I’ve spent a fair amount of ink this past week on Sarah Palin, but aside from what her appointment says about John McCain, she’s probably not make-or-break in the Presidential race. Whether you believe it’s a boldly maverick move to bring along someone with no experience of national politics and barely any experience of statewide office or whether it just seems a tad strange to you that a candidate with so much gravitas himself would trust the country, in the event of his demise, to someone with none to speak of, Sarah Palin’s not the issue.
The main issue in the race for the Presidency seems to be whether the country has had enough of what got us where we are or whether we’re ready to chance that more of the same policies might yield better results in the future. The country is in pretty hard economic times. People are losing their homes and jobs at a fast enough clip to make one wonder whether things might just be getting worse still. $600 stimulus checks haven’t stopped a rising unemployment rate and the failure of several banks, a major investment house, two major mortgage lenders, and other predatory ones.
Tax cuts for the rich have drained the fat of the land into the coffers of those with the ability to invest it anywhere in the world they like, while workers real wages have stagnated and their jobs continue to disappear abroad. Health savings accounts provide tax deductible cash for elective treatments and health club memberships— if you can afford them— while tens of millions of harder pressed citizens can’t afford to get an annual checkup without health insurance.
We’re besieged in the opinion of the world. We haven’t found a way to unite the country around shared values some seven years after being attacked by a small gang of terrorists and five and one half years after attacking a country those terrorists didn’t come from in response. Most of the policies our government has pursued seem to be like rubber to Al Queda and glue for our troops bogged down in internal sectarian conflicts halfway around the world.
We’ve been through the drowning of a great American city and we now have a candidate who shared his birthday celebration with President Bush as it happened, but he later said he’d have landed Air Force One at the nearest base to New Orleans if he’d been the Commander-in-Chief. The city is still at risk from hurricane flooding and some tens of thousands of its residents even now are unable to reoccupy their homes.
We have a continuing assault on the civil liberties that made America the beacon of democratic hope around the world. We have a government that has institutionalized torture as a way to fight those would subject our troops and civilians to torture themselves and called it a necessary ‘dark side’ to war. When confronted with evidence that illegal imprisonments and torturous interrogations were being executed without deference to the Constitution’s ban and international agreements’ prohibition of them, our President merely waved away inconvenient facts— and dared the judiciary to enforce their rulings.
When confronted with unpleasant facts, this Administration has responded with character assassination and even by revealing covert identities of covert agents to retaliate against critics. When Administration figures were convicted of crimes involved, the President’s response was to commute any meaningful sentence against his Vice President’s aide and describe him in glowing terms.
The same Administration that puffs so loudly about terror 24/7 spends little energy securing nuclear materials around the world and putting salve on the conflicts that make their eventual use a little more likely every day. While they invaded a country supposedly to pre-empt nuclear proliferation with manufactured evidence, the government as a whole is pathetic in its inability to address the spread of nuclear materials for profit and ideology from sites around the world.
The last seven years of inaction against climate change and energy dependence on foreign oil have sunk the entire planet into a tailspin from which we don’t really know we’ll recover. One thing about the current energy and environmental mess we do know is that it was utterly predictable. In fact, the scientists who told us it would happen worked for the government in some cases. But the current Administration muzzled them, lest their cries of alarm trouble the citizenry about their strong support for the petroleum barons who put them in power. And now, the successor to the throne of the party in power leads chants of “Drill, Baby, Drill,” as a solution to the problem.
Even against this backdrop and years of backing the President, Mr. McCain hopes the country will still think of him as somehow separate from the party and the policies he’s endorsed and supported for Mr. Bush. He hopes that voters are more interested an ambience of freshness emanating from an unknown and appealing woman from the North and that they will fear another unknown, what a new and very different President might mean for their future.
If Americans are distracted enough by the hoopla about war heroism and the snarky things said about community organizing and supposed elitism to forget all that we’ve been through over the past seven years of hard right policies, perhaps America will be getting what it wants and deserves. Otherwise, this coming election ought to be a referendum on whether those policies have worked out so well for us.