hertzberg wrote a Talk of the Town piece on the subject! McCain and Rice both finally denied “reports” that she was angling for the spot on the ticket.

Now, I guess, it’s time to start up the rumor mill anew.

But before you put pen to paper on that column about how a Gingrich-Rice ticket would surely win moderate women in Ohio, consider this: In addition to the fact that she’s always denied wanting the job, and in addition to the fact that she was an unmitigated failure in the Bush administration, downplaying terrorism as a priority prior to 9/11 and selling the public on the Iraq invasion with untruths, Condi Rice is pro-choice.

*Update: Jon Krakauer recently rescinded his claim that Wilkinson, then a communications aide to General Tommy Franks, was responsible for the initial false Washington Post report on Lynch’s apparent heroics before her capture. Though Wilkinson was obviously involved in the PR campaign surrounding Lynch’s rescue and return to the U.S., he apparently isn’t responsible for falsifying her actions or leaking that false story to the press.

The New Black Panther Party is a cartoonish fringe group of a couple guys who play “’60s radical” dress-up and say mean things about whitey for Fox cameras in order to scare old white people. They have been explicitly rejected by the old Black Panther Party. For some reason, various conservatives have dedicated themselves to proving that this weird, marginal group of Nation of Islam cast-offs is somehow supported by or deeply connected to the Democratic Party and the Obama administration in particular, because, you know, Eric Holder and Barack Obama, those are two guys who very obviously share the values of extremist anti-white proponents of racial separation.

So Breitbart “proves” something or other about the essential anti-white racistness of the Obama campaign by noting that members of the inane New Black Panther Party were spotted by cameras near Obama, at various times, and also NBPP head Malik Zulu Shabazz spoke at the event.

(Brietbart goes on to publish two pictures of the event despite the photographer withholding permission, because “The First Amendment allows photographs of such enormous public importance to see the light of day.” Good luck with that argument in court?)

Andrew C. McCarthy gleefully endorses Breitbart’s story in a breathless post at the National Review’s The Corner:

This is a shocking story, and a breathtaking indictment of the mainstream media which went out of its way to avoid vetting Obama as a candidate — and to make sure anyone who tried to do due diligence got no sunshine. A candidate who chose to appeared in the company of, say, the KKK, would have provoked relentlessly hostile media coverage and, in short order, have been marginalized as disqualified to hold responsible elective office.

If only the media had reported that some fringe weirdos also participated in this event that both Democratic candidates and thousands of other people participated in, and then the fringe weirdos sort of followed Obama around for a while. That would’ve opened America’s eyes! (I mean the media besides NPR, which did report that the NBPP was there.)

Here’s the bit of this sad, desperate reach that is the saddest and most desperate: “Andrew further reminds us that, in March 2008, the Obama campaign website posted an endorsement of Obama by the New Black Panther Party.” Whoa, did they really? Shocking if true! It is, of course, not true. It was a user-generated blog post on the Obama campaign site that the campaign removed as soon as they became aware of its existence. Because websites do not “post” things to themselves, generally, McCarthy’s statement can’t even be charitably described as technically accurate. It’s just a lie.

A random stupid incorrect Breitbart smear is worth paying attention to only to the extent that the smear threatens to bubble up to the more reputable conservative press, or Fox, or Republican elected officials. The McCarthy endorsement means keep an eye on this one!

Here’s my reaction to those revelations: Sarah Palin is a person! She’s done drugs and pissed people off and slept with people, like 90 percent of American humans. If Sarah Palin was smart she’d dismiss the book with a chuckle, say nobody’s perfect, laugh off the “gossip,” and move on.

Sarah Palin might not be smart.

The Palins always prefer grand self-pitying martyrdom to quiet dignity, of course, which is why picking on them can be so profitable: They will always respond, and always help you drum up more publicity for your Palin-attacking venture. Instead of depriving the book of oxygen, they launched a multimedia attack on Joe McGinniss before he’d finished the first draft, and what they accomplished was … giving him more material and ensuring that even more breathless anticipation awaited the book’s release.

Now that the book’s rollout is underway, the Palins might as well get paid for their marketing efforts. Todd Palin angrily denounced it, again accusing McGinniss of having a “creepy obsession” with Sarah Palin. Oooh, it’s so creeeepy to write an unauthorized biography of a prominent public figure, right?

How bad did the Palins allowed themselves to be trolled? Sarah Palin’s people released a statement on behalf of Brad Hanson, Todd Palin’s former business partner, with whom Sarah Palin is alleged to have carried on an extramarital affair, some years back. The statement is a blanket denial, but what does having the supposed beau directly address the press accomplish, exactly? It just drives more interest in the book’s salacious, shocking revelations about the secret life of Sarah Palin. This guy, of all guys, should be kept out of it.

I am sure that Todd and everyone else is very personally pissed off that McGinniss went to Wasilla, talked to a bunch of people who hate them, and published a book full of stories about how bad and awful they are, but blowing up publicly just sends the message that there’s stuff in the book worth getting worked up about.