J-Ro is a musician and designer currently residing in Washington D.C.
He writes for The Seminal and works for Health Care for America Now.
A popular right-wing canard is to proclaim Social Security, a foundational program in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, in crisis. To put it bluntly, there is no crisis. An explanation:
Social Security does face a shortfall over the next 75 years. However, predicting this sort of shortfall is like predicting the weather: the farther into the future you project things, the less certain your predictions....
The point of this is not to say that we should go on doing nothing. (Though, personally, I think we can afford to wait a decade or so.) It is to say that we should remember that this problem is not projected to hit us for another 33 years, and that before we completely freak out, we should think about the possibility that those predictions are wrong. We should also remember that the projected shortfall is quite manageable. (It's worth bearing in mind that a lot of the projections are over 75 years.) For instance, as Table 2 here makes clear, we could make up for it simply by letting the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest 1% of Americans expire and dedicating the proceeds to the SS trust fund.
But we do, in fact, have a genuine crisis on our hands: Health care.
The next President is predicted to come into power with a record $482 billion of government debt, a testament to George Bush's "fiscally conservative" nature. And that debt is predicted to grow, mostly driven by increases in the cost for programs like Medicare.
Now, as the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare points out, the forces driving increased Medicare costs have nothing to do with "bloated government programs" or "inefficient bureaucracy:"
The long-term costs of Medicare, on the other hand, are primarily driven by the same factors that have caused skyrocketing health care costs for workers and their employers, and which the nation has, to date, been unable to solve. This interrelationship means that attempting to limit future cost increases in Medicare without addressing the problems of our nation's healthcare system as a whole simply will not work. And a policy that relies primarily on shifting more costs onto seniors, who are mostly lower-income, is unfair and not sustainable over the long term.
So, given that we are spending 15% of our national prosperity on a product that fails to deliver on its promises, is it any wonder we find ourselves in dire straight economically? And if we could get that same 15% that we spend on health care working harder, isn't it possible we could either a) spend less, or b) get more for that money, and that would help turn our economy around? Healthy children learn more. Healthy adults work more. Healthy countries are more prosperous.
In order to fix our mounting public debt, and in order to turn our economy around, we need to reign in health care costs. And the most effective way of doing that is to make sure we're sharing risk fairly.
The private insurance industry in America can charge customers different premiums based on their age and health history - the amount they can afford to pay doesn't factor into the decision. When old, sick, and/or poor customers can no longer afford their premiums, or have to change jobs, get married, or do anything else that would change their insurance status, private insurers do everything they can to drop them as customers, because these people very quickly go from being profitable accounts in their ledgers to big expenses. These old, sick, and/or poor end up on public health care plans like Medicare or without insurance altogether - which means they show up at emergency rooms to get treated for free, by far the most expensive way to get health care. Therefore, our current health care system allows private insurers to collect premiums from healthy and/or wealthy customers and drop the sick, old, or poor on the public's rolls. This is not sharing risk fairly.
To reduce health care costs, risk must be spread out - even if it is at the expense of profits. Premiums should be calculated based on a person's ability to pay, not on their health history or age. Standard levels of care need to be established, both for preventative medicine and for treatment of the sick. A public health care plan must be created that is open to all to fairly share risk. Most importantly, insurers - both private and public - must not be allowed to drop customers or raise rates when health circumstances change. To do less is not fair, and as it is currently practiced, unfair sharing of risk is the main driver of health care costs in this country and one of the main reasons we spend so much more on health care than other countries.
Other ways of cutting costs include:
With an expensive war in Iraq and a President with no self-control with regards to spending, public debt is indeed an issue. Therefore, reigning in health care costs - the main driver of this debt - should be at the top of our list of priorities. And the only way to reign in those costs is through fair risk-sharing. It should be clear to all - given the already intensely privatized nature of our health care system - that even more "free market" reforms will do nothing to drive down health care costs. The private actors in this industry and making off handsomely by putting profits before people and there is no indication that further privatization will cause them to behave any differently.
82% of Americans think our health care system needs a "major overhaul." On top of that, over 90% of Americans [pdf] think the next President and Congress should improve the quality and affordability of health care.
With the worsening economy continuing to be the top issue for most Americans, this hope for change isn't hard to understand. American health care spending is projected to reach a full 1/5th of our GDP by 2015, which means by then, we'll be spending twenty cents of every dollar we make on health care. Health care premiums have risen 86% between 2000 and 2006 while wages only rose 20%, putting the strain on working families. Health care costs continue to be the #1 cause of bankruptcy in America.
Americans are paying $217 million for health care per hour. Meanwhile, insurance industry profits have risen 1,000% in the past five years.
According the to Government Accountability Office, health care reform is necessary to keep our country on the right track:
"Rapidly rising health care costs are not simply a federal budget problem," the GAO report says. "Growth in health-related spending is the primary driver of the fiscal challenges facing state and local governments as well. Unsustainable growth in health care spending also threatens to erode the ability of employers to provide coverage to their workers and undercuts their ability to compete in a global marketplace."
Quite simply, with rising health care costs (including $50 billion per year to pay for insurance industry advertising) being born out by working families and American businesses, health care is a top economic concern. To keep American workers at their best, and to keep American business competitive in the world, something has to change.
Nancy Pelosi has recently declared health care expansion to be #2 on her list of legislative priorities, right after ending the Iraq war. In the past month, tens of thousands of Americans have told us they want quality, affordable health care for all. Now it's time to ask Congress.
So, Congress, which side are you on? Are you with us for quality, affordable health care for all? Or are you with the insurance companies, working to preserve our broken system?
We've set up a quick and easy way for you to contact your Members of Congress and ask them if they support our vision for health care reform. Just click here and enter in your phone number and address. Choose the elected official you want to talk to and in a few moments, we'll call your phone and connect you automatically.
Over the next few weeks, we want to make 100,000 calls to Congress, asking every Member which side they are on. We need your help to do it, so please click here to call!
Once your done with your call, tell us what happened so we can keep track of where Congress stands. As of today, we're proud to announce Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), are with us. The rest, so far, are unknown. You can see the full list here.
Health care is a priority for the American people. It's a priority for Nancy Pelosi. It's up to us to make sure it's a priority for Congress as well. Please take a moment, call your Members of Congress, and ask them which side they are on.
Oh, and if you have a blog or website, you can help spread the word about this campaign by embedding the widget you see above on your site. Just copy and paste the code here.
Health savings accounts, touted as the latest "free market" solution to our spiraling health care costs, is nothing but a scam to give more money to insurance companies and the rich.
Health savings accounts by definition favor the wealthy and/or the healthy. For those that never go to the doctor, or who can afford the high out-of-pocket costs incurred when using health savings accounts (you need to pay $1,050 as an individual or $2,100 for a family before your insurance will cover the rest), health savings accounts are great. Wealthy and/or healthy individuals can put a bit of money away, tax free, into their health savings account and then draw from it to pay their astronomical out-of-pocket costs when they decide to go see a doctor. If you're healthy, the doctor's visit doesn't happen very often. If you're wealthy, who cares if it happens very often, you can afford it.
For the rest of us, however, health savings accounts don't work. If we get sick and see the doctor often, we have to pay those huge costs often; that means we have to save a lot of money in that health savings account. For those on fixed incomes, or even those just barely scraping by (and that's a lot of us in today's economic climate), putting away even $4,000 in a health savings account is out of the question. Health savings accounts don't work for the same reason tax credits don't work: Those who don't have a lot of cash to save are forced to put away money they don't have a bit at a time to pay for their care. With tax credits, they get repaid at the end of the year. With health savings accounts, they don't pay taxes on that money. But either way, they need to save over the course of a year to get that payoff. For a lot of folks, this just isn't a realistic option - there's simply nothing to spare.
Is it any wonder, then, that health savings accounts haven't been embraced by most Americans? Jason Roberson at The Dallas Morning News reports:
Today, with only 5 percent of the 114 million Americans covered at work opting for such health plans, their future is in question. In Texas, regarded as the birthplace of the HSA, only 387,000 people have signed up out of the 12 million with employer-provided insurance.Proponents point to small companies - including some in Texas - that have used the lower-cost plans to offer coverage for the first time.
Meanwhile, critics argue that the plans benefit only the healthy and wealthy, with sick patients who can't afford deductibles of more than $2,000 doing without care.
...
Despite the tax benefits, patients have not been enamored of the trade-off. Few have signed on at companies now offering HSA plans as a new option, according to the Commonwealth Fund, a private New York City foundation focusing on the nation's health care system.
...
On the other side, Stacy Pogue, a policy analyst at the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin-based advocacy group, argued that HSAs favor healthy people, who don't worry about a deductible, and the rich, who have the money for a big deductible and like the tax incentives.
In fact, a May report from the Government Accountability Office found that taxpayers with health savings accounts averaged an adjusted gross income of $139,000 in 2005 vs. $57,000 for other filers.
People who work hard, who pay their taxes, and who get sick out of no fault of their own deserve better.
And health savings accounts do nothing to address underlying problems. Insurance companies can still deny care at will, even after people are forced to pay thousands out of pocket. Health care access is still determined by your wealth - the more money you have the more health care you can buy. And health savings accounts do nothing to lower the actual cost of health care, they only serve as a small deterrent for people to see a doctor in the first place.
John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas and "father" of the health savings account admits as much:
"If a mother wakes up in the middle of the night with a sick child, we want her to think about the cost of the emergency room visit," said Mr. Goodman, dubbed by many the "Father of Medical Savings Accounts."
Paul Krugman agrees with this basic assessment of the failings of health savings accounts, and he points to a further problem:
But for people whose income puts them in high tax brackets, these accounts are a very good deal; making the premiums deductible turns them into a great deal. In other words, health savings accounts will offer the already affluent, who don't have problems getting health insurance, yet another tax shelter. Meanwhile, health savings accounts, in the view of many experts, will actually increase the number of uninsured....
In the case of health savings accounts, the key side consequence is a reduced incentive for companies to insure their workers. When companies provide group health insurance, healthier employees implicitly subsidize their sicker colleagues. They're willing to do this largely because the employer's contributions to health insurance are a tax-free form of compensation, but only if the same plan is offered to all employees.
Tax-free health savings accounts and premiums would provide healthier and wealthier employees an incentive to opt out, accepting higher paychecks instead, and would lead to higher insurance premiums for those who remain in traditional plans. This would cause some companies to stop providing health insurance, or raise employee contributions to a level some workers can't afford.
So, to recap:
In short, health savings accounts are a scam.
As you may or may not know, I've taken a job with Health Care for America Now, an issue advocacy groups dedicated to winning real health care reform in 2009. Jerome has been kind enough to allow me to continue to post here on weekends on the topic of health care reform in America. Here's my pitch for the importance of this campaign.
$217 million per hour.
That's how much Americans spend on health care according to testimony in front of Congress' Joint Economic Committee by experts from the American Human Development Project.
24 hours a day. 365 days a year. For a total of almost $2 trillion spent every year, 16% of our GDP - more than any other nation on earth. And for what?
According to the World Health Organization, America ranks 37th in the world for best health care systems, behind countries we'd expect like France, Japan, and Norway, and also countries that might surprise you, like Colombia, Saudi Arabia, and Chile. And it's not just our health care. According to the American Human Development Project:
Despite the second-highest income in the world, despite being the the world's No. 1 economy, and despite spending $5.2 billion a day on healthcare -- more than any other nation -- America landed behind 11 other countries in overall human development [encompassing health, education, and income rankings].One of the main problems was that one in six Americans don't have health insurance. That limitation is connected to such factors as lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality. The U.S. also has the highest percentage of children living in poverty of the 30 richest countries. The top 20% of income earners in the U.S. make 15 times more than the bottom 20%. And 14% of Americans lack the literary skills to understand newspaper articles or navigate instruction manuals. Those measures -- education, poverty, poor health and shorter lifespan -- have all been shown to be interconnected.
Health care is integral to our success as a country. Healthy children learn more. Healthy adults work more. A healthy population creates more prosperity for itself. And yet, while America spends more money on health care than everyone else, we get less. Over the years, as health insurance profits have risen (along with costs), Americans get less for their money. The ranks of not only the uninsured, but the underinsured are growing.
$217 million per hour, every day of every year.
Without adequate health insurance because premiums are rising much more quickly than both inflation and earnings, the number one cause of bankruptcy in America is health care costs.
Why do we put up with this? Why do we allow private insurance companies to reap ever-higher profits while fulfilling less and less of their obligations to cover our medical bills? Why do Americans continue to finance an industry that admits it puts profits before people, and is so is full of waste? As Ezra Klein puts it:
And of course, there's administration, where we pay $98 billion more than anyone else, $84 billion of it in oh-so-efficient private sector. 64% of those costs come from insurer underwriting and advertising -- in other words, we're paying more than $50 billion dollars so insurers can convince us we need care and then figure out how to deny those of us who'll actually use it. That's some added value.
What if insurance companies were required to provide a standard level of care for a standard price? What if insurance companies couldn't drop you from their plans if you got sick? What if they couldn't deny you coverage if you had pre-existing conditions? And most importantly, what if there was a public health insurance plan anybody could opt into no matter what?
The distinguishing feature of America's health insurance system is its extreme privatization. While countries with public health insurance plans get more and pay less, America is forced to use its considerable wealth to pay for sub-par services.
$217 million per hour, day in and day out.
With America's education system in need of an overhaul, our roads and bridges crumbling, and the gap between our rich and poor widening, there are better things our government can be spending money on than padding pharmaceutical corporation's bottom lines, as they are doing with the advent of the new Medicare Part D laws. And with gas prices getting higher, electricity costs rising, and the dollar falling, there are better things the American people can be spending their money on than overpriced, under-performing private health care.
America was once known as a land of thrift. At the very least, let's try to be known as a land of smart consumers. We need a change. We need health care for America now!
We're going to get in in 2009, but we need your help. Please, join us!
I'm about to take on a new job that will prevent me from blogging about electoral issues through November, so I'd like to lay out what I see the general arc of the race being from now until election day, and where the progressive movement fits into that story line.
Barack Obama will no doubt continue moderating his positions, as most politicians do in general elections. Hell, he might even moderate his stance on Iraq a bit, though I doubt it will be significant. It will continue to piss progressives off, as it should.
Eventually, most folks will realize that Barack Obama is basically saying, "Trust me," as he did Thursday with his response to the anti-FISA group on my.barackobama.com. Once again, I feel this is pretty typical. Politicians make all sorts of campaign promises, both explicit and implicit. Obama will moderate his stances in an ambiguous way while trying to reassure progressives he doesn't really mean it, or at least that when it comes time to sort out those ambiguities, he'll come out on our side.
Eventually, I'd hope that progressives realize the answer to Obama's strategy is to outflank him, positioning ourselves to hold his accountable to his statements in the way that we want. Electoral strategy says define your opposition before they define themselves. If Obama can be considered "the opposition" once he's elected - and I think he can - then we need to position ourselves to define him as a progressive president as soon as he gets in office. We must keep track of his statements and his rhetoric, and being ready to use it to push him towards progressive policies or use it against him if necessary.
This positioning won't be easy. It will help if progressives make a point to reward good behavior during the electoral season. We should loudly cheer Obama's progressive positions, and certainly pressure him however possible to adopt more of these positions. He'll probably ignore these efforts for the most part, or at best acknowledge the opposition without changing his position. But through these efforts we keep our integrity. Over the election season, progressives can develop a critique of Obama and keep their credibility, both of which can be effectively used to push him once he's in office and we have actual leverage for accountability.
On a more specific level, though the presidential election tends to suck all the fundraising money into their vast machine, we should try and focus on building strong progressive institutions. Grassroots groups like MoveOn.org, think tanks like the Center for American Progress, and netroots activists like Blue America will need to be at their best to effectively move an Obama administration in a progressive direction.
**************
No president was every great without strong forces pushing him towards greatness. Even FDR experienced strong pressure from mounting pro-labor sentiment sweeping America in the 1930s. In fact, FDR's presidency represented the beginning of labor's peak in America; in 1945 they represented over 1 in 3 American workers. These outside movements have traditionally built the political clout necessary to move administrations. That's what we need to build in preparation for an Obama presidency.
The role of the progressive movement as we move from an outsider group in a minority party to a strong presence in a ruling party is going to make for lots of wrenching changes. Preserving our credibility, building an independent power base, and positioning ourselves to define Obama as a progressive and hold him accountable to that definition are going to be key parts of those changes. If we get it right, we'll have real power to sway Obama's policy positions. If we don't, we'll find our cries falling on deaf ears.
But this is just one man's view of things to come. What do you think? How can the progressive movement best position itself to hold maximum power over an Obama administration?
J Ro's opinions are his own, and do not represent those of any other individual or organization.Yesterday, I put forward my answer to the Obama problem:
I do not believe for one second that Obama or the Democratic party will necessarily bring all the change we need. No party stands for my bedrock principles all the time, principles like the rule of law, the balance of powers, the Constitution, civil liberties, opportunity for all, security through freedom, reduced corporate power, and responsible governance. Politicians will sell me out to get elected when they can get away with it, and I will sell them out to uphold these principles when I can get away with it.As long as we don't stoop so low as to rationalize a candidate's political calculations, progressives can retain their authority while still supporting a center/center-left candidate.
But once Obama is elected, it's war. As I've said before, November is just the beginning.
So given that I want Obama to succeed, does that give me pause about Jason's plan to be tough on Obama starting the day after he's elected? Well, not really, but I do think the progressive movement needs to have a sophisticated, multi-level strategy. I think progressives should, and very likely will, break into 3 types of players during an Obama administration.1. Going on the inside. I hope that the Obama team can be convinced to place as many genuine progressives in government jobs as possible.
2. Friendly outsiders who are pushing them toward progressivism. These are the progressive organization people, bloggers, donors, and other activists who stay on the outside, and are generally friendly to, and supportive of the Obama team, who still gently push them to pick the progressive path as much as possible.
3. Outsiders who bang away. Those organization people, bloggers, donors, and other activists who decide their best role is to aggressively bang away, who work day in and day out to hold Obama accountable.I believe we are best served when we have lots of people in all 3 of these categories. A movement does not succeed without having all 3 kinds of people in place, each playing their part. The progressive things that did happen during the Clinton years came as a direct result of each of these 3 kinds of people playing a big role.
The key is that the folks in all these categories need to forge a constructive working relationship with each other. There will definitely be tensions between the three at times, but if they can respect each other in their different roles, good things will happen.
With a first-past-the-post, plurality based voting system, two party tyranny rules. An activist's only real point of pressure to push candidates towards their agenda is during primaries. During the general election, unless you genuinely don't care which of the two party representatives gets elected, you have no choice but to help the "best of the worst" of your two choices.
Of course, the Democratic primary is over, so our real leverage against Obama is gone - unless you want to help McCain win.
However, if Obama is elected, working to push him towards progressive positions while he's in power allows for a much more nuanced strategy, as Mike highlights. More importantly, none of these options are winner-take-all. Progressives can hand Obama a genuine legislative defeat and not cost him the presidency or the Democrats both houses of Congress. If played correctly, progressives can flex their power and cause worried politicians to support progressive policies without severely damaging the Democratic brand to such an extent as to cause electoral problems.
To put it another way, it's war in November, but it's not indiscriminate war. It's a smart conflict calculated to bring progressive policies while maintaining electoral control.
J Ro's opinions are his own and do not represent any other organization or individual.
Bloggers love to write about the media. And, as non-corporate, truly independent media outlets, blogs have the moral authority to effectively point out and criticize media bias, media consolidation, and the old media business model.
Perhaps all that criticism is actually having an effect.
It's hard not to see the decline of the old media in today's society. As everyone knows, circulation and audience numbers have been declining for years as more and more people move online:
Across the industry, newspaper ad revenue -- print and online, combined -- fell almost 8 percent last year, the second-worst decline in more than half a century, according to the Newspaper Association of America. The Times Company's ad revenue dropped 4.7 percent last year, when adjusted for a change in the length of its fiscal year.Over the last year, classified ads continued a decade-long flight to the Web, and display ads for real estate and cars fell sharply as those industries contracted.
However, there is something fundamentally different about getting your information online, even if you still do use old media sources. Online, pulling up competing viewpoints on a topic or criticisms of an opinion piece is as easy as a Google search. Facts can be checked, myths debunked, and diverse viewpoints consumed in minutes. You almost have to be willfully ignorant to get taken in by media bias in the online universe.
With this fundamental change, I would argue the media has less influence on our politics today than it had even four years ago, and certainly less than it had in the golden eras of mass communication. Take the presidential primaries as a potent example.
When the primaries began almost two years ago, there were two media frontrunners: Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.
As we all know well, the old media was filled with stories of Clinton's inevitability and Giuliani's heroics after 9/11. To be sure, these frontrunner picks were based on early poll numbers, but anyone with half a brain could understand these early polls meant little. Clinton and Giuliani were the biggest names in the race - people knew them and their poll numbers reflected that.
In a very real sense, the old media manufactured these two frontrunner narratives and to their surprise, they both collapsed - in no small part because of grassroots organizing and online outlets like blogs.
Now, it would be a mistake to discount the old media completely. Sexism, racism, gotcha politics, and all kinds of media manufactured scandals affected the race. And to be sure, the media abandoned its chosen frontrunners and latched onto other candidates during the course of the primary. The old media still has power, no question. But it is striking when you realize the two candidates our corporate media overlords picked to compete in the 2008 general election both lost.
Let's herald this as a small victory. The old media still commands a vast audience and has vast influence, but its days are numbered. It still has power - I wait in dread for the day when they really turn against Barack Obama - but perhaps that power is waning in some significant ways.
This year, people stood up, read the news, and voted for the candidate they believed in.
J Ro's opinions are his own and do not represent those of any other person or organization.
In the heat of the campaign season, pundits often forget that the American people like leadership. While there is endless debate on the fine points of each candidate's character (and occasionally debate about the issues), in the end, I believe Americans vote for candidates who offer a compelling and cohesive vision for America. That vision must give voters a story to connect the various proposals and anecdotes that politicians use on the campaign trail.
As I touched on a couple of weeks ago, John McCain has had three months to run unopposed and so far, he hasn't been making a convincing case to the American people that he has an overarching idea of where America should be going. I've been watching McCain's campaign closely over the last few months, and the multiple and often competing "visions" he has been laying out don't coalesce into anything that makes sense.
McCain's original pitch to the American people after locking up the nomination was that he would be a "different kind of Republican," willing to reach out to those who don't often vote Republican and get their views. McCain then embarked on a tour of "forgotten places," mostly in Democratic strongholds in the South like New Orleans.
There, while holding a myriad of town hall meetings, he continued to support policies created by George Bush that hurt the very people he was supposed to be "reaching out to." John McCain was going on tour and listening, but there was no action behind his words. His straight talk was cold comfort to those in New Orleans still without housing or employment, or those in the rural South hurting from free trade agreements.
While ostensibly reaching out to people in "forgotten places," McCain was also trying to solidify the Republican base. His speech on Supreme Court judges, in particular, was a dangerous bit of pandering. Many on the left and in the media missed the significance of that speech and the cases McCain referenced, but Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker caught it:
The giveaway here was that McCain did not reveal the subject matter of this supposed judicial outrage. The case was Roper v. Simmons, in which a seventeen-year-old boy murdered a woman after breaking into her home, and was sentenced to death. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's opinion overturned the sentence and held that the Constitution forbids the death penalty for juvenile offenders. McCain's reference to the Court's "discourse" on the law of "other nations" refers to Kennedy's observation of the "stark reality that the United States is the only country in the world that continues to give official sanction to the juvenile death penalty." Likewise, Kennedy noted that the only other countries to execute juvenile offenders since 1990 have been China, Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. According to McCain, the United States apparently belongs on this dismal list.Nor were his references to penumbras and emanations accidental. Those words come from Justice William O. Douglas's 1965 opinion for the Court in Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the Justices recognized for the first time a constitutional right to privacy, and ruled that a state could not deny married couples access to birth control. The "meaning of life" was a specific reference, too. It comes from the Court's 1992 opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed the central holding of Roe v. Wade, and forbade the states from banning abortion. In short, this one passage in McCain's speech amounted to a dog whistle for the right--an implicit promise that he will appoint Justices who will eliminate the right to privacy, permit states to ban abortion, and allow the execution of teen-agers.
Finally, on Tuesday, with the Democratic nomination all but over, John McCain sought to re-brand himself again. This time, he declared that he represented the "right kind of change" in front of a hideous green backdrop. In his speech, McCain argued that Obama represented a return to 70s and 80s style liberalism, his policies were different from Bush, and he has the experience necessary to bring about the "right kind of change."
It should be pretty clear to most people here that none of these arguments are going to work. Once again, Jeffrey Toobin had it right, proclaiming on CNN, "That was pathetic!"
First, does anyone really believe, after listening to Barack Obama, that he is looking backwards in his policies? Obama has been able to convince huge swaths of America that he is looking beyond the partisan battles of our past towards a new, hopeful future. There is nothing in the language that he uses or the way he presents himself that smacks of old, Carter-era politics. It's hard for me to imagine that line of attack sticking.
Next, while McCain believes his policy positions are original, I've yet to uncover a single major plan that breaks from Bush's course in any way. (I used to be able to point to global warming, but given his recent statement that he's against Lieberman-Warner, I can't even say that anymore.) Put that together with McCain's voting record - 100% with Bush this year and 95% with Bush last year - and you begin to perceive the truth. McCain's presidency would represent four more years of Bush.
Lastly, John McCain seems to want to fight the experience vs. change battle again. With all due respect towards Hillary Clinton, that battle has already been fought. Change won. If McCain wants to have that discussion again, be my guest. I don't think it's going to work out any differently this time around.
Of course, McCain's schizophrenic messaging can be easily contrasted with Barack Obama's clear voice. For better or for worse, Americans know what Obama stands for - hope and change. All of Obama's policies, anecdotes, and language fit under this rhetorical umbrella. While it's difficult to understand why McCain doesn't support the G.I. Bill or wants a manned mission to Mars, given his campaign theme, Obama's focus on technology and nuclear disarmament fits right in with his hope and change message.
McCain has no coherent vision and seems to be running on his checkered Senate voting record and his war-hero persona. As Holly Bailey and Jon Meacham at Newsweek point out, he is beginning to primarily define himself by what he is not (Bush, Obama), a sure-fire losing strategy. Americans - who by and large care about their country but don't have the inclination to understand every nuance of policy of character - tend to elect candidates with a coherent message because they feel secure that whatever a candidate's policies are, they will fit into the message they are preaching.
There is a lot of time between now and November, but so far, Obama has a 17 month head start in getting out a clear message to America. McCain just might be playing catch-up this entire race.
(P.S. If you're wondering what all those random links reading "McCain" are about, I'm participating in Chris Bowers' search optimization project "Searching For McCain," and you should too!)
J Ro's opinions are his own and do not represent any other person or organization.
· Iowa commission takes one small step against CAFOs (desmoinesdem)
· LA-06: Cazayoux's Gittin' It Done! (DailyKingFish)
· Secrets of the American Future Fund (chase martyn)
· Happy Birthday Jerome! (Jonathan Singer)
· Oilmen For Scott Garrett (NJ-5) (Aaron Banks)
· Youth Delegates at DNC Outnumber RNC 15 - 1 (Mike Connery)
· LA-02: James Carter's First Ad (DailyKingFish)
· Clean Coal's Goodie Bag for Dem. Delegates (lowkell)
· Liveblogging Obama Town Hall (fbihop)
· McCain's Goons Throw Birthday Cake In Trash (fbihop)
· IA-04: Would-be independent candidate fails to qualify for ballot (desmoinesdem)
· TX-Sen: They Don't Call it a Stump Speech for Nothing (KTinTX)
