The 2008 Campaign
There are two major reasons to vote for Barack Obama in November.
First, the Republicans should be held accountable for the disaster they have created in this country over the past eight years – an unnecessary war that has killed and wounded American soldiers and thousands of more Iraqis, brought thousands of anti-Americans into the Al Qaeda fold, created massive deficits that will have to be paid by our children, ignored the findings of scientists and the perils of climate change, skewed wealth in this country to the benefit of big business and the rich at the expense of middle class and poor citizens, brought corruption and incompetence into the government on an unparalleled scale, and increased the unchecked power of the executive by ignoring and subverting Constitutional safeguards.
If Abe Lincoln was the Republican nominee, he would not deserve to be elected given this record, no matter how opposed he might be to those policies. Sometimes it is hard to see with all the focus on the President, but an administration is made up of thousands of political appointees who do the thinking and carry out the tasks of governance, and a McCain victory would only reward the people who have been in power under Bush’s leadership.
Second, experience in the Presidency is not the salient attribute for success. Presidents don’t micromanage the government. They don’t sit in the oval office and think up bright new ideas to be executed by their staff. What they should do is establish strategic goals and then evaluate the myriad suggestions, ideas, and plans proposed to them for meeting those aims and deciding which ones to pursue and which to ignore.
An analytical intellect, that can see reality clearly, and that is not influenced by a preset agenda is what is needed. Until you have been in the President’s office, you don’t bring significant experience to the job. Being a senator, a community organizer, or a prisoner-of-war doesn’t prepare you to be President. Being smart does. Being an elitist if this means that you are brighter than the average person is a desirable attribute. We’ve just suffered from eight years of an incurious ‘average man’ as President and we don’t want to repeat that experience.
McCain will claim that he has experience that Obama doesn’t. He will criticize Obama for not having visited Iraq as much as he has. The last time McCain went he came back excited and impressed about how peaceful it was walking through an Iraqi market in the middle of Baghdad, without realizing that he was surrounded by one hundred US soldiers, with combat helicopters in the sky, and checkpoints to keep most people away. Because of the position he had staked out in support of the Bush Iraq policy, he saw what he wanted to justify that position, rather than the reality on the ground. That approach to facts, that mode of thinking exactly mirrors what we have gotten from Bush and is the last thing we need as we go forward to rectify the Bush years.
First, the Republicans should be held accountable for the disaster they have created in this country over the past eight years – an unnecessary war that has killed and wounded American soldiers and thousands of more Iraqis, brought thousands of anti-Americans into the Al Qaeda fold, created massive deficits that will have to be paid by our children, ignored the findings of scientists and the perils of climate change, skewed wealth in this country to the benefit of big business and the rich at the expense of middle class and poor citizens, brought corruption and incompetence into the government on an unparalleled scale, and increased the unchecked power of the executive by ignoring and subverting Constitutional safeguards.
If Abe Lincoln was the Republican nominee, he would not deserve to be elected given this record, no matter how opposed he might be to those policies. Sometimes it is hard to see with all the focus on the President, but an administration is made up of thousands of political appointees who do the thinking and carry out the tasks of governance, and a McCain victory would only reward the people who have been in power under Bush’s leadership.
Second, experience in the Presidency is not the salient attribute for success. Presidents don’t micromanage the government. They don’t sit in the oval office and think up bright new ideas to be executed by their staff. What they should do is establish strategic goals and then evaluate the myriad suggestions, ideas, and plans proposed to them for meeting those aims and deciding which ones to pursue and which to ignore.
An analytical intellect, that can see reality clearly, and that is not influenced by a preset agenda is what is needed. Until you have been in the President’s office, you don’t bring significant experience to the job. Being a senator, a community organizer, or a prisoner-of-war doesn’t prepare you to be President. Being smart does. Being an elitist if this means that you are brighter than the average person is a desirable attribute. We’ve just suffered from eight years of an incurious ‘average man’ as President and we don’t want to repeat that experience.
McCain will claim that he has experience that Obama doesn’t. He will criticize Obama for not having visited Iraq as much as he has. The last time McCain went he came back excited and impressed about how peaceful it was walking through an Iraqi market in the middle of Baghdad, without realizing that he was surrounded by one hundred US soldiers, with combat helicopters in the sky, and checkpoints to keep most people away. Because of the position he had staked out in support of the Bush Iraq policy, he saw what he wanted to justify that position, rather than the reality on the ground. That approach to facts, that mode of thinking exactly mirrors what we have gotten from Bush and is the last thing we need as we go forward to rectify the Bush years.
posted by John Weiss at 4:17 PM
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