Beyond the Dome

Here’s one of the things that happens when you have two longtime senators in the presidential race: They start running against each other’s votes, even when one is at the top of the ticket and the other is at the bottom of the ticket.

This morning, Barack Obama released a new TV ad that slams McCain’s education record in the Senate. Among other things, it accuses McCain of voting to cut education funding. In the little white fine print that flashes by on the screen, the ad cites McCain votes that go back as far as 1999.

That’s way before Obama was in the U.S. Senate, of course, so McCain’s rapid response team couldn’t compare his votes directly to Obama’s. So they swung around to the closest target they could find. They compared McCain’s votes to Joe Biden’s.

“FACT CHECK: Obama Ad Cites Votes Where John McCain Voted FOR Education Funding And Joe Biden Voted NO,” the rapid response e-mail screamed. (Not literally, but it did use all capital letters.) The McCain campaign cited two measures: a 2000 appropriations bill for labor, health, and education programs, and a non-binding spending blueprint from 1999. In both cases, sure enough, McCain voted yes and Biden voted no.

Naturally, there’s an important back story that the McCain campaign doesn’t mention. In both cases, most of the Republicans voted yes and most of the Democrats voted no. In fact, on the spending blueprint, every single Republican voted for it and every single Democrat voted against it. When that happens, it’s usually a red flag that there’s something else going on with the legislation.

Biden himself doesn’t appear to have made any floor speeches or issued statements about those votes. But in the case of the 1999 budget resolution, most Democrats were concerned about the impact of the tax cuts included in the measure by the Republicans, who controlled the Senate at the time. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle said the tax cuts, totalling $777.9 billion over 10 years, would have resulted in “crippling cuts in education, health care, environment, agriculture, food safety and countless other critical areas.”

The 2000 spending bill was a more complicated matter. It didn’t call for actual education funding cuts, according to CQ’s coverage at the time. In fact, the Department of Education’s overall budget would have increased from $37.9 billion to $42.6 billion. Instead, Clinton and most Democrats opposed it because the Senate refused to dedicate funding to specific programs they favored, such as renovating crumbling schools and hiring more teachers so children could learn in smaller classes.

McCain did vote against the Democrats’ attempts to target the education funds to these and other causes. That’s different from actually cutting education funding, though. (I’ve asked the Obama campaign if there’s another reason they cited that vote that we might have missed. If they come up with one, I’ll update this post.)

This is way beyond the level of information the average viewer will get from a TV ad, of course. But it gives you some idea of the lengthy history behind many of these votes. It also may be the first of many McCain vs. Biden matchups we’re likely to see. After all, McCain and Obama have overlapped in the Senate for less than four years. Biden and McCain, however, have served together for almost 22 years.