The 2008 presidential election run-up is leaving oldstyleliberal significantly underwhelmed. He tends to support Democrats, not Republicans, and he finds the present crop of Democratic front-runners less than inspiring. (The Republicans are worse.) Asking himself what the matter could possibly be, he mentions to himself that there is a vast dearth of two desirable characteristics in the present lineup of presidential hopefuls: leadership, and an absence of hypocrisy.
oldstyleliberal defines leadership as the ability to change people's minds by appealing to their reason, thus bringing about a national consensus on issues of importance. But what we are actually getting is a sophisticated version of hypocrisy, in which the candidates' positions on things like the war in Iraq are so mush-mouthed, so qualified, so contorted, they seem to match our own positions without necessarily really doing so.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, for instance, wants to have it all ways on the Iraq war, according to this post on The Fact Checker blog at The Washington Post. Although her campaign literature says
Hillary will begin immediate phased withdrawal [from Iraq] with a definite timetable to bring our troops home
her actual position does not actually commit her "to pulling all U.S. troops out of Iraq [even] by the end of a second presidential term." The Post adds:
Clinton has made a flat promise that the United States will "get out of Iraq" while she is president. She says she has a plan to "end the war" and "a definite timetable to bring our troops home." On closer examination, it turns out that all these promises are so carefully hedged as to be virtually meaningless. There is no "definite timetable" to bring the troops home or end the war. She has said she "wants" to begin troop withdrawals in the first 60 days of her presidency-but has also talked about leaving a "vastly reduced residual force" in the country for "a limited period of time."
Clinton's pledge to "end the war" contains so much fine print that it is hardly a pledge at all, more a general aspiration. She has described several "vital U.S. national security interests" in that country, including fighting al-Qaeda, protecting the U.S. embassy, training Iraqi troops, protecting the Kurds, and countering the influence of Iran.
Barack Obama is only a little better, this Fact Checker post shows. He supposedly will flatly remove "all combat troops" from Iraq if he becomes president. But he also leaves open sending troops "back into the country to fight al Qaeda and 'stop genocidal violence.' " Per The Post:
It is more difficult to find obvious contradictions in Obama's speeches on Iraq than in the statements of his Democratic rivals. The weakest chink in his rhetorical armor is his claim that he will withdraw all combat troops from Iraq "within 16 months" of taking office — but "continue to strike at al Qaeda in Iraq." He has acknowledged that these will be "combat missions."
The Obama campaign has tried to square the circle by insisting that Obama will withdraw all 20 combat brigades presently in Iraq. "A different force will be constituted," said Obama spokesman Bill Burton, in an e-mail. "This would not be a brigade engaged in sustained combat. Rather, it would be a strike force that could take targeted action against specific al Qaeda assets."
In other words, the vaunted Obama "withdrawal" might not truly get U.S. troops out of harm's way after all.
(One of oldstyleliberal's best friends, also a Democrat, has pointed out to him that none of the candidates' television ads run nationally. They're tailored to Iowa or New Hampshire or wherever, or to individual localities therein, the better to tell the potential voters in the various states and communities what they want to hear. Again, it's the exact opposite of exerting steady, uniform leadership to forge a general consensus among U.S. citizens.)
So oldstyleliberal feels he is up the creek without a paddle when it comes to figuring out who to vote for.
oldstyleliberal realizes that there is one true "peace candidate" in the Democratic field, Dennis Kucinich, but he's a guy who claims to have seen a UFO. Thank you very much, but, no. Few if any of the other major Democratic or Republican aspirants, meanwhile, have a clear, firm commitment to getting out of Iraq.
oldstyleliberal does feel strangely attracted, oddly enough, to the candidacy of Republican Ron Paul, known mainly as a libertarian, whose political positions are summarized here. Paul opposes the Iraq war without ifs, ands, or buts, at least as far as oldstyleliberal can tell. Yet it is hard for oldstyleliberal to admit, even to himself, that he is in sympathy with those libertarian ideological principles of Paul's that don't exactly qualify the man as a liberal.
For example, Paul wants "secure borders and legal immigration," which sounds to oldstyleliberal like code talk for something which goes against true libertarian sentiments. Libertarians want a small governmental footprint, but apparently in Paul's mind that hands-off posture stops at the border with Mexico. Mexicans and others who sneak into this country illegally in search of a better way of life aren't to be considered as free to pursue happiness as anyone who is here legally.
Now, it may well be that the U.S.-Mexico border can and should be secured. (If it can't be secured, it doesn't matter whether it should be secured.) But oldstyleliberal has somehow gotten the idea that the best way to keep Mexicans at home in Mexico would be to stop subsidizing U.S. farms. The U.S. government keeps the price of, say, American corn low in Mexican marketplaces by making up the difference with a price support or a subsidy to American growers. Mexican corn growers, not getting a similar subsidy, can't compete even in their own home market. Mexican farm workers, either out of work or working for peanuts, migrate north, often illegally, looking for more income.
If our government were as small as Ron Paul, as a libertarian, would like it to be, perhaps the U.S. farm subsidies would vanish, Mexican farms could compete on an equal basis, and Mexican agricultural workers would make enough money to keep them at home with their families, where they'd rather be.
Or, take education. Columnist George F. Will has this op-ed piece in this Sunday's Post. It says, "No Child Left Behind, supposedly an antidote to the 'soft bigotry of low expectations,' has instead spawned lowered standards." NCLB legislation was passed by Congress in 2001 and signed into law on January 8, 2002, by President Bush.
Ostensibly intended to force states and their local school systems to show measurably higher results in the education of America's children, NCLB has, according to Will, done just the opposite:
NCLB requires states to identify, by criteria they devise, "persistently dangerous schools." But what state wants that embarrassment? The Post recently reported that last year, of America's approximately 94,000 public schools, the "persistently dangerous" numbered 46. There were none among the 9,000 schools in amazingly tranquil California.
NCLB's crucial provisions concern testing to measure yearly progress toward the goal of "universal proficiency" in math and reading by 2014. This goal is America's version of Soviet grain quotas, solemnly avowed but not seriously constraining. Most states retain the low standards they had before; some have defined proficiency down.
Per Will, a report called "The Proficiency Illusion" from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which studies education reform, claims:
The rationale for standards-based reform was that expectations would become more rigorous and uniform, but states' proficiency tests vary "wildly" in difficulty, "with 'passing scores' ranging from the 6th percentile to the 77th." Indeed, "half of the reported improvement in reading, and 70 percent of the reported improvement in mathematics, appear idiosyncratic to the state test." In some states, tests have become more demanding; but in twice as many states, the tests in at least two grades have become easier.
Again, it looks to oldstyleliberal as if a government program, however well-motivated, has failed to make things better and in some ways made things worse. The states get more money from Uncle Sam if schools and pupils pass standardized tests, so guess what? It's truly amazing how few schools and pupils flunk the state-devised tests. 6th percentile, indeed!
oldstyleliberal has never heard George Will say he is a libertarian, but he proudly owns to being an old-style conservative, which is nearly the same thing. Will regularly lambastes President Bush and his crowd for not being real conservatives who stick like glue to the U.S. Constitution's limits on their powers of office. They prosecute foreign military interventions without getting Congress to declare war. They usurp civil liberties and privacy rights. They run up huge deficits, albeit with congressional approval — Will is just as scathing about Congress's abdication of its own constitutional responsibilities.
Now that Congress is led by oldstyleliberal's own party, the Democrats, he ought to be pleased ... but he's not. The front page headline in today's Post, "Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002," leads off an article revealing that Nancy Pelosi, now Speaker of the House, was among the four or eight Democratic and Republican members of Congress briefed in 2002 and 2003 about the means then being used to coerce detainees in the war against terrorism to talk, including the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding. Pelosi and the others, almost without exception, let out not a peep of protest — even though some of the Democrats who were in on the briefing today roundly excoriate the Bush administration for having sanctioned such tactics of torture. More hypocrisy.
So oldstyleliberal is interested in supporting a candidate who will be absolutely straight with the American people without adding pages and pages of fine print to every pledge. He is interested in supporting a candidate who will say the same things to all the people all the time. He is interested in a candidate who does not substitute firmness of tone and pugnacity of mien for true leadership. He is interested in a candidate who will exert that leadership to bring us together, rather than merely finessing our differences with rhetoric that doesn't really mean what it appears to mean. And oldstyleliberal now believes that the only way a candidate can stop being a mush-mouth today is to stop promising us the world and instead promise to shrink the government's much-too-huge footprint.
No comments:
Post a Comment