Closing Thoughts on the Presidential Election

Tomorrow, Americans will head to the polls and cast their votes for one of two viable candidates: John McCain or Barack Obama.

John McCain is not my ideal candidate, but represents an agenda I think all moderate and conservative voters should be much more interested in.

Barack Obama - by measure of his associations, his voting record, or his proposed policies - would be the most liberal president we've ever had. Some of you may read that and think I'm exaggerating or using hyperbole. I am not. Barack Obama is an excellent politician who has done a tremendous job during the campaign convincing Americans he is moderate and reasonable. But he is not.


On social policy, the issue most important to me is abortion, because literally at stake is life and death. I believe any rational person should be able to discern the scientific case that life begins at conception.

Even if you aren't pro-life, most moderate voters want abortion to at least have some restrictions, like parental notification. But Obama has pledged that "the first thing I would do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act." The FOCA would remove all restrictions on abortion, from parental notification to re-legalizing so called "partial birth abortion" which is much more accurately described as infanticide.

Obama's ultra-liberal dedication to abortion even includes his vote against a bill in the Illinois Senate that would have required doctors to provide medical care for babies that survived botched abortions.


On foreign policy, we are now winning in Iraq thanks to the The Surge, a strategy McCain advocated at great risk to his political career. Had we followed Obama's plan we would have begun a withdrawal of troops prior to even attempting The Surge and Iraq would be in shambles, with Al-Qaeda strengthened. Senator Obama has next to no foreign policy, military, or executive experience. Making him president while engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seems downright dangerous.


On economic policy - the area that seems to be ruling the day, we have Obama proposing a redistributionist tax policy that would literally cut checks to "working families" while ramping up hundreds of billions of dollars of new spending to be paid for exclusively by the top 5% of income earners (or, if you go with this cut off of "$250,000" - the top 1.5% of income earners.) The top 5% of income earners, today, already pay 60% of the personal income tax burden (while making only 20% of the country's income - a disparity of 3:1). Does that seem fair to you?

By contrast, John McCain wants to lower taxes across the board and reduce government spending - starting with reforming earmarks.

Analysis by economists indicates that Obama's policies will actually slow the economy, while McCain's will help it grow. This is probably best demonstrated by the following chart which I'm stealing from here:



From the study from which that chart is generated:

When fully phased in, and all economic adjustments are made, the McCain tax plan would increase the private sector portion of GDP relative to the baseline by about 2.7 percent, and the Obama tax plan would reduce private sector GDP by about 3.5 percent, a significant 6.2 percent difference in output and income between the two plans. (See Chart 1.) The difference in private sector capital accumulation would be 15.8 percent or $4.1 trillion in favor of McCain. Hourly wages before-tax would be up 2.2 percent under McCain, down 2.6 percent under Obama, a 4.8 percent difference. Hours worked would be 0.5 percent higher under McCain, and 1 percent lower under Obama.

I do not want to see this recession continue for four years, do you?

Yes, let's please debate experience

I'm not sure whether I was more pleased by McCain's picking Palin or by the resulting Democratic response.

The Obama campaign's response was:

Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Chuck Schumer weighed in with this:

After the great success of the Democratic convention, the choice of Sarah Palin is surely a Hail Mary pass. ... Certainly the choice of Palin puts to rest any argument about inexperience on the Democratic team and while Palin is a fine person, her lack of experience makes the thought of her assuming the presidency troubling. I particularly look forward to the Biden-Palin debate in Missouri.

Besides both quotes continuing the trend from their convention of sounding mean and elitist, I'd like to encourage the Democrats to continue bringing up Palin's supposed lack of experience.

Here's why.

First, since it's obvious that Biden has more experience than Palin, and that McCain more than Obama, the comparison that gets made is between Palin and Obama. Once again, we're left wondering if Obama has enough experience. And Obama's the top half of the Democratic ticket; Palin's the bottom half of the Republican ticket. So this just winds up begging the question: which is more important to avoid - a supposedly inexperienced President or a supposedly inexperienced Vice-President?

Second, let's actually explore the experience differences between Obama and Palin.

Palin got into politics as a member of the Wasilla City Council in 1992. That makes it sixteen years since the start of her political career. Obama got his start with being elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996. That's a full four years longer that Palin's been picking up political experience.

Obama took his highest office, that of being a US Senator, in January, 2005. He's been (officially) campaigning to be president since February 10, 2007 though. So, he's had two full years where his attention was actually singularly-focused on being a Senator. Palin took her highest office, that of being the Governor of Alaska in December 4, 2006. So, she's been there almost two years. And she's actually been focused on doing the job her constituency elected her to do the entire time, instead of touring around the country trying to obtain the next highest office.

So, Obama has been a senator longer than Palin's been a governor ... but not by a whole lot, and really not by much if you factor out the time Obama's been focused on running for president instead of representing Illinois.

And now here's the two important points about the quality of that experience

One, the President is an executive role. Palin's been a mayor and a governor. Those are executive roles. Obama's been a state and national senator. There's zero executive experience to be found in either role.

Two, Palin can list accomplishment after accomplishment for her executive service. She cut property taxes dramatically in Wasilla. As governor she successfully went after corrupt officials within her own party. She cancelled the huge waste-of-tax-payer's-money "Bridge to Nowhere." She's challenged the current Washington establishment on oil and energy security. She's supported bringing change to Washington by supporting the effort to unseat (Republican) U.S. Congressmen Don Young from Alaska and has been anything but supportive of (also Republican) U.S. Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska.

What's Obama done? If you can't think of anything, you're not alone. But, maybe you're thinking back to the Saddleback Civil Forum where, when asked about something bipartisan Obama had done, he talked about how he worked with John McCain to pass ethics reform. There's an accomplishment, right? Well, not so fast. Obama did work, for about a week, with McCain but then jumped ship from a role in a bipartisan effort to just support the bill crafted by the Democrats. (But maybe Obama's audacity to lie to Rick Warren during the Saddleback Civil Forum counts as an accomplishment?)

The final area to consider is foreign policy experience.

I'm not sure what Obama can point to here, short of traveling to get some photo ops with foreign leaders and promising but then reneging to meet without precondition with our foreign leaders.

Palin too comes up fairly short. She does have the experience of governing a state with a 1500 mile border with Canada, and as a governor she also has experience overseeing Alaska's National Guard. As part of her experience with Alaska's National Guard she visited Kuwait (and her trip to the Middle East was nearly a year before Obama's).

And I'm not really that concerned with Palin's relative lack of foreign policy experience. Capable leaders who come in with executive experience, like say, Ronald Regan, have been known to do great things in the foreign policy arena (like, say, end a cold war), without formal foreign policy experience prior to their becoming President. Palin (unlike Obama) has that executive experience. And (also unlike Obama), Palin's only going after the second-in-command position.

You Broke It, You Bought It?

Is Huckabee serious?! The reason to continue supporting the war is because "you broke it, you bought it"?!

Heck no - the reason to continue supporting the war is because it's in our national interest - not because of some trite folks-saying. This is perhaps the weakest argument for the war I've heard, and we've been putting up with exceptionally weak arguments from Bush for four and a half years.

The corollary of this reasoning seems to me to be that we simply have to live with the negative consequences ("buy it") of borders the government has left "broken". Ron Paul might suggest we could elect new leaders to fix the problem ... but no! - the Huckabee folk-saying clearly dictates that we must stand united behind "buying" the negative consequences -- amnesty it is -- we passively allowed illegal immigrants to cross the border, and, "you broke it, you bought it!"

Furthermore, I can't believe he classified U.S. action in Iraq as "breaking" Iraq. There's truth to that, but saying that does not strike me as being particularly deft and I think it hinders, rather than helps, the "support the war" cause.

There's a lot of things I like about Huckabee, but this just adds to my conception that he really just doesn't "get" foreign policy like many of the other GOP candidates.

... On the other hand, maybe what he said was brilliant and I just don't get it ... Allahpundit and the community over at HotAir seem to be eating it up. Perhaps they just enjoy cheering on anyone going after Ron Paul?