McCain on Job Training

So this morning I'm listening to NPR and hear a single soundbite from Sen. John McCain amid all the back-and-forth on the Pennsylvania outcome. It was compelling. He wouldn't promise to bring back the steel mills in Pennsylvania, just like he wouldn't promise to bring back the textile mills in South Carolina (I'm paraphrasing here because I didn't have a pen available to write down the exact quote). But he'd make sure that every displaced worker had access to education and training for the jobs of the future, not the jobs of the past.

So honest. So forward-looking. So, dare we say it, compassionate.

Here's John McCain's record on job training:

* In 2002, McCain voted to kill an amendment requiring the Labor Department to establish a pilot program providing low-interest loans to workers in job training or job assistance programs that would enable displaced workers to continue making their mortgage payments.

* In 2007, McCain said "he would reallocate money spent on existing retraining programs to help pay for his proposal" to create a wage insurance system for laid-off workers, according to the Detroit Free Press.

* In March of this year, McCain skipped a vote on a worker training program, which would specifically "improve the training of manufacturing workers." McCain instead attended a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser in Philadelphia.

In 2000, a Republican candidate running for president told the American people he was a "compassionate conservative" while offering private assurances to religious bigots and economic royalists that he was really one of them. Once in office, it was his private assurances, not his public utterances, that really mattered.

Alas, with the help of the press, it looks like it's going to be "fool me once, fool me every time" from the misnamed "straight talk express." It took me five minutes on the Internet to get the counterfactual from the AFL-CIO and Democratic National Campaign Committee websites (admittedly biased sources, but they referenced the specific votes in Congress). And, anyway, isn't it journalists' jobs to get the other side of fact-based questions, and not rely on campaign-style he said/she said?