I know a fair number of both undecideds and unenthusiastic McCain supporters who can most certainly be persuaded to vote for Obama in November. The people I'm referring to are not low-information voters. They're intelligent and well-informed but for whatever the reason (most often, a history of voting Republican), they have not made the move to vote for Obama, despite serious misgivings about McCain.
Because these people live in Florida, where I grew up, I feel a particular urgency to persuade them this month. I've had many conversations with them of course but sometimes in the spur of the moment you leave out key arguments or don't express yourself as well as you could have.
So I decided to write it all down. MY case, well-researched and rational, but also passionate, for why Barack Obama needs to be elected the next President of the United States. It is long (under 6 pages on Word), but I lay it all out there and will be emailing it to every swing vote I know.
It is yours to read below the jump. Please feel free to send it off to your undecideds. And please feel free to send me feedback, to fact-check me if I'm wrong, and to add your thoughts.
Lets win this damn thing already.
BARACK OBAMA FOR PRESIDENT
"If you don’t have any fresh ideas...you make a big election about small things."
The above words, from Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, were prescient in at least a couple of ways. They of course foresaw the spate of personal attacks that his opponent, in the face of dipping poll numbers, has started to level his way and will likely continue to do so, with increasing fervor and decreasing veracity, between now and the election. But more importantly they respected, and spoke to, the ever-growing sense among Americans of every ideological bent that this is indeed a big election. As big an election as most people can remember. One in which two fairly distinct plans have been set forth to quell the quiet unease that has gripped 80% of Americans who say in surveys that our country is on the wrong track, who have a subtle but gnawing fear that everything we’ve ever assumed about America is, at the very least, not safely guaranteed for the next generations.
To intelligently consider both plans, it is essential to pinpoint where we are. We currently find ourselves engaged in two wars, one just and one foolhardy, that have stretched our military to its limits and, in the case of Iraq, will likely have cost us over a trillion dollars before it is finished. The financial costs of the Iraq war, staggering as they may be, pale in comparison to the human costs: four thousand American lives lost, thirty thousand Americans seriously wounded, 4.5 million Iraqis forced to leave their homes and currently living in limbo, tens of thousands of Iraqis killed. Its has frayed close alliances, tarnished American prestige, and emboldened our enemies. It has allowed the Taliban to resurge in Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda to once again find safe haven there. The stretching of our military and this administration’s only-recently-revised contempt for diplomacy have weakened, and in some cases destroyed, our ability to respond to threats and crises as they emerge in Russia, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, and Darfur.
Our nation’s tenuous position abroad, sadly, is mirrored by a precarious position at home. Barack Obama has criticized John McCain for repeating dozens of times that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong." It is a fair criticism. While the surface of our economy can still inspire some confidence, it is precisely the fundamentals that are corroding and in need of immediate attention. We face a middle-class that is rapidly shrinking (Under President Bush, five million new people fell below the poverty line), an infrastructure that is at turns either crumbling or outdated and in almost all respects lagging behind the rest of the developed world (including a lack of high speed rail; an outdated and inefficient electrical grid; roads, highways, and bridges in need of repair), a precipitous decline in the manufacturing sector of our economy, and nine straight months of job loss (totaling close to 750,00 for the year with no immediate end in sight). If, as the rest of the developed world does, we consider the education and heath care of our citizens to be part of our infrastructure, the picture does not become any rosier. The number of uninsured Americans has now reached 45 million and medical costs are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the country. No Child Left Behind was well-intentioned, but it has been inadequately funded and poorly executed. Perhaps most concerning to younger generations, however, is a national debt that has almost doubled under President Bush and now swelled to $10 trillion. All of this without even mentioning the banking and credit crisis that may or may not be alleviated by a $700 billion bailout with taxpayer money. That is not a strong foundation. It is one that begs for repair if the edifice that is our country as we’ve known it is to stay aloft for future generations.
It would be wrong to dismiss a realistic appraisal of our country’s problems as mere "doom and gloom." To point out precisely how far we’ve veered onto the wrong track is not to peddle fear and cynicism. Democrats and Republicans can both agree that Americans remain the hardest working and most selfless people on earth, that they remain a source of hope and inspiration to the world-over, and that they have a spotless track record of rising to challenges as great as the ones we face today. There are 305 million reasons and counting to believe that the American Dream will live on. But any serious discussion of this election and the course of our future, must begin with the understanding that the American Dream is not a given and it can slip away. It is in the hopes of preventing that, that we find ourselves with the choice between two significantly different plans for the future.
There are many ways to measure what a candidate values and what agenda they’re likely to bring to the White House. Their rhetoric is only one of them, and compared with their platforms, policy proposals, and voting record, it is the most superficial. But it does tell us something if we listen closely. John McCain has managed to go through an entire Republican Convention and one debate without uttering the phrase "middle class." He has stumped for months in every corner of the country, with scarcely a mention of "infrastructure" and "health care." Barack Obama, by contrast, has put the middle class at the center of his campaign, just as it is at the center of his plan for economic recovery. He has, in every speech, every day of his campaign, stressed our crumbling infrastructure, not just as a problem in need of fixing, but as an opportunity to strengthen our economy and an investment that will pay for itself and create jobs as it did under Dwight Eisenhower some 50 years ago. And he has repeatedly tied the health and education of our citizens with our ability to compete globally in the 21st century.
Their policy proposals reflect that disparity. Under Obama’s tax proposal, middle-class families earning less than $250,000 would receive three times as much tax relief as under John McCain’s plan. Those making more than that would have their tax rate return to Bill Clinton levels (an era, it is worth noting, of budget surpluses and 22.75 million new jobs). In addition, corporate tax loopholes would be closed. The sum effect is that government revenues would increase dramatically, but middle class families would catch a needed break. By contrast, John McCain’s plan would extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans (a souped-up version of the tax cuts he voted against in 2001 and 2003 and derided as "irresponsible"), cuts which, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would cost the US government between $200-$300 billion a year in revenue. Alan Greenspan is on record as saying that we cannot afford McCain’s tax plan unless it comes with massive spending cuts. Senator McCain has offered no specifics on just what spending he would cut beyond the earmarks and pork barrel he is famous for opposing. This is an admirable cause, and Senator McCain has a distinguished record of fighting pork, so there is no reason to question his sincerity. There is reason, however, to question his math. If every last earmark in the federal budget were eliminated, it would save $20 billion, a fraction of the revenue lost to his tax cuts. Until McCain offers more specifics, it is impossible to see him as anything but the latest in a long line of Republican presidential candidates who have promised tax and spending cuts. When elected, the tax cuts have come and the spending cuts have not. The end result has been our $10 trillion deficit (Do yourself a favor and chart, year by year, the growth of our national debt. Next to it, chart year by year, which party has been in the White House. If you are a fiscal conservative, not only can you vote Democratic, but based on the history of our deficit, you absolutely should.)
The deficit has dug us into such a deep hole financially (at the mercy of countries like China), that there is no way out of it without a fundamental shift in our economy. Put in the simplest terms, we need to once again become a country that makes things and exports things. We need to revive our manufacturing economy and with it middle-class jobs. And nowhere will that growth in manufacturing be more vital -- to our economy, to our job growth, to reducing the deficit, to the environment, and to national security – than in the energy sector. Here again, Barack Obama’s plans are more incisive and in tune with the scope of the problem. Besides his investments in transportation infrastructure, Obama plans to invest over $150 billion in the next decade in wind and solar power and biofuels, complementing direct investment with tax incentives for private initiatives, altogether building a new industry that could create as many as five million new jobs and stop what T. Boone Pickens has called "the greatest transfer of wealth in human history," namely the mountains of oil money we send to Saudi Arabia. Obama’s plan, which also includes retooling America’s auto industry, has been called expensive, though it is important to note that much of the funding would come from a cap and trade system (in effect, a more intelligent and precise taxation on heavy polluters like utilities) and ambitious (how far we have fallen from Kennedy’s Apollo Mission days when ambition is seen as a negative). It is most certainly both. But it is also something else: absolutely essential. As the Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Thomas L. Friedman recently wrote:
Renewable energy technologies — what I call "E.T." — are going to constitute the next great global industry. They will rival and probably surpass "I.T." — information technology. The country that spawns the most E.T. companies will enjoy more economic power, strategic advantage and rising standards of living. We need to make sure that is America.
Obama’s plan demonstrates that he has seen the writing on the wall. As he said recently during a rally in Reno, Nevada: "Imagine putting these old factories back to work creating solar panels and wind turbines....imagine putting young people in the inner cities and rural areas to work in these factories." While not as concise as "Drill Baby Drill," it has the advantage of actually reflecting good policy.
There was a time when it seemed the nomination of John McCain would allow for an intelligent debate on energy and the environment (to his credit, McCain is "greener" than many of his party colleagues). But those days have past. In the interim, McCain has purposely missed all eight votes on the Senate floor to extend tax credits and subsidies to the wind and solar industries. He has made the merits of offshore drilling, which he once opposed and which President Bush’s own Energy Department has said will have a negligible effect on gas prices and no effect before 2030, the central energy discussion of the 2008 election (to his discredit, Obama caved partially on the issue when McCain started to gain some traction on it). He has brought oil lobbyists into his campaign (Obama: "if you think those lobbyists are working night and day to get him elected, only to put themselves out of business, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you in Alaska"). And he has appointed Sarah Palin to be his vice-presidential running mate, a woman who questions whether global warming is man-made and who supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The League of Conservation voters, which monitors the voting record of public officials on issues related to the environment and energy has given John McCain a lifetime rating of 24 (out of 100), and a grade of 0 for 2007 when he missed 15 key votes. Senator Obama’s voting record has earned him a score of 100.
In addition to taxes, Senator McCain offers little difference from President Bush on the crucial issues of health care, regulation of the financial industry, and international diplomacy. The fruits of the latter two are plain to see. Not as obvious, and perhaps more disturbing, are the ramifications of McCain’s health care plan if he were to be more successful than Bush in implementing it. Independent analysts have shown that by taxing Employee Health Benefits for the first time in history, McCain’s’ plan will make it more costly for employers to insure their workers and as many as 20 million people could lose their Employee Health coverage and be forced to fend with higher prices on their own. The ranks of the uninsured would swell even more and prices would likely rise for those that are insured. Barack Obama’s plan, which contrary to Republican talking points would not in any way socialize medicine but would instead offer government-sponsored insurance plans to the uninsured, has flaws of its own. Mainly, some of his ideas for funding it are overly optimistic and, especially in light of the $700 billion bailout, it is likely that his plan will have to be scaled back some. But it is a serious plan and a first step toward joining the rest of the industrialized world in insuring all of our citizens. As in nearly every issue facing the country, Obama’s plan aims at the core of the problem (in this case rising costs and the crisis of the uninsured) and McCain’s plan is at best tangential to the problem, at worst an exacerbation of it.
On foreign affairs, Senator Obama’s judgment has for the most part been more prescient, just as his vision and plan today are more strategic and realistic. To be sure, John McCain was right on the surge in Iraq and Barack Obama was wrong. And it is notable that he risked his presidential ambitions on the issue. But it is also important to note that in 2002, while Barack Obama warned that even a successful invasion would lead to "an occupation of undetermined length, with undetermined costs and undetermined consequences," Senator McCain was predicting a swift and easy conflict. It is imortant to note that mere months after September 11th, Senator McCain hailed "Next Stop Baghdad" with a bellicosity not unlike his later musical call to "Bomb Iran." It is also important to note that while Senator Obama has spent years warning of a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, Senator McCain largely ignored the problem and insisted that we could muddle through. Senator Obama’s call for a flexible timetable has the advantage of setting an agenda. It says to the Iraqis that we will not continue spending $10 billion a month and committing soldiers we need in Afghanistan forever and in so doing makes Iraqi political reconcialiation more imperative. By contrast, McCain has spent much of his campaign discussing "victory," but he has never defined just what that means in this war, which has now stretched longer than the American involvement in World War II, nor just when it may come.
And then there’s Sarah Palin. While it is true, as many have said, that neither she nor Joe Biden are running for President, it is also true that they were chosen by the candidates who are; the very men whose judgment, temperament, and character we have the responsibility to weigh in casting our ballots. Both candidates insisted, shortly after clinching their nominations, that they would choose partners in governance; running mates whose areas of expertise would add balance to the White House; whose competence and integrity would be utilized to challenge the President and make sure any decisions were hard-earned. Barack Obama, after three months of intense vetting, stayed true to his word. John McCain, after one fifteen-minute phone conversation, made a mockery of his campaign slogan ("Country First") and, in as crass a political ploy as any in recent memory, put a neophyte who cannot name a Supreme Court case other than Roe v. Wade, who cannot articulate the philosophical backbone behind the two wars her nation is fighting (The Bush Doctrine), who thinks that proximity to Russia constitutes foreign policy experience, a proverbial heartbeat away from the Presidency. The sheer irresponsibility of the choice, given the historical crossroads at which the country finds itself (try to imagine Mrs. Palin as wheel-chair ridden FDR’s Vice-President) speak volumes of Senator McCain’s judgment and temperament; but it is the cynicism betrayed in the choice that speak to his character, and to the opinion he holds of the very people who he is seeking to represent.
Senator McCain’s histrionics since his vice-presidential selection have done little to reassure the American voter. It is true that experience matters and in an ideal world Obama’s tenure in the Senate would be closer to McCain’s 26 years of service than to the half-term he has served. But if tenure were all that mattered, the Presidency would be an appointed position and not an elected one. Experience is not an intrinsic virtue (see Dick Cheney). It is a helpful way to measure a candidate only in so much as it speaks to his or her knowledge, judgment, and temperament. Since clinching their respective nominations, it has been Senator Obama who on all three counts has seemed the elder statesman ready to lead and Senator McCain whose selection has come to seem like a dangerous gamble. From the selection of their vice-presidents, to their handling of the economic crisis, to the consistency with which they hold their core positions, it has been Obama who has shown a steady-hand and a far-sighted vision and it has been McCain who has shown an impulsive streak, a frightening willingness to gamble for short-term gains, and a proclivity for jettisoning core positions for political profit (his dramatic reversals on offshore drilling and Bush’s tax cuts, his insistence that he’d vote against his own immigration bill today, his contradictory and schizophrenic pronouncements on government regulation, many of which belie his 26-year record of deregulation, are among the more prominent examples). Senator Obama has largely held true to his voting record, has surrounded himself with brilliant policy advisors, and has run perhaps the most grassroots campaign in history (generating 93% of its funds from small donations, with no notable lobbyists anywhere near the top of his campaign).
He has also done something else. He has turned millions of new voters on to the democratic process -- young people (who will have to inherit the climate crisis and national debt of his predecessors), minorities, and other Americans who have never voted, never campaigned, never donated to a campaign. It is a classic Karl Rovean strategy to turn an opponent’s strength into a weakness and the Republicans have certainly tried to do so with the enthusiasm that Obama’s supporters feel for him. The Britney Spears ad is the most famous example of dismissing Obama as a pop celebrity devoid of substance, and his supporters as mindless sheep enthralled in the latest trend. It is cheap cynicism and it hasn’t worked. The reason it hasn’t worked is that any way you spin it, millions of people shaking off their complacency and investing themselves in their society to push for an agenda they believe in IS A GOOD THING. Lets repeat that: IT IS A GOOD THING. It is the single most important quality of a healthy democracy. And if it is any indication of what America will be like during an Obama presidency, it should give you more not less reason to vote for him.
It is true that Obama has, like every politician in history, promised more than he can possibly deliver. It is true that, as with his health care plan, the financing of some of his proposals gets fuzzy around the edges. It is true that he is not "The Messiah" as his opponents have derisively called him. And it is also true that not even a Messiah could clean up the mess of the last eight years in one fell swoop. And it is essential to hold him, and every candidate, responsible when the numbers don’t add up, when they break a promise, or when they cave on a core principle. Obama is not perfect and those of us who knock on doors for his campaign, and call strangers on the phone, and cheer at his rallies, know that.
But we also know that agendas matter. We know that in both the broad strokes and the gritty specifics Barack Obama brings significantly better ideas to the table. We know for certain that he has a solid grasp on what’s wrong and we know that much more often than not he has inventive, aggressive, and long-term solutions to make it right. Most importantly, we know, as you do, that this is as pivotal a time as any we have faced as a country. We as a nation, in terms of agenda, and yes, in terms of the temperament of the candidates before us, have a stark difference of choices that will determine the course of our future. There is one candidate who, by and large, has 21st-century solutions to the complex problems we face. There is one candidate who has the take-the-long-view wisdom and temperament to answer that phone at 3AM. And there is one candidate who is going to win in November in a landslide because of it. His name is Barack Obama. And I hope you consider everything written here, I hope you research everything for yourself, and I hope on November 4th (or earlier in many states) you vote for the change we desperately need.