It's about...
If you accept the media hype that the 2008 Presidential Election is about the concept of change qua change, you cannot go wrong with any of the four major party front-runners. John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, and Barack Obama each represent a significant deviation from the close-minded mendacity that has characterized the presidency of George W. Bush, an over-pampered, under-equipped ne'er-do-well who basically admitted up front that he was a little light in the resume for this gig, and then picked the most venal gang of hacks and ideologues to govern in his stead. Each of the four candidates vying to replace him have demonstrated their ability to lead competently in different venues; each has a record of considerable personal achievement, both in public service, and, especially in Romney's case, the private sector. We can rest relatively assured that the personal defects that have rendered President Bush a failure will not repeated; the question, then, is what kind of change do we want?
Being an open-minded, forgiving sort, I would love to write-off Bush as a singular disaster and at least partially exculpate the Republican Party at large for the scope of our continuing national disaster. However, it must be noted that those same "Reagan conservatives" who now cry apostasy at our Bungler-in-Chief for his infidelity to "principle" eagerly lined up to applaud the tax giveaways to the wealthy, the exploitation of national tragedy to cow and subdue political opposition, and, worst of all, the campaign of misinformation ("misinformation" being a polite word for "lies")that led to our abortive invasion of Iraq - a misadventure that single-handedly eradicated any diplomatic or military advantages we enjoyed in that brief atmosphere of post-9/11 international amity. Many still endorse the most profane excesses of the War on Terror, including the unconscionable illegal wiretapping of American citizen's private communications and the use of torture tactics on detainees (Candidate Romney: "My view is that we ought to double Guantanamo.").
If I had to pick between the two Republican frontrunners, I would choose McCain over Romney in a heartbeat. Senator McCain has demonstrated a continued willingness to break with his party and this president, whether on campaign finance reform, reckless tax breaks, immigration, or opposition for torture. He is obviously a man of great personal integrity and intellectual independence, and he would undoubtedly restore significant luster to a tarnished institution. Romney, on the other hand, has displayed an unbecoming taste for political expediency; approaching his candidacy like the business consultant he is, Romney identified a gap in the field for a standard issue pro-business social-conservative, and has offered himself up as such. Unfortunately, such stances contradict his most germane personal and political experience: his four-year tenure as governor of Massachusetts. Indeed, Romney's presidential bid reads like an explicit repudiation of his past; even his signature achievement, an inventive universal health care mandate (the product of compromise with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature)has been treated as a liability at a time when America's health care system is in need of a dramatic overhaul. Given the cynical ambivalence with which he views his own interchangeable "beliefs", it's not precisely clear why Romney is running, what we would get if we elected him, and why we would want to do so in the first place.
Senator McCain is not without his downside, of course. At issue is his continued support for the Iraq war, and his promise to keep us embroiled there for the foreseeable future. He as well as anyone knows that this policy is untenable - even the surge he so avidly championed will soon come to an end as combat brigades prepare to rotate back to the States with no forces prepared to replace them. Furthermore, though the surge undoubtedly improved the security situation in Iraq, much of this success is attributable to alliances of convenience with Sunni militias targeted against al Qaeda in Iraq. With no meaningful headway made towards a political solution, is it reasonable to expect these militias - militias that previously dedicated themselves to attacking American soldiers - to remain in our camp while the Shiites consolidate power? There is no end game, and we need a president focused on the best way to extricate the nation from this mess, not someone prepared to muck about for another decade.
For the necessary change then, we must turn to the Democrats, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. On the major issues, there is little daylight between the candidates; indeed, The New Republic characterized the Democratic primary as a "fight to the death between Diet Coke and Coke Zero." Both propose a phased withdrawal of American forces from Iraq; tax cuts targeted at the middle class and based on expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit or some variation thereof; a hybridized private-public form of universal health care (as opposed to a single-payer, entirely government-funded and administered model); and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants in concert with tighter border enforcement. Regardless of which candidate wins, we are thus promised that the restoration of a progressive agenda sidetracked by eight years of neglect and outright hostility will be central to their candidacy and their presidency. Given the alternative - a
Hell House of which has been erected for your perusal at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue - we can even feel relatively assured that they mean it this time.
Furthermore, for you amateur semioticians and sociologists out there, who these candidates
are represents a significant departure from the previous 218 years of presidential precedent. Sure, you can argue that Americans should vote on the issues, and indeed they should: that's why I am decidedly against Mssrs. McCain and Romney and their promises to basically do it the same, but different. As I have just established, however, I don't see much of a policy divide between Clinton and Obama, at least not one I can use as a basis for extrapolation. Yet I also don't see identity politics as particularly useful for making a selection, though if I were a women or an African-American instead of a white male I probably would (or in Romney's case, a Mormon). Let's just agree that the day that either a women or a black man sits in the Oval Office will represent a seismic change from two unbroken centuries of white male monopoly on executive power. Call it a wash.
So why, oh why did I end up picking - not settling for, mind you - Barack Obama? Well, I like to be inspired, and he's inspirational. Frankly, I'm just as cynical as most of you mopes or anyone who's endured the last eight years of terror and the manipulation thereof, rinse-repeat. But why not go with the guy who is talking about hope? The presidency, after all, is kind of a mirror for the nation, case in point, JFK in 1961: "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."; George W. Bush in 2001: "Go shopping." What do we want to see in the Oval Office? In my case certainly not a Republican, because you get what you pay for and we'd be stupid to pay for anymore of
this, but I don't want the Hillary and Bill Show either, to be perfectly honest.
Clinton's camp has already made it clear that they view presidential politics as an existential knife fight in a phone booth, a perception no doubt colored by the Lewinsky affair. Says adviser Sidney Blumenthal: "It’s not a question of transcending partisanship,”
It’s a question of fulfilling it. If we can win and govern well while handling multiple crises at the same time and the Congress, then we can move the country out of this Republican era and into a progressive Democratic era, for a long period of time.
Clinton is more qualified for the presidency (or rather to be the Democratic nominee, which is more than a semantic distinction), the argument goes, because she has already survived the "Republican attack machine." Her team is girding for four more years of the same dogfighting that has persisted since Newt Gingrich tried to crown himself Prime Minister after 1994's Republican Revolution. Obama's appeals for civility and his constant invocation of "hope" are seen as dangerously naive.
Isn't this a reductive argument though? Let's face it, the first Clinton presidency, operating from seemingly the same premise, sure as hell didn't usher in "a progressive Democratic era, for a long period of time." Are partisan politics a zero sum game, where the Democratic interest must always be advanced at the expense of the Republican position, or vice versa? Or mightn't we be able to use someone who can see all sides of an issue?
In all honesty, that's what Obama brings to the table. The reason that he appeals to independents and yes, even some Republicans, is because he doesn't treat their perspectives as obstacles to be overcome but points of view to be considered and perhaps even synthesized. I know that in the Bush era bipartisanship has been equated by progressives with rolling over and playing dead, and not without reason. However, I also don't think that anyone who navigated Chicago's famously murky political waters to get to where Obama is can rightfully be called naive. I think that he's a guy who knows how to push when it comes to shove, whereas I think Hillary
only knows how to push.
I voted for Barack Obama because I think it takes guts to talk about hope in America today. It takes guts to talk to Democrats about the need to mend fences and reach out to Republicans after a presidency where we've gotten nothing but the bootheel. It takes guts to challenge the American people to take some responsibility for the future of their country. He talks the talk; I look forward to seeing if he can walk the walk.
