August 21, 2008, 12:10 pm
CHESTER, Va. — If John McCain had tried to play into Barack Obama’s strategy of sounding out of touch with ordinary people, he could not have done better than to say in an interview that he didn’t know how many houses he had.
“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” Mr. McCain told reporters for The Politico in an
interview in New Mexico on Wednesday. “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”Mr. Obama seized on the remark at his first event here today to bolster his case that Mr. McCain is too rich to understand what’s going on with the economy and had recently said that it was “fundamentally strong.”
Here’s what Mr. Obama said next:
“This puzzled me. I was confused as to what he meant. Then there was another interview, where somebody asked John McCain, ‘How many houses do you have?’ He said, ‘I’m not sure I’ll have to check with my staff.’ True quote! ‘I’m not sure, I’ll have to check with my staff.’ So they asked his staff and he said, ‘at least four.’ ‘At least four.’ Now think about that.
I guess if you think that being rich means you’ve got to make $5 million, and if you don’t know how many houses you have, then it’s not surprising that you might think the economy was fundamentally strong. But if you’re like me, and you got one house, or you were like the millions of people who are struggling right now to keep up with their mortgage so they don’t lose their home, you might have a different perspective.
“This puzzled me. I was confused as to what he meant. Then there was another interview, where somebody asked John McCain, ‘How many houses do you have?’ He said, ‘I’m not sure I’ll have to check with my staff.’ True quote! ‘I’m not sure, I’ll have to check with my staff.’ So they asked his staff and he said, ‘at least four.’ ‘At least four.’ Now think about that.
I guess if you think that being rich means you’ve got to make $5 million, and if you don’t know how many houses you have, then it’s not surprising that you might think the economy was fundamentally strong. But if you’re like me, and you got one house, or you were like the millions of people who are struggling right now to keep up with their mortgage so they don’t lose their home, you might have a different perspective.
By the way, the answer is, John McCain has seven homes. There’s just a fundamental gap of understanding between John McCain’s world and what people are going through every single day here in America. You don’t have to be a Nobel Prize-laureate economist, you just have to have a little bit of a sense of what ordinary people are going through to understand that we can’t afford eight more years or four more years or one more year of the failed economic policies that George Bush has put in place.”
For the record, Mr. Obama paid $1.65 million for his Chicago home and an adjacent parcel in 2005.
Mr. Obama was speaking to a group of perhaps 150 people at an outdoors town-hall meeting, under the shade of tall pines here at John Tyler Community College.
Mr. Obama was speaking to a group of perhaps 150 people at an outdoors town-hall meeting, under the shade of tall pines here at John Tyler Community College.
Mr. Obama returned to the subject later in an answer to a woman who asked him what he would do for poor people. He said that among other things he would expand the mortgage deduction beyond people who itemize their taxes.
“John McCain, with those homes, they get a mortgage deduction, up to $1 million,” he said. (The Obama plan would give a 10 percent tax credit on up to $8,000 of mortgage interest payments to households who take the standard deduction. The campaign estimates that 10 million homeowners would benefit from this proposal.)
“John McCain, with those homes, they get a mortgage deduction, up to $1 million,” he said. (The Obama plan would give a 10 percent tax credit on up to $8,000 of mortgage interest payments to households who take the standard deduction. The campaign estimates that 10 million homeowners would benefit from this proposal.)
The McCain campaign quickly fired back at Mr. Obama’s remarks, calling them a “personal attack.” Brian Rogers, a spokesman, issued this statement: “Does a guy who made more than $4 million last year, just got back from vacation on a private beach in Hawaii and bought his own million-dollar mansion with the help of a convicted felon really want to get into a debate about houses? Does a guy who worries about the price of arugula and thinks regular people “cling” to guns and religion in the face of economic hardship really want to have a debate about who’s in touch with regular Americans?
“The reality is that Barack Obama’s plans to raise taxes and opposition to producing more energy here at home as gas prices skyrocket show he’s completely out of touch with the concerns of average Americans.”
Campaigning with Mr. Obama today is Gov. Tim Kaine, who also hit the theme of Mr. McCain’s houses early this morning on CNN. “I understand that Senator McCain was asked yesterday this question, ‘How many houses do you own?,’ and he couldn’t answer that question,” Mr. Kaine said. “He couldn’t count high enough, apparently, to even know how many houses he owns.”
The Obama campaign also quickly cobbled together a
TV ad for a national cable buy about the McCain homes, juxtaposed with residents dealing with foreclosure. It estimates that Mr. McCain owns seven homes, with a total worth of $13 million. Now, two major labor organizations and Brave New Films teamed up earlier this week to
produce a Web film that intersperses shots of some of those properties with the tale of a woman who lost her home in a mortgage foreclosure.Mr. McCain’s Senate financial disclosures do not list these properties among his assets, because, according to public records, the homes and condominiums are in the name of a corporation trust listing his wife Cindy, the heiress to a beer distributorship whose worth is estimated to be anywhere from $35 million to $100 million.
Among those properties:
*Their ranch in Sedona, Ariz., where Mr. McCain is spending some down time this weekend, and its guest house and parcels, is valued at $1,766,440. (An Architectural Digest
*In Phoenix, two adjacent condos with a price tag of $4.7 million in 2006.
*In Scottsdale, Mrs. McCain also owns the Princess Medical Center, valued at $14 million, but this is not a residential property.
*In Coronado, Calif., a condominium owned by Mrs. McCain’s “Dream Catcher Family” corporation is valued, according to recent
tax assessments, at $2.7 million. And records show another condo there as well.In La Jolla, Calif., Mrs. McCain’s trust owns another condo.
The couple also have a home in Arlington, Va., another condominium valued at $847,800 this year, according to public records.
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