John McCain reads a sheet of paper in Rochester, Mich. McCain's camp suffers from a paper gap

While campaigns typically snow reporters with white papers and policy minutiae, many of the domestic policy plans of John McCain have been notably short on details.

Analysts caution that both McCain and Barack Obama have produced policy pronouncements that are just as much election documents as workable proposals; after all, that is what presidential candidates do. But when it comes to the metric of paper produced, McCain trails Obama in spelling out the nitty-gritty.


"The Obama people are much more detailed," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan advocacy group dedicated to balancing the budget.

Consider McCain campaign senior adviser Taylor Griffin’s description of his candidate's plan for fixing Social Security:

"The history of the Social Security debate has taught that too many specifics, especially during a presidential campaign, has polarized the debate," he said of the program that McCain called "an absolute disgrace [that's] got to be fixed."

Will he contrast his plan to that of his opponent? "Sen. McCain believes this is so important that we do not politicize this debate during an election season."

What, then, is the plan? There doesn't appear to be a page dedicated to it on the McCain website, though some details can be gleaned from the page dedicated to his plan to balance the budget by 2013:

"John McCain will fight to save the future of Social Security, and he believes that we may meet our obligations to the retirees of today and the future without raising taxes. John McCain supports supplementing the current Social Security system with personal accounts — but not as a substitute for addressing benefit promises that cannot be kept."

Elsewhere, though, he's talked down private accounts, saying only that "workers ought to have the latitude to take a small amount of their own taxes, of their own money — it's not somebody else's money — and put it into an account with their name on it, a very small amount." And on an appearance last Sunday on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," he told the host that "everything," specifically including Obama's tax hike, "is on the table."

To be sure, Obama's Social Security plan has holes still to be filled, and the McCain camp has lately been charging the Democrat with changing the nuances of his plan to better suit his current political needs. The Obama campaign, which denies the charge while also saying the specifics would have to be worked out in conjunction with Congress, notes that it has a "specific strategy" — an inversion of the usual campaign dynamic in which the trailing candidate usually introduces policy plans first, and in more detail.

"He has not offered very much in specifics that I have seen," Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said about McCain's Social Security plan.

Riedl, however, was nonplussed by Obama's level of detail when it comes to spending programs.

"Obama's website has page after page after page of very specific [entitlement] increases, specifically within Medicare. It doesn't take political courage to specify the goodies you're going to offer voters."

"You can't judge campaign numbers the same way you'd judge a president's budget," said Bixby. But he added that the McCain campaign's budget proposals — including a promise to balance the budget by 2013 — were notably short on specifics and often didn't appear to add up.

Even many of the economists listed on McCain's site endorsing his budget plan stressed they were agreeing more to the principles of lowering taxes and cutting federal spending than to the specifics, such as they were.

"The McCain goal is quite responsible," said Bixby. "But I can't see any way he could get there under the policies they've been proposing. There's a disconnect there."

A report issued last week by the Tax Policy Center, a well-respected, numbers-oriented think tank, found that "Sen. McCain's proposals on the stump are often far more sweeping than the more measured options outlined by his campaign" — and would in fact double the tax impact of his formal proposals, while Obama's off-the-cuff additions would reduce the impact of his plan by about one-sixth.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain's economic adviser, disputed the analysis, saying that while McCain's words on the trail don't always jibe with the granular specifics, the Tax Policy Center drew trillion-dollar assumptions based on McCain saying things like he'd prefer to get rid of the alternative minimum tax.

"He has been very clear that he'd like to develop an alternative simplified tax," Holtz-Eakin said, noting that he'd try to create one that would be revenue-neutral. "We do not yet have a specific proposal."

The Obama campaign currently has 14 paid staffers (twice as many as in the primary), and The New York Times reported last week that his foreign policy campaign bureaucracy has some 300 advisers, 12 of whom joined the campaign for at least one leg of this week's world tour.

The McCain campaign declined to say how many policy staffers it employs. but did concede that its rival's staff was bigger. "Maybe that's because they are on both sides of every policy," cracked McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds.

The McCain campaign, which nearly ran out of money during the primaries and until New Hampshire seemed headed for a crash-landing, operated on a shoestring budget. At points it appeared that Holtz-Eakin was responsible for formulating (or at least defending) every policy the campaign put out.

"The difference in enthusiasm among voters is also a difference in enthusiasm among policy wonks," said Robert Gordon, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who worked for the Clinton White House and John Kerry's campaign in 2004.

For Obama, the need to generate policy — and snag policy wonks — has been pressing since early in the primary, when the campaign needed to prove both its policy prowess and an ability to sign up top-flight minds to compete with Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards.

"We were in a contentious primary that lasted a very, very long time and was hard-fought and very substantive," said Obama policy director Heather Higginbottom. "That did not happen in a Republican primary."

In part because the leading Democrats' policy proposals were largely similar and the details were much considered by key constituencies, the candidates were compelled to offer fine-grained plans to draw differences.

It made for debates in which Clinton keyed in on nuanced and sometimes difficult-to-explain differences between her plan and Obama's to vastly increase the federal government's role in providing health care.

Intraparty pressures also meant that Obama produced a fairly ambitious climate change strategy last year. The McCain campaign did not start rolling out the details of its environment and energy plan until May of this year.

The more dominant interest groups in the Republican Party — social conservatives, hawks and tax-cutters — had less wonky primary goals that didn't need extreme specificity to be articulated clearly, which was also true for women's groups on the left.

When McCain has focused on domestic policy, it has generally been to offer headline-grabbing plans, such as his proposal for a gas tax holiday and his claim that allowing offshore drilling could have an immediate effect on gas prices, both of which were almost universally derided by economists across the ideological spectrum.

"There's a lot more happening in the Obama budget. There's a lot more moving parts, and I think that probably calls for more specificity," Bixby said. "It's a much more ambitious agenda than McCain's."