Imperfect Presidential Candidates, Impossible Problems
McCain tried to influence the FCC on behalf of a company that paid a tres-cute lady lobbyist to hang out with him. Evil! Barack Obama tried drugs when he was young, and doesn’t have 80 years of experience in the federal government. Horrors! Hillary Clinton is a schemer and will step on anyone who gets in her way. Yech! How can we vote for any of these people? Or for anyone else, since by definition all candidates are human, which means none of them are perfect?
I’ll admit: I’m not sure the current candidates are the best we could have found, but our electoral process has gotten so long-winded and nasty that I don’t think “the best and the brightest” are likely to run.
And no matter who gets elected in November, that person is going to face a huge stack of problems, most of which no president can possibly solve.
Iraq? The choice is basically between keeping or stepping up our current level of force, drawing down our forces but maintaining some sort of stabilizing presence, possibly for many decades a la Korea, and pulling out entirely.
No matter which direction we go, there will be bloodshed in Iraq, and a sizable percentage of Americans will say we did the wrong thing. We can all sit around and complain that Bush and Cheney misled us into a bad war, but that’s the past. We need to think about the future now. And I personally believe that we must keep at least some forces in Iraq until the Iraqis get some sort of coherent government going (even if it’s one we don’t like very much), because we took responsibility for Iraq on the day we invaded that poor country, and walking away now would be irresponsible.
The economy? A U.S. president has limited powers here. He or she can nudge and cajole and make ringing speeches, but the Federal Reserve Board sets interest rates, and market forces — mostly outside the U.S. — determine the dollar’s value.
The president can negotiate and renegotiate trade treaties, and I believe many of the ones we have in place now could stand some renegotiation, but once again we have a situation where a large percentage of the American public will be angry with whatever action (or no action) our next president decides to take. For the Greedheads at the top of our economic ladder, free trade is great. They can (and do) take their production facilities to places that offer the lowest wages, the fewest environmental protections, and the cheapest land.
Americans who work for a living are hurt by the offshoring of our vital industries, of course, but the Greedheads can (and do) hire hordes of well-dressed economists to make colorful charts telling the laid-off workers that despite their own experiences — mere anecdotal evidence — statistics prove they really are better off working at Wal~Mart or in other low-pay, low-benefit jobs than they were when they earned $25/hour and had comprehensive health insurance.
Who wins this one? For several decades, Republicans have allied with the Greedheads and have managed to shove their agenda though Congress. Now Congress is controlled by Democrats, so the question is whether the Greedheads can dominate the Democratic Party as much as they’ve dominated the Republicans.
What scares me is that the Greedheads have a massive, well-financed propaganda machine that turns out billions of pages every year designed to convince us that unregulated private industry is the solution to all our problems — and that we should overlook small problems like tainted ground beef, adulterated medications, pollution, anti-worker discrimination, price-gouging, shoddy construction, usery, and even plain-out fraud, because government is evil, evil, evil, and Free Enterprise is good, good, good (evidence to the contrary notwithstanding).
Health care: I’ve long advocated the creation of a stripped-down, clinic-based national health care system modeled on Army sick call. No transplants, no super-expensive life-extension treatments, 99% generic drugs, and you see a nurse or PA for almost all routine conditions and, if hospitalized, stay in a ward instead of a private or semi-private room.
You say that level of health care isn’t good enough for you? Fine. Buy private health insurance. Some people are satisfied with (or can only afford) Kias, and some prefer (and can afford) BMWs. The idea that everyone, regardless of means, should get the same level of health care is as silly as mandating that everyone, regardless of means, should have the same level of automobile.
Ditto housing. I’m fine with campgrounds or cabin-type living quarters available to all either in exchange for work or for tiny rent, with one mother watching four other mothers’ children while they work or go to school, plus simple, nutritious food ingredients available either free, in exchange for work or at a very low price. This is my personal solution to homelessness, AFDC and welfare, all in one stroke.
I suspect that my health and welfare plan would cost the government a lot less than our current hodge-podge of programs, and would do a lot more good for a lot more people, too, while giving all recipients a strong incentive to better themselves. But this is all too sensible for any president to advocate or for a Greedhead-bought Congress to enact. And many anti-poverty activists would be just as angry about my “ghettoization” plan as the Greedheads would be about its “income transfer” aspect.
Oh, well. My plans aren’t necessarily any more practical than the ones we hear from our presidential candidates. I’m human, too, and no more perfect than they are.
But I don’t go around claiming to have all the answers, either, which anyone running for president (or nearly any other office) is obliged to do to in order to get elected.
And that, right there, is the problem. We set our standards for candidates impossibly high.
We need to realize that no candidate will agree with us on every single issue, and that no candidate, once in office, is going to be able to do everything we’d like to see done.
I will not predict which candidate is going to win the election. I’ll leave that to the professional pundits, because they’re paid to do that sort of thing — even if they’re wrong more often than they’re right.
But I will make one prediction here: that our next president — whoever he or she may be — will only last one term, because he or she will disappoint a majority of the American people in one way or another.