Back to Politics Part 2 or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Obama

If you're confused about the title, you obviously have not seen this movie.

So, if I believe everything I said before (and I do), why am I supporting Obama again?  Because this election is not a referendum on his first-term performance relative to my expectations, it’s about the next 4 years.  And, even with the knowledge that he will not be tackling the systemic problems I hoped he would, by a wide margin he is still the candidate that is more closely aligned with my personal positions.

As Christy and I were driving in the car on Friday, in what amounted to a 6-hour trip to IHOP (that’s a story for another day), she was expressing her own personal frustration at not being informed about the various candidates and how hard it was to actually get informed.  Nothing that comes out of a candidate’s mouth can ever be taken at face value, and their websites are just their mouths in a different format.  Newspapers, magazines, and news shows all have their own agendas too, so it actually is quite difficult to ever feel comfortable that you’ve gotten at any kind of “objective truth”.  In any case, down the line in this discussion she asked me “why should I vote for Obama?”

Now, it’s not that I didn’t have an answer for her.  It’s more that the Mark Twain saying “I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn’t have enough time” applied here.  I could easily have meandered through an hour-long diatribe about everything I agreed with Obama on and everything I disagreed with Romney on, but I knew that’s not what she wanted.   I think that she, like most Americans, doesn’t want to listen to hours and hours of back and forth between candidates and pundits and have to read between the lines and tease out the truths.  She wants to know, quite simply, what are the important points that each side believes, and what are going to be the actual consequences of choosing one side versus the other.

That set me to the task of trying to compile a succinct list of the main reasons I am supporting Obama over Romney.  And after about 10 minutes, I had a list of about 4 or 5 main points, and they are as follows:

1. Supreme Court Appointments – It is impossible to know when a Supreme Court vacancy will open up.  However, given that there are currently 4 justices in their 70s (Ginsburg – 79, Scalia – 75, Kennedy – 75, and Breyer – 74) and that the average retirement age of a justice is 78.7, it is likely that there will be 1 or 2 appointments in the next presidential term.  Right now the generally accepted interpretation regarding the makeup of the court is that there are 4 conservative justices, 4 liberals, and Kennedy is the swing vote (though it can probably be said that he leans conservative).  And since, of the four justices in their 70s, only Scalia is a conservative, the potential for the court to swing decidedly conservative under a Romney administration is clear.  And with Supreme Court appointments being for life, that is a swing which may last a long time.  Would a conservative Supreme Court overturn Roe v Wade?  I honestly don’t know, but certainly many conservatives hope so.  Also, the issue of gay marriage will almost certainly come before the Supreme Court in the next few years.  If you want to ensure that Roe v Wade is not getting overturned anytime soon, and you want the issue of gay marriage to come before a court that is not any more conservative than it is right now, you need to vote for Barack Obama.

2. Obamacare – I really don’t like the Affordable Care Act (ACA), but not for the reasons that conservatives don’t like it.  I don’t like it because, for all the ridiculous amount of effort and angst from the right, it’s remarkable how little it actually does.  Still, it did away with lifetime limits and will end pre-existing conditions, and also includes a mandate for everyone to carry health insurance (however toothless that mandate may be).  And I can tell you from firsthand experience that here at Blue Cross since its passage there has been effort like never before on reducing costs and keeping premium increases as low as possible.  And the bottom line is that this legislation took us one step closer to ensuring that every American has health insurance.  But the full impact of these changes don’t go into effect until 2014 or later, and Romney has outright stated that he intends to work towards repealing ACA in his first term.  If you believe that ACA is a step in the right direction and that we need to work towards the day when -  like a police force, firefighters, social security, and national defense - health insurance is something that every American is provided with, you need to vote for Barack Obama.

3. Climate Change – This one is pretty simple.  One side acknowledges that climate change is real and is largely the result of human activity, and the other side doesn’t.  In 2010 Obama signed an executive order which will increase the corporate average fuel efficiency (CAFÉ) standards from 27.5 to 35.5 by 2016.  As an executive order, Romney would have the power to undo this change at the stroke of a pen.  Obama also heavily supports investment in alternative and renewable energy; Romney supports more domestic drilling and is only concerned with getting us off foreign oil – not oil in general.  If you believe that climate change is happening, is manmade, and is a serious threat to us and our planet, you need to vote for Barack Obama.

4. Social Issues – The GOP is supposed to stand for hands-off government.  Turns out that this is only the case when it comes to gun control, taxes, and corporate regulation.  When it comes to being involved in your personal decisions they have no qualms whatsoever in getting actively involved to decide what is best for you and the country.  Part of being “hands-off” is acknowledging that things will occur that you don’t personally agree with, because above all you believe that it is not the government’s place to interfere.  That is the libertarian view, but the GOP abandoned it long ago.  There are literally a hundred issues I could point to here, but I’ll just pick a couple: gay marriage, any form of marijuana (growing hemp, recreational use, and medicinal use), internet gambling, separation of church and state, and abortion.  If you are a progressive when it comes to social issues and don’t believe that the Bible should be the basis for social legislation, you need to vote for Barack Obama.

5. Send a Message to the GOP – This one is closely tied to #s 2, 3, and 4 above.  For all the bashing I do of the GOP (and I am aware I do a lot of it) it does not come from a place of hatred.  It comes from a place of frustration, because deep down I still feel that the GOP is my party and that it is currently being held hostage by a bunch of lunatics.  I am a fiscal conservative – I believe in a flat tax, balancing the budget, reducing the deficit, and that a voucher system is a fantastic solution for both our education and health insurance problems.  Those are all ideas championed by conservatives before they got control of both Congress and the Presidency and decided that unlimited spending was OK as long as they were in power and that they would concentrate on social issues.  And if you think I'm exaggerating about the spending, I urge you to read this article written in 2003 by the conservative Christian Science Monitor.  I want to see a debate on how to best deliver universal health care to all Americans while not busting the budget and how to lower carbon emissions without killing the economy – not whether or not we should do either of those things.  I thought that the Democratic Congressional takeover in 2006, followed by Obama’s victory in 2008 would have forced them to reinvent themselves as centrists.  Instead they’ve opted to double down, summarized best by Mitch McConnell after the Republican landslide in 2010; “Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term.”  Not “our top priority is to get Americans back to work” or “to get the economy going again” or “to work with Democrats to get legislation passed which helps all Americans.”  Nope, number one objective is “Screw You Obama.”  If you want to send a message to Republicans that they need to meet Democrats and the majority of the country in the center, you need to vote for Barack Obama.