A crying need for real statesmen

I used to be a moderate Republican, in favor of small government, fiscal responsibility, just enough regulation to keep the playing field level for everyone, and many liberal social ideas. The Republicans, however, seem to have slipped their moorings and become an undisciplined, free-spending bunch of political hacks pandering to the religious right, who apparently would like to scrap separation of church and state, emulate the mullahs of the Middle East and have the government impose their own version of Christian sharia law on everyone. They certainly aren’t anything Republican that I recognize anymore.

The Democrats, to the extent they are anything at all these days, seem to be in the grip of the loony left, who would still like to emulate the “postmodern” welfare states of Europe so that we too could have permanent high unemployment, slow growth, low worker productivity, high taxes, terrible health service, a wildly expensive cradle-to-grave welfare system, millions of pages of bureaucratic regulations on everything, and immigrant riots in the streets every Saturday. Not an appealing alternative.

Of course underneath the public disagreements the two parties are really pretty much alike. Both have colluded to gerrymander their congressional districts so that they can face as little opposition as possible. Both are on the take big time from lobbyists, though only a few are crass enough to take outright bribes to store in the freezer. Neither party is willing to step up and make hard choices. Both will promise anything the focus groups say will win them an election, whether they could deliver or not. Neither in recent times seems to have been able to field a presidential candidate I would buy a used car from.

Politics has never been easy or clean anywhere in the world – there is too much power and money involved. But if there was ever a time when we needed a few real statesmen to emerge, this is it.

We face really, really serious problems, like the Medicare and Social Security icebergs that look likely to bankrupt us, like the massive national debt we have accumulated that puts us at the mercy of our enemies if they decide to stop buying our bonds, like our economy’s overdependence on petroleum from volatile parts of the world, and I am sure you can think of a dozen more.

In the face of this, we certainly need something better in leaders than either political party has shown us yet.