Recently, I had an email exchange with my Dad, a lifelong Republican, about this election that easily ranks as the longest written communication between the two of us. The response I received from people to whom I forwarded the exchange was overwhelming and I have since written a few articles about the failure of the Republican propaganda machine.
This morning my wife asked me to look at Senator McCain's campaign website and its comparison of Senator McCain’s and Senator Obama's positions across multiple issues. She asked me because one of her friends said in a Facebook post that after reading this comparison table, "the choice was clear" for Senator McCain. My wife also knows that although I have voted Republican many times, I believe that Senator Obama is a far, far better choice for President. And while I also believe that smart people can differ on their criteria for voting, I am disappointed by Senator McCain and his supporters’ willingness to trade principles for pandering.
So even though the focus of this post is the silly comparison list on Senator McCain's website, I'd like to share two thoughts about the McCain / Palin ticket upfront:
(1) The choice of Governor Palin as running mate is proving disastrous for the Republican ticket by any credible measure (other than measuring the galvanization of a consituency that wasn't voting Democrat anyway). Books will be written about this colossal error, but I think Peggy Noonan, Head Speech Writer and Special Assistant to President Reagan, said it best when she recently denounced Governor Palin's candidacy as a "vulgarization in American Politics" that is "no good...for conservatism...[or] the country" and which is a "mark against John McCain, against his judgment and idealism." Or maybe it was Monty Python's John Cleese who said it best. Either way, it's reason enough to vote against the Republican ticket.
(2) The case against Senator McCain is being made much more eloquently than I could. For example, Tom Dickinson recently wrote a fantastically well-documented article highlighting Senator McCain's "disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty."
However, the original reason for my post was to correct the distortions that the McCain campaign has included on their website. I don't have the mental stamina to discuss each one, but here are three in order of appearance:
Misstatement on Taxes: Barack Obama wants to "spread the wealth around" and is more interested in controlling who gets your piece of the pie than he is in growing the pie.
Firstly, this statement is condescending in its lack of detail. Unfortunately, this is often when propaganda does best -- as a sort of simplified, folksy truth. In reality, Senator Obama wants to eliminate capital gains taxes for small businesses, cut corporate taxes for firms that invest and create jobs in the United States, and provide tax credits to reduce the cost of healthcare and to reward investments in innovation. I think determining the likely outcome of economic policy can be a tricky business, but as John Richardson points out in yesterday's Esquire article, the Republican party has bankrupted the country and presided over the greatest transfer of wealth since the Gilded Age—due to Bush’s tax cuts, 20 percent of the money in the country is now in the hands of 1 percent of the people. Consequently, McCain has now abandoned 99 percent of the Republican talking points on economics. He never mentions the trickle-down theory. He doesn’t talk about deregulation. He certainly doesn’t talk about small government or fiscal prudence or getting rid of Social Security or privatizing every function of government that doesn’t include his current job. But he does talk about how important it is to give $600 billion to Wall Street or another $300 billion to buy up every bad mortgage in America. In other words, it's impossible to say what Senator McCain stands for.
Misstatement on Education: Barack Obama wants our schools to answer to unions and entrenched bureaucracies.
Firstly, I think it's a political mistake to demonize unions. There are problems with organized labor for sure, but part of why America is great is our ability to establish ethical work standards, and unions have been a key historical reason. And as an aside, the single greatest speech on race in this election came not from Senator Obama, but from Richard Trumka, Secretary Treasurer of the AFL-CIO (link). More to the point, Senator Obama has frequently stated his support for charter schools and for merit-based teacher pay. This position is decidedly un-union. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will double funding for the Federal Charter School Program to support the creation of more successful charter schools. An Obama-Biden administration will provide this expanded charter school funding only to states that improve accountability for charter schools, allow for interventions in struggling charter schools and have a clear process for closing down chronically underperforming charter schools. An Obama-Biden administration will also prioritize supporting states that help the most successful charter schools to expand to serve more students.
Obama and Biden will promote new and innovative ways to increase teacher pay that are developed with teachers, not imposed on them. Districts will be able to design programs that reward accomplished educators who serve as a mentor to new teachers with a salary increase. Districts can reward teachers who work in underserved places like rural areas and inner cities. And if teachers consistently excel in the classroom, that work can be valued and rewarded as well.
Misstatement on Iraq: Barack Obama opposed the new strategy and predicted wrongly that it would fail. He voted to deny critical funds to our men and women fighting in Iraq.
On May 24, 2007, Obama was one of 14 senators who voted against a war-spending plan that would have provided emergency funds for American troops overseas. He, like many Democrats, was pushing for an end to the war in Iraq, and the legislation included no provisions for that. "We must fund our troops," Obama said that day in a news release. "But we owe them something more. We owe them a clear, prudent plan to relieve them of the burden of policing someone else's civil war." Republican nominee Sen. John McCain, and Obama's running mate Sen. Joe Biden, voted in favor of that resolution.
Obama had supported, and voted for, an earlier version of the bill that would have provided the money for the troops but established a timeline for Bush to begin bringing them home. Biden also voted for that version of the plan.
McCain was one of three senators who did not vote that day — but he urged Bush to veto it after it passed 51-46 on April 26, 2007. "I look forward to the president's prompt veto of this misguided bill," McCain said in a written statement. Bush did veto the measure on May 1, 2007, leading to the second vote.
Perhaps the more important point is that Senator Obama opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning. In 2002, he said the war would lead to "an occupation of undetermined length, with undetermined costs and undetermined consequences" (link). In January 2007, Obama introduced legislation to responsibly end the war in Iraq, with a phased withdrawal of troops engaged in combat operations (link). Senator Obama also supports the recommendations of the bi-partisan Iraq Study Group Report (link). This effort will aim to secure Iraq's borders, keep neighboring countries from meddling inside Iraq, isolate al Qaeda, support reconciliation among Iraq's sectarian groups, and provide financial support for Iraq's reconstruction and development.
It's tempting to argue what chess move is best in a given situation, when a master would tell you that it's better not to be in that situation.
I welcome your comments, so long as you don't drop your "G's" or say Nu-cue-lar.
