I have a question for any of my Republican friends or family out there. Why would you (assuming you are planning to) vote for Mitt Romney and the Republican candidates for the House and Senate wherever you live? I mean this in all sincerity. Based on what policy positions do you find them preferable to President Obama and the Democrats?
Is it because of the slow recovery from the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression? If so, let's talk honestly about a) what caused that meltdown and b) what has slowed down the recovery. It's indisputable that the meltdown occurred under George W. Bush's watch, and largely if not entirely due to policies enacted or reinforced by him. The measures put into place by President Obama, primarily the stimulus package and the bailout of the auto industry, also indisputably kept the economy from spiraling completely out of control and devolving into a potentially worse crisis even than the aforementioned Depression. Even a number of Republicans have admitted as much.
Is it because of the persisting unemployment problem? Let's look at that as well. In the last year of the Bush administration and the first 9 months of the Obama administration, before any of his policies could take effect, the economy was simply hemorrhaging jobs - some months as many as 800,000 jobs lost. Since the Obama policies have been in effect, we have been gaining private sector jobs consistently, every month, for two and a half years. The unemployment situation would be even better if not for the consistent loss in public sector jobs, through local and state-enforced budget cuts and austerity measures, mostly enacted by Republican-controlled governors and legislatures. Without those job losses, we would now have unemployment at around 7%.
Further, the Republicans have been harping for years now about the jobs situation, but have offered not a single constructive job plan of their own. Rather, Obama has pressured them time and again to pass his jobs bill, which would put millions of people back to work - not through frivolous government spending, but through keeping teachers, firefighters, and police officers working, and through a number of desperately needed infrastructure projects. These are not "liberal, socialist" ideas. Please remember that one of the greatest public infrastructure projects in the history of the world was enacted by President Eisenhower - the interstate highway system, without which our modern economy would be unable to function. The Republicans in Congress made it not only implicitly clear, but EXPLICITLY clear, that their primary goal for the four years following Obama's inauguration in 2009 was to make sure he was a one-term President. It was not to fix the economy, it was not to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was not to help the millions of people being forced into bankruptcy and foreclosure. It was to wrest political power from their perceived enemy, at the expense of the country and the American people.
Is it because of the President's foreign policies? If you object to these based on their aggressive nature (drone attacks, indefinite detention, extra-judicial assassinations of suspected terrorists, etc), then you would certainly have objected both to President Bush's foreign policies and to those of any of the Republicans who sought the Presidency this time around, with the single exception of Ron Paul, who was so disgusted by what he has seen so far from the Romney camp and the GOP convention, that he now describes himself as an "undecided voter" and left the convention entirely. Or perhaps you object to the fact that the President made the courageous decision to attack and kill Osama Bin Laden, the man responsible for 3,000 American deaths. Or perhaps you object to his policies regarding Israel, even though Shimon Peres has recently said that Israel has had no better friend or advocate in the U.S. Presidency in history than Obama. Mitt Romney likes to portray Obama as an "apologist" for America, but the facts simply don't line up behind this attack.
Is it because you oppose same-sex marriage? If so, I need to know this, as I find opposition to this wholly insupportable with any sort of sane logic, and personally deeply offensive.
Is it because you believe the government should be able to force a woman to bear her rapist's child, or one whose gestation would threaten her very life? This seems to me the very opposite of the supposed conservative value of keeping government out of people's lives.
Or is it because you object to the Affordable Care Act? Even though this legislation was modeled on the highly successful Massachusetts program put in place by Romney himself, he loves to blast this as governmental overreach and some sort of paean to socialism. The fact is and always has been that this is a CONSERVATIVE idea, launched originally by the Heritage Foundation, on the principle that by putting in place a mandate, you keep the freeloaders (those who can afford insurance but choose not to have it, then use the emergency care system, ultimately resulting in increased costs for the insured) from wrecking the cost checks. For those who truly can't afford insurance, other measures are in place to help them acquire it or to provide the truly poor with free coverage through Medicaid. Republican talking points will call "Obamacare" socialized medicine, or a government takeover that strips you of your ability to make your own medical decisions. The truth is just the opposite. Obamacare relies primarily on private insurance, but puts into place protections for the insured that will keep costs down in the long run, prevent coverage from being denied because of pre-existing conditions, and eliminate lifetime caps that bankrupt people with devastating or chronic illnesses that require long-term, expensive care. The number of people actually affected by the "penalties" associated with the mandate is extremely small, and there is scant enforcement mechanism. The result, however, is the ability of the system to maintain itself, and that benefits everybody.
So which is it? Because frankly, I don't see a single issue on which Romney and Ryan's policies are demonstrably better than Obama's, and in most cases they are disastrously, egregiously wrong. In order to sell you on them, they've engaged in the most egregious lying and dissembling that has ever been wrought on the American people, at least in the modern era. The best example of this is the current outrageous claim that Obama is "gutting" the work requirements from welfare. In spite of the fact that every single fact-checking organization has decried this as an outright falsehood, the Romney camp has run FIVE separate ads (of their last 12) on this very issue, repeating this same lie. This week a Romney spokesman asserted that their campaign would not be dictated to by "fact-checkers." In other words - they would not be beholden to what the rest of us like to call "the truth."
Thanks, Andy Boy!
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