The Referendum

A debate could rage for another year regarding the qualities of one presidential candidate over the other.  I certainly see an obvious outcome to that debate as the weaknesses of Mitt Romney and the radical Republican philosophies are profound.  However, the real identifiable outcomes of this election can be boiled down to three distinct choices, which are the true referendums of this election:

1)     The Supreme Court – The choice of the next President will determine whether the Supreme Court will become a socially Conservative judicial body or remain balanced.  Elect Mitt Romney and likely justices Ginsburg and Kennedy will be replaced by men or women more resembling Justice Alito.  This will impact a host of social and security decisions from abortion to marriage to privacy to drugs to regulations to political funding and beyond, and it will do so indefinitely. The ramifications could be immense.  

2)     Health Care – Although Romney has proclaimed like a conquering Caesar that “on day one” he will remove the Affordable Health Care Act (AHCA), it is unlikely that he would or could.  Still, Obama during this election process has repeatedly failed to point out what was really important about the AHCA. The real importance is not where the Act has taken us to; rather it is where it has taken us from.  It is a flawed insurance reform law created with senseless compromise, failing to adequately address the most difficult problem – cost.  However, where this country was prior to AHCA was truly insane and getting worse (see this blog Health Care…No Relief in Sight Aug 26, 2008) and the AHCA at least got us to take a step out of the crazy house.  The election of Romney would begin to work us back to reinforcing a dominant for-profit health care system, which primarily benefits a select minority of the Country, and delaying by many years the necessary evolution to universal and affordable healthcare.  Such health care is simply not possible without centrally controlled costs in lieu of massive debt and/or services denied.

3)     Taxes – This is the only referendum that is a quantitative reality immediately after the election.  If Romney is elected the Bush tax cuts will be extended, if Obama is reelected they will be modified to lapse for upper income Americans.  It doesn’t matter what the makeup of Congress will be, as nether party will allow taxes to rise in the short term for lower income families.  The bigger and less definitive referendum, though, will be in how we address the use of taxes going forward. Unless Romney got working majorities in both Houses (including a super majority in the Senate – which is hardly likely) he would not be able to carry out his ridiculous 20% cut plan. He’s probably hoping he couldn’t. However, he would hold back any increase in revenues from income.  Instead, as he did in Massachusetts, he will start generating revenue through fees and excise taxes targeting his famed 47% as well as massive cuts to services.  To do otherwise would continue to balloon the debt.  Despite his political saber rattling, he won’t increase the military budget.  That’s just more cubic feet of what Jon Stewart calls Romney’s bullshit mountain.  If Obama is elected he needs to make the case for expanding the progressive tax system we have and that the public services we purchase with those tax dollars have at least the same value to the average citizen as anything they purchase in the private sector, and perhaps more.

So that’s it, the real choice with this election.  Most other issues, including jobs, gas, wages, energy, crime and birth control, to name a few, overstate the power the President has to effect change. The rest, such as character or honesty or personality or leadership are just subjective enough to keep the debate going, but I’m tired of the debate…how about you?

Why?

With this political season closing I am confounded.  Not only has reason decided to pick this season to go on vacation, but I’m left to conclude that the dynamics which may decide the political and judicial future of this country are found in the darkest corners of our National consciousness.

Barack Obama is at best holding a barely distinguishable lead in this contest.  Mitt Romney is potentially the next President. That’s right – Mitt Romney; a man whose only political leadership was that of a one term governor so divisive and unpopular that he couldn’t have been reelected, a man who has been rejected across the political spectrum as Presidential timber for seven years, a man who treats pragmatism as an art form – that Mitt Romney.

There is practically nothing real that has occurred in the past four years that should lead to this outcome a week before the election.  The only reason Romney is the Republican candidate at all is because the field of heavy-weight Republican politicians decided two years ago that the race was not winnable. The clown-like Republican Primary has clearly vanished from the collective memory of the American electorate. 

No one denies what the Nation was left with at the end of the Bush presidency.  Although not the direct cause, the Bush Administration and Congress had cultivated an atmosphere where politically connected financial barons, and the institutions they ran, could advance their self-interest with impunity.  The greed that evolved based on ever magically rising real estate values made no correction even as the cataclysmic outcome of falling housing values on derivatives became obvious to the major players. 

The resulting meltdown had the potential of eclipsing 1929 as a financial black hole.  Yet the Obama Presidency held court over a recovery which avoided anything like what was experienced in the 1930s and did so in spite of more obstructionist opposition than any President has faced since the Civil War.  Even if Obama’s failures as a communicator (see this blog – Handling Depression  9/9/12) hurt his ability to make his case, he still should be comfortably ahead in this election because of his successes and the actual outcomes.  His and the Democratic Party’s premier accomplishment, The Affordable Health Care Act, was used as a tool to drum the Democratic House majority into a minority, despite it being a major step away from the most dysfunctional health care system in the industrialized world.  Reason be damned.

We need to get real. Obama is barely holding onto his Presidency because he is so profoundly hated (not disagreed with – hated), and primarily by white men.  He has been vilified as a Communist, Socialist, Anarchist, radical Muslim, non-American (legally and emotionally), traitor, a Hitler, a Stalin, an anti-capitalist, anti-energy, anti-freedom, and (on occasion) anti-Christ  - who probably shoots kittens to get them out of the trees their stuck in, while still being anti-guns.  It makes no sense. Aside from some social issues, Obama is far closer to Ronald Reagan than he is to Jimmy Carter on all matters regarding the economy and National security, including health care. What really makes a significant majority of white men hate Obama is as simple as it is impervious to discussion – race.   

It is obvious that a large majority of African-Americans support and will vote for Obama based strictly on race.  Obama is projected to receive 95% of the black vote which carries with it no more legitimacy than race voting by white men.  The difference is in the numbers and intent.  According to the 2010 Census, white males in the US consist of numbers 3 times that of all Blacks in this country.  The ratio could be 4 or 5 times as many if one only considers those who vote. 

White men, especially with limited education, don’t see what Obama was handed and what he has accomplished because they don’t want to see it, or perhaps, more realistically, their bigotry won’t let them see it. Sure the Nation elected Barack Obama in 2008 because he appeared to be a young engaging leader who happened to be Black to boot, which some of those white men still encumbered with bigotry felt well about accepting.  However, it has now become obvious that we are much closer to the decades prior to 1960 than we thought.  When Romney Co-chair Gov. John Sununu suggested this week that Colin Powell had endorsed Obama due to race he (Sununu) was saying something far more telling about himself (and his peers) then about Powell.

Given time over these past 3 years and a concerted effort by a neo-conservative movement, tens of millions of white American men are allowing themselves to embrace their fears of lost supremacy.  To those who would argue to the contrary I offer as evidence Mitt Romney…their chosen alternative.

American Women - Pay Attention

The War on Women may seem more like the War for Women if one just stands back and listens to the rhetoric.  Sure, it’s about votes, but there is something else going on as well and American women need to pay close attention.

There is history, but it’s a history which isn’t very old.  The 19^th Amendment to the Constitution which gave women the right to vote wasn’t passed until August of 1920, a mere 91 years ago.  Think of it, there are still plenty of people alive today whose mothers lived at a time when they simply watched their husbands, fathers, and brothers march off to the polls to decide the future for them and their families.  That Constitutional milestone was hardly the successful culmination of the fight for equal rights. Rather, it was more like the first door being unlocked.  Since then women have continued to face locked doors, whether it be in employment, health care, social mobility, finance, and even property rights to name a few, and men have reluctantly given up the keys.  The end is not yet in sight; in fact it may actually be slipping away. This is a reality which can be hard for women to see beyond the attention they must give to their lives on any given day.

The origins of patriarchal societies covering the planet are irrelevant.  The relevancy is what has perpetuated this inequality between men and women throughout recorded history and up to this present day.  It is the use of faith based doctrine and theocratic governance which has provided men the justification to retain legal power over women.  It is no accident of history that the United States was one of the first countries to accept women’s suffrage in 1920, and in fact provided a model for countries around the world.  The crack in the hold men had over women in the US, leading to Women’s Suffrage, began with the creation of the Nation itself, which drew a strong distinction between the rule of law and religious doctrine.  Yet still after 236 years the glass, although covered in cracks, is still not broken.

This clear movement to resist the equality of women is evident in the rise of Theoconservatives championed by the Republican Party. They would have you believe the debate is simply about abortion.  It is not. Abortion is a tragic occurrence by essentially everyone’s standards and no one can fault a person’s emotional response to it, but if there is a God and he didn’t want women to make the decision as to the use of their bodies he would have designed them to lay eggs like chickens - then men could decided what went into the hatchery and what didn’t.  

No, it is not simply about abortion.  It is about the continuation of a faith based definition of what a woman is, how she should act, and is manifest in the powerful, extreme conservative wing of the Republican Party. It’s not just in rhetoric you hear about God deciding who gets pregnant from a rape or designing women’s bodies to differentiate good sperm from evil sperm.  That’s just the tip of the testosterone iceberg.  It is the movement to an Old Testament, faith based creation of law which is threatening the gains women have made over the past 100 years. It should be no surprise that almost all the Conservative rhetoric you hear regarding women comes from men, that Congressional hearings lead by Republicans are testimonies primarily of men, and that a woman who seeks to argue her case for women can acceptably be labeled a slut.  Those are all echoes of 1919.

These are the same people, Romney, Ryan, and the male Republican leadership, who attack Islamic nations that use a faith based rationale to subjugate women.  Although they may rightly describe Islamic fundamentalist attitudes toward women as Neanderthal, American women need to wake up to the fact that even though this Theoconservatism carries a smaller club, it still lives in the same cave as their Middle Eastern brethren.

Are Americans Stupid?

Mitt Romney has proven himself to be what anyone with a pair of lazy eyes and one good ear could discern with ease. He is a master pragmatist like none other I have seen in my lifetime nor studied in history, and politicians generally are hopeless pragmatists.  He is a product of late 20th Century American business which chooses short term goals in the pursuit of increased shareholder equity over long term structural integrity, and by any means possible.  His almost dizzying display of changing positions, which has been correctly observed by commentators, pundits, opponents, and supporters, is only eclipsed by how little a difference this tact of Romney's has impacted American opinion. Combining with such things as his matter-of-fact refusal to release prior tax returns has made him the most opaque Presidential candidate in many decades. Yet it seems to make little difference, especially to white male voters. Is this the result of his campaign's cleverness, the incompetency of the Democratic opposition, or the revelation of a troubling ignorance on the part of the American people?

Without a doubt, the Democrats and the Obama Campaign have failed to address and convince the American electorate on the negative aspects of a leader of the Free World taking a unique position that compliments every group he speaks in front of. Romney has said the most outrageous things, sometimes repeatedly to fit the sales pitch he's giving at the moment and yet seems rarely to be challenged by the opposition. Therefore, the media takes little notice as well. Take numbers, which are simple to expose.

In all three debates Romney said definitively that 23 million Americans are unemployed (a statement made several times at the Republican convention as well) and that Obama's failure to bring the unemployment rate down to 5.4% (as Mitt said Obama promised) equals 9 million unemployed. Take the second point. If the difference between our current unemployment rate of 7.8% and 5.4% (or 2.4%) equals 9 million people than you must accept two conclusions: first that the population of the US is approximately 375 million (about 68 million more than reality) and that everyone other than the 9 million unemployed has a job, everyone - every child of all ages, every senior, every mother, every disabled person, every everyone has a job, including the 5.4%. The number of working Americans is a moving target, but if you take the estimated number of 155 million working Americans provided by the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) it lowers Romney's proclamation down from 9 million to 3.7 million. That doesn't even take into consideration that 5.4% is deemed full employment for the nation. Has Romney been challenged on his ludicrous number by anyone? Not that I'm aware of.

The popular Republican number of 23 million unemployed has a few more subtleties. Although it was stated clearly as "unemployed" at the Republican convention and later by Romney, it has more recently been described as 23 million "looking for work". That's because the number was concocted by far right wing "fact-ories", using bias statistics to represent not just those unemployed, but also those who have stopped looking for work (which includes retirees - the largest subgroup in that category), those new workers who haven’t started looking for work but presumably would have had more jobs been available, those deemed "under-employed", and also those who feel their jobs unsatisfactory (a factor that arguably could included half of all working Americans). The BLS sets the current unemployment numbers at less than 12 million of which more than half is, again, unemployment you would expect to find in a deemed fully employed economy. Has Obama or the limited number of his "spokesmen" ever challenged this deception by Romney and the Republicans? What have you heard?

In the first debate Romney whimsically presented, unchallenged, that he has five sons who believed (at some age) that saying the same thing over and over was a path to creating reality. If so, it appears the teacher became the student. His repeated use of ridiculous assertions, not just with off the wall statistics, but with his plans to balance budgets, maintain revenues, or even his decision to withhold the release of his taxes as a means of keeping the opposition honest have been facilitated by the apparent inability of that opposition to take strong issue with any of it. Obama's campaign has attempted to shoot holes occasionally in Mitt's allegations, but the agile Romney has kept the targets moving and added new targets daily. Obama and the Democrats successfully painted an accurate picture of Mitt Romney the business man. What they have been failing to do is to show that the man who will do and say anything necessary to close the deal, slash & burn, and harvest the short term profits in business is the same man who is a couple of percentage points away from becoming the Head of State, Commander-in-chief, and leader of the Free World.

Obama's extraordinary performance in office against both devastating economic conditions and psychotic obstructionism on the part of the new Neo-Conservative Republicans has earned him reelection. It should be earning him an easy reelection. If Mitt Romney is elected, with all the elitist baggage he carts around with him, then this nation has learned nothing from its gross ineptness of reelecting George Bush in 2004. That would be either collective dementia or tragic stupidity.