Well, no one wants to be associated with the policies of Reagan and Dubya which talked about reducing the size of government to mask their actual vote buying strategies that increased the size of government by mortgaging the future generations.

Of course, the really big problem is that Reagan mortgaged future generations who are now entering the workforce just as the boomers whose votes Reagan bought are beginning to collect on Reagan's bribes.

The only president in the past quarter century to actually limit the size of government in real terms was Bill Clinton - by the end of his term, government wasn't being made larger by taxing future generations.

Dubya has been the opposite, expanding the size of government and massively taxing future generations with his current voter bribes plus burdening them with the future expanded government he pretty much locked in, unless more than half the elected Federal official vow to commit political suicide.

And McCain seems to have come under the spell of Republican economics and is no proposing more of the same, expanding government and also bribing voters by taxing voters after he is dead, or at least out of office.