8-26-08, 9:57 am

A recent TV ad by the McCain campaign titled 'Debra' appears to be suggesting that not only is John McCain a 'maverick,' but that he is also more like Hillary Clinton than George W. Bush. After Clinton narrowly failed to win the necessary votes in the Democratic primaries to clinch the nomination, the McCain campaign has begun direct appeals to her supporters in order to peel them away from supporting Barack Obama.

But Clinton backers are slapping back. Calling the ad a distortion of what Hillary Clinton is all about and a 'cheap political stunt,' Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), a Clinton endorser, said, “This ad does not reflect the sentiment of the thousands of former Clinton supporters from my Congressional District who have embraced Barack Obama’s message of uniting Americans and getting the country back on track.'

In a statement to the press this week responding directly to the ad, Wasserman Schultz further asserted that the ad demonstrates how much alike McCain is to the Bush administration, including the habit of using sleazy tactics conjured up by Karl Rove, who now advises McCain.

Wasserman Schultz also noted that the McCain ad's claims about taxes are simply false. 'Hillary Clinton supporters are embracing Barack Obama and Joe Biden because they know they will bring a tax code that gives real relief to working families, a serious plan to tackle the energy crisis and help you cope with rising prices, and an end to the kind of political game too often on display at McCain headquarters.'

Hillary Clinton, herself, reaffirmed her commitment this weekend to seeing the Obama-Biden ticket win this November in a message to supporters after the announcement that Biden had been chosen to run with Obama. Clinton has also repeatedly described a McCain presidency as a disaster for the country.

How McCain distorts the tax issue

The McCain ad is deceptive about McCain's proposed tax policies, recently noted. John McCain has called for an historic new tax on working families. His proposals include a new health care tax on workers' health benefits that totals, by some estimates, $3.6 trillion. This new health care tax would essentially redistribute taxpayer money to insurance companies, ostensibly to provide health care coverage. McCain's proposal, however, would make it more difficult for working families to find and purchase health insurance, analysts say.

The only significant changes that would happen under the McCain plan are that American working families would pay a new tax and employers would have a financial incentive to eliminate employee health care benefits.

By contrast, Obama calls for tax relief for working families averaging about $1,000 for households earning less than $227,000.

In addition, he proposes bringing the Iraq war to a close and using the $10 billion spent there per month to fund a three-pronged health care plan that would encourage the growth of the employee benefit system, provide more assistance for lower income families without job benefits to access health care programs like S-CHIP and Medicaid, and increase availability of the federal health insurance program (currently available to John McCain and all of Congress) to middle income families without job benefits.

While the Obama plan doesn't provide universal access to affordable coverage immediately, according to the Economic Policy Institute, it does far surpass McCain's health care tax plan in efficiency and increased coverage. In ten years, EPI estimates, the Obama plan as currently outlined would cut in half the number of people who lack health care coverage, which currently totals 48 million people and is expected to rise to 63 million, if the status quo persists, within a few years.

Universal health care advocates have pledged to continue to press for health care policies that will provide a faster road to universal coverage, including 'Medicare-for-all' proposals that have already been introduced in Congress.

--Reach Joel Wendland at