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Today’s New York Times poses this question in a nice article by Michael Cooper.  To which I say, isn’t it obvious?  I mean, have you been listening to him at the town hall meetings or being interviewed on CNN?  Or in the article itself, just pay attention to this McCain quote, which even seems milder than what he says lately:

[W]hen Mr. McCain first outlined his tax cut proposals shortly before the South Carolina primary in January, he highlighted his new enthusiasm for supply-side economics. “Don’t listen to this siren song about cutting taxes,” Mr. McCain said then. “Every time in history we have raised taxes it has cut revenues.”

But in the Cooper article, the best clue that McCain is indeed a “supply sider” now comes from this quote from Doug Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s economic advisor, that at least in my mind proves that even Doug, formerly known as the lonely deficit hawk among the rest of McCain’s advisors who are supply siders, is a supply sider now:

Deficit hawks believe that keeping the budget balanced will put downward pressure on interest rates, helping the economy. [I want to add that more importantly, we deficit hawks believe that reducing the deficit raises national saving and hence is good for longer-term economic growth.]  Many supply-siders believe that balancing the budget is a misguided goal, except to the extent that it shrinks government, which is a somewhat different goal. Supply-siders believe that lower taxes will spur economic growth, and that while lower taxes may lead to bigger deficits in the short term, they will eventually produce more revenue and lead to balanced budgets.

But one of Mr. McCain’s top economic advisers, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who said on Monday that Mr. McCain’s “plan is to balance the budget by the end of his first term in 2013,” suggested that the two arguments are not incompatible. “You’ll never have successful deficit reduction,” he said, “without strong economic growth.”

Just because the McCain campaign says they plan to eliminate the deficit doesn’t make them deficit hawks, especially if the claim lacks credibility and is incompatible with the rest of their supply-side plans.  If Doug Holtz-Eakin sees any potential compatibility rather than incompatibility, his quote still reveals him to be (at least in his current incarnation) a supply sider more than a deficit hawk, through the causal relationship he describes:  strong economic growth reduces deficits.  How would I, a true “fiscal hawk,” put the compatibility differently?  This is what I would say:

“You’ll never have strong economic growth, without thoughtful deficit reduction” (EconomistMom says).

See the difference?