© Stephen Finn | Dreamstime.com
Seldom are the battle lines as clear as they are in election season 2008.
Establishment conservative versus up from the streets progressive.
Moneyed comfort (via marriage) vs. up from food stamps, self-made comfort.
Explosive, short-fused temper vs. articulate, Ivy League erudition.
Chiseled in stone libertarian capitalism vs. government as proper societal safety net capitalism.
Bomb first, ask questions later approach to foreign affairs vs. talk first, inclusive globalism.
Pandering to the women’s vote with a barely qualified vice presidential choice vs. persuading women that progressive positions trump empty symbols (Sarah Palin is this generation’s Dan Quayle) every time.
The marketplace is the proper solution to the crisis in health care vs. too many families forego medical care because health insurance is out of reach and this must end.
There’s no problem with the economy that ceasing whining won’t cure vs. the last eight years have been economically unpleasant for nearly everyone who has less than $5,000,000 a year in income, and downright catastrophic for far too many working people.
NYTimes economist Paul Krugman put it very well:
Feeling No Pain
Op-Ed Columnist | By PAUL KRUGMAN | Published: August 29, 2008
My first reaction to Bill Clinton’s convention speech was sheer professional jealousy: nobody, but nobody, has his ability to translate economic wonkery into plain, forceful English. In effect, Mr. Clinton provided an executive summary of the new Census report on income, poverty and health insurance — but he did it so eloquently, so seamlessly, that there was no sense that he was giving his audience a lecture.
My second reaction was that in Mr. Clinton’s speech — as in the speeches by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden (this column was filed before Barack Obama spoke on Thursday night) — one heard the fundamental difference between the two parties. Democrats say and, as far as I can tell, really believe that working Americans are getting a raw deal; Republicans, despite occasional attempts to sound sympathetic, basically believe that people have nothing to complain about.
As it happens, the numbers support the Democrats.
The Republicans who have the ear of John McCain are certain that there’s no such thing as not having health insurance, since people can always use hospital emergency rooms. Anyone who lives in the real world knows how crassly wrong-headed that is, especially because the bankruptcy courts are crowded with those whose emergency room and other medical bills have pushed them over the edge.
Op-Ed Columnist – Feeling No Pain – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com
Barack Obama made it clear, in that extraordinary event in front of 90,000 Democrats in Denver the other night, that he and the Democratic party understand the challenges that working people are facing on a daily basis, and are prepared begin the process of fixing that which eight years of George III’s misrule have utterly broken.
As a parent:
- of an adult son who, unemployed and uninsured, required two days of hospitalization last week that we required our extended family’s assistance to confront;
- of an adult, married, herself presently hospitalized once again as I write this daughter, whose insurance company has been giving her such a hard time about her costly medication that she’s had to file a case with her state’s insurance commission;
I have no difficulty understanding how truly broken is our national health system, where working people’s and their children’s medical well-being is subordinated to insurance companies mandates first, and always, to provide suitable returns to stockholders.
Can the Republicans fix this?
They don’t even see that we have a health care problem.
If the voters elect the Republican’s charming May-December couple, than they’ll have selected four more years of warm support for plutocrats and the Fortune 500, and crass neglect of the 98% of the rest of us.
Will the Democrats fix this?
Only if voters elect Obama-Biden nationally, and send Democratic legislators to represent them in Congress, will this nation regain the opportunity to begin to repair the broken health system, as well as to begin to repair our infrastructure osteoporosis and thereby the economy, and to begin to restore our moral leadership in world affairs.
Seldom are the battle lines as clear as they are in election season 2008.
It’s it for now. Thanks,
–MUDGE
