You Can't Keep a Good Blog Down

Back again...

I realize that a lot of you have been staying on the fence, refusing to commit to either candidate in this pivotal election until seeing which one received the all-important endorsement of this blog. By failing to comment on this election earlier, I have let you all down. I acknowledge this and accept responsibility for it. But no blame or negative consequences. Just like the Bush Administration!

Anyway, I am here to correct this failure on my part by blogging about the election, and yes (calm down everyone!) endorsing a candidate. I called this a pivotal election and we'd better hope that I'm right. We've got a lot of problems in this country, people. Problems that we've been more or less ignoring for the last 30 years or so. Our infrastructure is crumbling, our health-care system is a disgraceful shambles, our energy-consumption is both envionmentally unsound and unsustainable in the long-term without new renewable energy sources that we're barely pretending to be trying to find, our government is largely in the hands of a few particularly potent interest groups and the corporate lobby, and the resultant merry-go-round of deregulation to collapse to bailout back to deregulation for some reason threatens an economy already racked by; government deficits, an eternal war on the other side of the globe, our unfavorable trade balance and dependence on credit, and the constant loss of living-wage jobs and their replacement by minimum-wage jobs. And those are just off the top of my head without really considering all the foreign policy problems the Bush Administration has created just in the last 8 years.

So, when I say this needs to be a pivotal election for this country, I mean we need to reverse course on the last 30 years. If we could undo just about every policy we've had since Reagan was elected, that would be great. We need big government investments in infrastructure and health care, some kind of coherent energy policy based on increased efficiency in the short term, and real investment in renewable energy resources in the long term. We need to reform the way the members of our government are elected so as to guarantee as much as possible that they work for their constituents rather than their financial benefactors. We need real corporate watchdog agencys with both the regulatory and enforcement authority to head these bailouts/recalls/e coli outbreaks/etc. off at the pass. We need to extricate ourselves from these Wars With No End and see if we can get a Do-Over from the international community. We need to find a way to rebuild the labor movement and manufacturing sector in this country, since China may not always be the bottomless supply of cheap labor and goods our financial wizards seem to think it is now. And then, once we've got all that licked, maybe we'll still have the juice to shrink those deficits and work on our credit addiction, since these will definitely have to wait while we solve our other problems.

Because of all these problems, and many more I'm sure that have simply slipped my mind at the moment, I'm afraid I have no choice but to endorse Barack Obama's candidacy for President of the United States. I plan to vote for him, and I urge every one of you reading this to vote for him as well. I wish I could say that I was endorsing Obama because I felt that he was the right man at the right time. Unfortunately I don't really feel that way. Obama's main assets seem to be his own personal charisma and an (admittedly admirable) abiltity to draw new people into the political process. These qualities remind me more of Ronald Reagan than they do of FDR or LBJ. A progressive Reagan might not be such a bad thing, but it seems to me that, again like Reagan, Obama's beliefs and personal policies are rather vague and ill-defined, and that the specific proposals he does have are in areas where he was forced to have a policy by someone else offering a specific plan first. This makes it hard for me to muster a lot of enthusiasm for an Obama Administration. Hopefully I'll be pleasantly surprised.

No, the real reason I'm endorsing Obama is that I'm convinced that this country cannot afford much more Republican leadership. The Republican Party has held the Executive Branch for 20 out of the last 30 years and both houses of the Legislative Branch for 12 of the last 14. Reagan passed most of his legislative agenda based on his personal charisma and popularity. Bush the Elder had a lot of problems with his opposition Congress, but so did Clinton. I recall Clinton standing up to Gingrich's Republican Congress exactly once. He also stole several of their ideas and spent a lot of his term dealing with certain "distractions". In a lot of ways Clinton was a sort of de facto Republican President even though the Republicans hated him. And, of course, Bush the Younger has had a Republican Congress most of the way. So, I lay the blame for the mess we're in mostly at their feet.

That isn't to say that the Democrats are hugely better, which is why I'm not more enthusiastic about Obama. But, Clinton does get points for attempting to tackle a few of our bigger problems. He did try to overhaul our health care system. His plan was terrible, but probably better than the status quo. And I certainly think the Democrats could have done more to shift the direction of this country then they have. Over the last 8 years, however, the Republicans have firmly established themselves as the party of willfully incompetent, irresponsible mis-government. A lot of the completely retarded things that they've been trying to enact since the Reagan Administration finally became law during the Bush the Younger Administration and very late Clinton Administration.

They've gutted environmental regulations, refused to enforce the ones that are still on the books, packed the courts with pro-business anti-consumer lunatics, simply repealed financial services regulations, appointed industry lobbyists to industry watchdog positions, enhanced police and intelligence agency powers at the expense of civil liberties, allowed energy industry lobbyists to write our energy policy, the prescription drug benefit Bush rammed through was essentially a drug company give-away, and they've spent more money doing all this than any TWO Democratic Administrations while enacting new tax-cuts tilted towards the rich every other year. I'm sure there's more I've forgotten, but I'm exhausted from all that.

Then of course there's the 9/11 disaster and the Forever Wars, but I'll just skip those. Basically, I'm endorsing Barack Obama, because he's the only realistic alternative to 4-8 more years of Republican mis-rule. That's it, and that's that.


Big Aristotle's gotta bounce, y'all...