Change Is About Policies Not Speeches or Symbolism
Change Is About Policies Not Speeches or Symbolism
Edwards has better policies for substantive change than either Clinton or Obama. Symbolism and speeches is not enough.
(1) While I find Obama inspiring especially when giving speeches, he has the worse plan of the top three contenders on healthcare and Edwards has the best. The best approach is expanding Medicare to cover all citizens which none of the top contenders currently support. Edwards comes closer than the other two top Democratic contenders. Edwards has a history of evolving his policy positions when educated by activists and experts with better ideas. Of the top three Democratic candidates, Edwards is the most likely candidate to eventually support Medicare For All. Obama’s plan does not get us to universal healthcare and definitely leaves large corporations with excessive control of healthcare policies in America.
(2) While Obama always opposed starting the Iraq War, he would not get us out of Iraq as quickly or completely as Edwards. Clinton has not been a leader on this issue in the past or today.
(3) On trade issues, Obama is far friendlier to the so-called “Free Trade” approach than Edwards. For example, on the recent deal with Peru both Clinton and Obama supported the “Free Trade” deal while Edwards opposed it. These “free trade” deals all serve corporate interests and are devastating the earning power of working class Americans.
(4) Compromising with Bush Republicans on policy sounds good as a sound-bite but is not likely to work. Obama cannot unite all Americans behind a common set of policies and still be an effective agent of change. The Republican in the House and Senate oppose all the change ideas supported by the vast majority of Americans. Over 70 percent of Americans want universal healthcare but the Republicans like our current, inefficient, unfair, corporate-controlled healthcare system.
Any compromises with corporate Republicans on the healthcare issue will mean making the changes more inefficient, unfair and corporate-controlled! The same idea holds with trade policy, media consolidation, campaign financing, environmental protection, energy policy, global warming, taxation, labor laws, etc.
The only effective approach to change will come from confronting corporate Republican forces, fighting them and winning. This is the Edwards approach. It is the FDR approach to real change. It was the path to Social Security under FDR and Medicare under LBJ. It is not the Clinton Approach. It is not the path advocated by Obama.
While Obama would make a good Vice President on an Edwards ticket, he is not the best agent for change on the Democratic Presidential ticket in 2008. It was unfortunate that Senator Lieberman played a mentor role to Obama when Obama was first elected to the U.S. Senate. The independent Senator from Connecticut is out of touch with the core values of the Democratic Party when it comes to change on many issues. The Lieberman influence will need time to fade before Obama will really be ready for the top of the Democratic ticket or to act as the real leader for policy change in America.
Written by Stephen Crockett (Co-host of Democratic Talk Radio http://DemocraticTalkRadio.com and Editor of Mid-Atlantic Labor.com http://www.midatlanticlabor.com ). Mail: P.O. Box 283, Earleville, Maryland 21919. Email: [email protected] . Phone: 443-907-2367.
Feel free to publish without prior approval.
January 4th, 2008 at 7:29 am
Obama for president
If he can win in Iowa and do well in New Hampshire with Independent support, Obama will have earned the opportunity for a final appeal to Democrats. As he does so, he will undoubtedly tout his then-proven ability to attract Independents and attract new voters into the process. That is why Clinton’s status as frontrunner will be more vulnerable.
Carlos Menéndez
http://www.segurosmagazine.es
January 10th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Received this by email:
There are those people who claim to be about reform, but if you look at their voting
records, there is a discrepancy between what they are saying and how they voted.
In a commentary by the Huffington Post, Arianna makes a couple of noteworthy points:
To be an instrument of change, you cannot be bogged down in “too many old
arrangements, too many deals, too many old networks. They all prevent transition to a
new age.”
This is the problem with Clinton and Obama. Clinton was having lunch in November of
2006 with Karl Rove in the White House. Clinton says that being in politics has taught her
to “compromise”. I think she means “capitulate.”
Obama was overtly being backed by Oprah Winfrey who owns a huge corporation, Harpo
Productions. Obama is now being backed by John Kerry… can we all say Heinz pickles?
Obama has really not clearly stated his policies, prefering circuitous language and being
absent for critical voting. When Obama was in the Illinois senate, he was given the task of
shepherding a medical bill through. Instead, he invited the corporates in on the bill, which
they derailed and re-wrote for profit, Thereby, the people of Illinois did not get their
medical needs met. Do we want this?
Hillary and Obama both stand for Free Trade, that is, unregulated trade. The same trade
that has been a DISASTER in South America (Chile and Argentina) and now these two want
to give us more of the same.
John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich stand for regulated trade, the New Deal, a balanced
country with a full and healthy middle class. These are the people of real change, not
Hillary and Obama, who are a pair of Blue Dogs that will only give us four more years of
what we have right now… BushCo revisited.
Don’t forget, Iowa and New Hampshire have traditionally been Republican states.
Republican states find Hillary and Obama attractive. Why? What’s in the policies of
Hillary and Obama that would strike a resounding note in two traditionally Republican
states?
Also, why has the media blacked out Dennis Kucinich from the beginning, and now
John Edwards? Because they are afraid of change. No more running wild on taxpayer
dollars, no more unaccountability. If you want real change, John Edwards is the only
sane choice. Otherwise, we are going to have four more years of exactly what we have
now. Wake up!
Also, read the Barney Frank article below. He really puts several things into perspective.
Komodo
Edwards means REAL change
Edwards in 2008
***
CHECK THIS OUT:
For the party of the status quo it is always easier. Who best represents “stay the course.”
The only complication this year is how to be the candidate of stay the course without
mentioning the president from whom you are inheriting the course.
For the party of reform, it is always more complicated. If it really were about who best
represents change it would be easier. But there is also the human factor of power. For
better or worse not everyone gets into politics to carry out reform. Some seek power, what
most people think politics is all about. For those who have had power and seek to keep it
or recapture it, they can claim to be for change and reform but they cannot bring it about
because there are too many old arrangements, too many deals, too many old networks.
They all prevent transition to a new age.
— The Huffington Post
****
Barney Frank
January 2008
By historical standards — or any other — the Democrats have an excellent set of
presidential candidates from which to choose this season, and I look forward to
campaigning enthusiastically and without reservation for our nominee. But this does not
mean that we should be suppressing the discussion of differences, and it is in this
framework that I think it is important to express my discomfort with a major theme of
Senator Obama’s campaign.
I am referring to his denigration of “the Washington battles of the 1990’s” and, usually
implicitly but sometimes explicitly, of those who fought them. My unease is compounded
by the very explicit note of generational politics in his approach. I should note that I
cannot be accused of self interest in taking exception to those who lament the baneful
influence of baby boomers on our current politics, having myself been born well before
the boom. Indeed, being much too young to claim membership in the greatest generation
and even being a couple of years short of being a depression baby, I am reconciled to
being part of a fairly large birth cohort that goes undesignated in our pop sociology. But
since I do not have much intellectual respect for generational politics, I can live with this
chronological anomie. I say that because generational politics presumes that I should have
a different set of political values today than I had in the sixties when I began my political
activity. But I cannot think of a cause that I cared deeply about then that I felt it
appropriate to abandon as I aged, nor an important issue in which I had no interest then,
but which now gets my attention.
This brings me to my particular concern with Senator Obama’s vehement disassociation of
himself and those he seeks to represent from “the fights of the nineties.” I am very proud
of many of the fights I engaged in in the nineties, as well as the eighties and before.
Senator Obama also bemoans the “same bitter partisanship” of that period and appears to
me to be again somewhat critical of those of us who he believes to have been engaged in
it.
I agree that it would have been better not to have had to fight over some of the issues
that occupied us in the nineties. But there would have been only one way to avoid them —
and that would have been to give up. More importantly, the only way I can think of to
avoid “refighting the same fights we had in the 1990’s”, to quote Senator Obama, is to let
our opponents win these fights without a struggle.
It would have been nice in the nineties not to have had to fight to defend a woman’s right
to choose whether or not to have an abortion, and I would be very happy if that fight
ended tomorrow. I was troubled when Newt Gingrich and his right wing band took over
Congress after the election of 1994 and sought to put an end to programs to deal with
continuing racial discrimination and the resulting inequality, and I am even more
distressed that we have to continue to fight that battle against a Republican party largely
opposed to all of these efforts — consider the Bush Justice Department and its role in
dealing with people’s right to vote. As a gay man, additionally, I would have been
delighted in the nineties if our conservative opponents had been willing to recognize our
rights to be treated fairly under the law, and I would have saved a lot of time, as recently
as this past year, if there was not continued strong right wing opposition to the “radical”
position that people should not be denied jobs because of their fundamental nature, or
that hate crimes based on sexual orientation and gender identity should be treated less
seriously than those based on racial or religious prejudice. These are three of the major
fights in which I was engaged in the nineties, and I literally do not understand what
Senator Obama means when he says that he does not want to keep fighting them. I know
that he understands that those who were opposed to all three of those causes in which
many of us deeply believe in the nineties continue their opposition, and I do not
understand how we can avoid fighting those battles other than by conceding them, which I
know he does not advocate.
In some cases, Senator Obama does not seem to remember what some of the fights of the
nineties were. I agree that it would be a good thing to have the 2008 election be in part
“about whether to…pass universal health care” but that in fact is one of the central fights
we had in the nineties. The effort of many of us to pass a universal health care plan is
precisely one of the battles of the nineties, and it seems to me one that we very much
want to keep fighting. Again, the only alternative to fighting it is losing it by concession.
Another major fight of the nineties which seems to me essential — not simply relevant —
to the current election is tax policy. Few fights that we had in the period when Senator
Obama is denigrating our battles was more important than the successful effort to pass
President Clinton’s tax plan in 1993. That battle was so hotly fought that it contributed,
sadly, to the Republican takeover the next year, because a number of the Democrats who
had voted for a progressive tax plan which made the tax code less unfair and provided
important revenues for important programs lost their seats because of it. I make no
apologies for having fought that fight, and in fact I hope that whoever is the President of
the United States in 2009 will take up the battle against excessive tax cuts for the
wealthiest people in the country, both as a matter of fairness and as a matter of being able
to afford fundamental programs essential to the quality of our lives. I also remember
fighting hard during that period for the rights of working men and women to join unions,
and while we lost that once the Republicans took power in ‘94, we did score one victory
when we were still in the majority in passing, in a “bitter partisan battle,” the Family and
Medical Leave Act — the need for us to wage that battle is once again as strong if not
stronger in 2008 than it was in 1995.
Finally, I do take pretty strong exception to Senator Obama’s evenhanded denunciation of
“the same bitter partisanship” of the nineties. It is true that American politics became
much more partisan in the nineties, but that was primarily the result of the successful
right wing takeover of the Republican Party, embodied at the time–he has since become a
little more moderate for some tactical purpose–by Newt Gingrich. Again I do not think
those of us who fought back against Gingrich’s poisoning of the atmosphere should
apologize for that. If anything, the apologies should come from those who were too slow
to respond. It was Gingrich and his right wing allies who decided to inject a much harsher
note of partisanship by explicitly rejecting the notion that the Democrats were honorable
people with whom they disagreed, and instead decided, as Gingrich’s own printed and
taped materials argued, to portray us as treasonous, corrupt, immoral and otherwise vile.
And when Gingrich was forced by his own flaws to step aside, Tom DeLay took up those
cudgels with a little less rhetorical flourish but with an even heavier hand. If Senator
Obama was denouncing the outrageous tactics of Gingrich and DeLay, I would be very
much in support of his comments. Instead, he evenhandedly denounces the “bitter
partisanship” of that period and seems to me to be distancing himself equally from the
Gingrich/DeLay attack and the efforts of many of us to combat it. The comment calls to
mind the marvelous words of John L. Lewis, at a point when Franklin Roosevelt
pronounced a plague “on both their houses” with regard to a significant labor dispute. “It
ill behooves one who has supped at labor’s table and who has been sheltered in labor’s
house to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when
they become locked in deadly embrace.”
As a Democratic Member of the U.S. House of Representatives today, I close by noting
that there does appear to me to be a strong contradiction between two of the criticisms we
sometimes receive. One is the approach taken by Senator Obama, which I have just tried to
describe, which expresses distaste for too much fighting and too much anger, with too
little effort to govern in a way that bridges differences. But contrary to that, I often hear
that we Democrats in the Congress have not fought hard enough, that we have not stood
up enough for what we believe in, and have been too prone to conciliate. I personally do
not think that either criticism is justified, but I know as a fact that they cannot both be
true.
I fully agree with Senator Obama that we should be arguing for the policies we advocate
and the values from which they derive in a manner that appeals to the broadest possible
segment of the public. His own ability to do that is one of our great assets. But I worry
when people on my side underestimate the difficulty of our most important work, and I
believe that is what Senator Obama does when he dismisses our efforts to fight the right
wing in an earlier period because it suggests to me that he does underestimate the
difficulty of the job. I think the best way to summarize my concern is that if you tell people
that we should not be willing to refight the battles of the nineties — including many very
important ones that we are far from having won — and if you tell people to refuse
partisanship, you may be inviting people to leave the battlefield to those with whom we
have the biggest differences. Racial fairness, reproductive rights for women, an end to
discrimination against sexual minorities, universal health care, the right of working men
and women to bargain collectively with employers — these battles we waged in the
nineties remain essential to our vision today, and I do not understand why we should
either be embarrassed about having fought hard for them, ten, fifteen or twenty years ago,
or why we should not be determined to keep fighting until we have achieved success.
****
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