The upcoming 2012 presidential election (and the accompanying House and Senate elections as well, for that matter) present a real dilemma – two alternatives neither of which is particularly attractive.
On the Democratic side we have President Obama with his lackluster first term. Actually, I don’t fault him for not solving the recession problem – it is clear that no one really knows how to resolve this issue, and the high-powered academic economists can’t even agree among themselves as to the proper course.
But I do fault him for not trying harder – for wasting his first three years in office saving the bonuses of Wall Street executives and CEOs, and subsidizing the jobs of union members who make up his base, and pushing through his heath care bill while all across the nation ordinary people’s homes were being foreclosed and jobs were being lost and small businesses were being forced out of business.
And I fault him, and especially Nancy Pelosi, for ramming through a messy and expensive (and perhaps even unconstitutional) health care bill while cutting Republicans completely out of the negotiations. It caused such bitterness among Republicans that it has been full-scale civil war between the parties in Congress ever since, and resulted in putting some 70+ intransigent Tea Party freshmen onto the House that even Republican Speaker John Boehner has difficulty controlling.
And finally I fault him for not putting in place a medium-term plan for cutting the ballooning federal debt. One might reasonably argue that the middle of a recession is not the time to cut the federal budget, but that argument only holds water if accompanied by a credible plan to cut the deficit in the medium term. He has presented no such plan, and such “budget cutting” he has finally agreed to (forced to it kicking and screaming by the Tea Party members) has largely been smoke and mirrors, and far too little to make any real difference.
All-in–all this Democratic administration has clearly been over its depth both domestically and in foreign policy. Remember the Russian “reset” and the “open hand” offered to the Arab world? – not much came of either of those initiatives.
But on the Republican side we have what appears to be equal incompetence. None of the current candidates look particularly promising, and while at this point the presidential election is the Republican’s to lose, they do seem quite capable of nominating some right-wing extremist and losing it.
The Republican fixation with cutting taxes, while there is indeed some logic behind it, appears to be held as an unthinking non-negotiable ideological position, not a logical one. More than that, there is little evidence from their performance in the previous Republican administration that they are any less feckless about the debt problem than the Democrats. It is true that this Democratic administration managed to add as much to the nation’s debt in three years as Bush did in eight years, but that isn’t saying much good about the Bush administration either.
Finally, despite all the hype and talking points, I have yet to hear from any Republican candidate a better idea for getting the economy moving again.
So we have a real dilemma – I may again want to vote “none of the above” in this next election.
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