The Barack
Okay gang. I'm hoping that this will be the last US presidential election in which I'll be allowed to have any public opinion. So I guess I'll make my opinions public while I can.
Given my demographic, you could probably guess that I want to see Obama become the Prez. My primary concerns are international relations and the image of the presidency ( Read more... )
Given my demographic, you could probably guess that I want to see Obama become the Prez. My primary concerns are international relations and the image of the presidency ( Read more... )
Moreover, it doesn't even matter. Who cares what the world thinks of our president? The general perception of leaders does little to drive the engine of history. If image means anything - and I think it means very little - what matters is how other leaders and decision-makers view our president, and you don't get to be an international leader without being smart enough to judge Obama and McCain on their own merits without reference to the past leaders.
Besides which, it's not fair to equate McCain as a Bush surrogate. McCain has vastly more experience and has been at odds with Bush time and time again given McCain's history as something of a maverick. He's long been known for attacking pork barrel spending and inflated government, which your more recent post suggests is out of control. Sure, he's a little more hawkish than Obama, but I think "Eric" made the wise point that Obama's plans to work every international dispute out over a tea and biscuits are a bit naive.
Anyway, a candidate's actual foreign policy plans as well as his domestic agenda (and their combination - i.e. energy policy) strike me as much more important issues on which to vote than someone's international image, which could have put Michael Jackson in the White House when we were kids. I am actually quite surprised that the rising oil price/energy policy is not the most raging, pressing issue of the campaigns.
I also think experience should count for a lot, which is a reason I was always suspicious of Bush. At the end of the day, the president is an actual CEO, the Manager of All Managers - there is a real job to be done aside from espousing ideas and announcing positions. McCain's experience with both foreign and domestic issues as well as with maneuvering Washington politics greatly outmatches Obama's. Aside from the sheer experience, we know where McCain stands based on his long record of public service as opposed to Obama who can charismatically speak all he wants and snag the coveted "Oprah" endorsement but doesn't have much of a record to back it up. He's the famous-for-nothing Paris Hilton of politics - why is he even ahead of the veteran, experienced Biden on the ticket?
Finally, while I think I'm agreeing with archivecats here about what issues to base a vote on, of course we differ greatly on which side of those issues is the right one. McCain is not the most pro-life candidate you'll find, but he'll protect far more innocent life than Obama would. I am all for allowing women to decide what happens to their bodies so long as they are not killing other people - in this case defenseless babies, many of them female - in the process. More than 40 million people have been killed since Roe v. Wade, making abortion a much more pressing life-or-death issue than the war in Iraq. And this is to say nothing of the emotional, physical, and psychological damage done to women over these years under the abortion regime. Moreover, a candidate's views on gay marriage or foreign policy or anything else are irrelevant when he is in favor of denying people the most fundamental of rights - the right to life.
Anyhow - that's my two cents. I don't think this election should be a slam-dunk for Obama. Thanks for the post and the chance to comment!
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On the "image" issue:
The election of the President is the one and only decision that the entire U.S. population makes (through the distorting lens of the Electoral College). It is a major source of information for anyone, domestic or international, interested in analyzing the policies and opinions of the nation as a whole. The President is the "first citizen", representative not only of the political agenda of the government, but also a major part of the historical narrative of the country. Most of the history books I've read devote a lot of words to every presidential election and what it "meant".
The "meaning" of a McCain election would be interpreted, both now and in the judgment of history, both here and abroad, as a continuation of current policies and worldviews. I totally agree that McCain would in fact espouse in many cases very different political views than the Bush gang. In the 1999 primaries I preferred McCain to Gore. However, there are at least two vitally important similarities between McCain and the current administration: his views on Iraq (and the use of military force in general), and (quite simply) his political party affiliation. People tend to simplify things, and the nuances of differences within the Republican Party would be brushed over in historical statements such as "Following the unsuccessful and poorly-planned entry into Iraq in 2003, the Republicans maintained control of the White House through two more election cycles and the occupation continued."
The "meaning" of an Obama presidency would be that the United States is capable of recognizing that not all of its political actions on the world stage (including at home) have been perfect successes, and that we are capable of altering our course. This is one of the amazing things about our governmental structure in which the head of state changes at least once every eight years. Democracy makes a state more flexible and adaptable than non-popular forms of government.
The McCain "brand" is experience and stability. By its very nature, his campaign represents the status quo. He is very literally the "conservative" candidate - by moving cautiously (if at all) away from the policies of the past, we minimize any risk of serious social or political disruption. Obama's "brand" is just the opposite - change and renewal.
Of course this, too, is an oversimplification. McCain wants to change some things: to improve our environmental policies, to limit or take away citizens' ability to end an unwanted pregnancy, to get people on both sides of the bitter political divide to work together. And who wouldn't want to bring the nation together again? Certainly Obama does as well; it is perhaps his main speaking point. Obama also talks a lot about environmental policies. But I still maintain that the image of a candidate - the meaning that contemporary and future analysts will assign to his election, and the direction that the country will take as a result - should be a major part of the electoral decision.
The presidential image has a huge impact on foreign relations. John F Kennedy apparently believed that the President should be almost exclusively concerned with foreign policy. I would not go that far myself, and of course we live in different times now. However, I do agree with him that foreign policy is incredibly important (see paragraph 3 of my original post, and add that our country cannot sustain itself in pretty much anything from food to energy to security to manufactured goods to electronics to culture), and the president (and the presidential election) is a HUGE foreign policy tool, that should always be used to our best advantage. Of course, the presidency (and the election) can also simultaneously serve as a useful tool for other purposes. Not to consider his (and its) foreign policy capabilities, however, would be to ignore a tremendous opportunity.
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The importance of experience is difficult to gauge. Say you're hiring a computer programmer, and one has worked at Microsoft for twenty years and risen through the ranks there, while another has been at a small startup for the three years since he graduated. To me, that's not really enough information; I want to see if the MS dude has actually learned anything from his experience or is continuing to think that the industry is the same as it was in the late 80s; I want to know if the other candidate has been responsible for the growth of that startup into a million-dollar organization during her short time there. I've heard from people familiar with the Illinois state senate that Obama was astonishingly able to there exactly what he wants to do with the federal government: bring together two bitterly opposed parties whose mutual antagonism had rendered any action at all virtually impossible, and change the atmosphere to a much more collaborative and effective governing structure. Apparently it's not just a brand image, but an actual ability (having the most to do, probably, with intense and intensive group and one-on-one negotiations). In other words, in the "experience" battle, quality should count as much as quantity.
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