Until the Republican National Convention, I thought we were. Now I’m not so sure. The insertion of Sarah Palin into the race has energized the Republican base and suddenly we are being told that change lies in the hands of the party that has brought us to the brink of ruin. The most mystifying aspect of this is that there are those who were on the fence who now think because suddenly the Republican Party has put a woman on the ticket, the blunders and missteps of the past eight years will suddenly be reversed.
How can continuing the failed policies of the past eight years improve our condition? Is the presence of a woman – any woman, especially a right wing, pistol packing, shooting wolves from airplanes, anti-choice, pro-Bush policy woman – all that it takes? Does the mere fact of a woman on the ticket of a man who has a twelve hundred page medical record that covers only the last eight out of seventy-two years make the choice of backward policies more palatable?
The polls indicate that this is the case.
As a woman, I would love to see another of my gender in the White House. But I also require that the woman who is in that exalted position have the intelligence and the vision to run this country in a complicated world. Sarah Palin is not that woman. And yet, many in this country are ready to put her a heartbeat away from the presidency by electing a ticket where the presidential candidate has shown us that he is no maverick, that he is more than willing to bow to the demands of the far right wing and embrace and expand the policies of the Bush administration.
Consider this. The McCain tax proposals would make permanent the disastrous tax cuts of the Bush administration. McCain says his plan will benefit the middle class but all one needs to do is look backwards over the past eight years to see that the tax cuts favor the wealthy and place an undue burden on the middle class. McCain counters arguments for raising the tax rate on the wealthy and on corporations by telling us that doing so will result in jobs disappearing. If the original tax cuts were so effective, why do we have the highest rate of unemployment in over a decade? Why have wages stagnated while prices and profits have risen? Where are all the high paying jobs that should have resulted from the tax cuts to the wealthy and the corporations? Where is all that money that was supposed to trickle down? Remember that phrase? The former President Bush coined the term “voo-doo economics” to describe the trickle down policies of the Reagan administration. People have profited all right. But it wasn’t you and it wasn’t me. You can bet your bottom dollar – if you have one to spare – that the Bush family and the Cheney family have profited.
On the energy front, McCain advocates drilling for more oil while giving only lip service to alternative energies that can release us from the strangle hold of foreign oil while creating new jobs, not to mention technologies that can be exported around the world and help to balance our trade deficit. Instead of concentrating on clean wind, solar and water based energies, McCain prefers to kowtow to the oil companies, knowing full well the United States doesn’t have the oil reserves needed to make us energy independent. Into the mix he throws more nuclear plants and tells us how safe they are. Yes, the record for nuclear energy in this country has been good. Except, of course, for Three Mile Island. France prides itself on the fact that almost all of their energy comes from nuclear reactors and the people of that country have felt safe. Until July 2008, when an accident contaminated two rivers and well water in the region where the plant is located. That was the result of just a small accident – a broken pipe. The clean up of the major Chernobyl disaster continues to this day. It only takes one incident. Just one. Nuclear waste is dirty and dangerous and yet, we’re told it’s safe.
On issue after issue we have a clear choice. We can vote to change the way America conducts itself both at home and abroad. We can do what Americans have done in the past when we were a country of can-do people and rise to the challenge of remaking ourselves into a people who hold high the banner of true freedom and opportunity and who also know that sometimes people need help, that sometimes people need those social programs so derided by the Republican party just so they can continue to be working, taxpaying contributors to our society. Not forever, but only for a time. We need people who are educated so we can compete on the world stage and yet, going to college poses such a huge financial burden that many simply can’t afford to do it. We need people who know their government has their backs, a government that is willing to put regulations on things like banking, energy and health care so the times we live in now will come to an end and a saner United States emerges. We can still have a free market system without being enslaved by the greed and avarice of corporations who care only for the bottom line and lose sight of the human condition. We can stop being afraid of the terrorist in the closet and fight terrorism where it breeds: in the mountains of Afghanistan and in the hearts and minds of people who are oppressed and uneducated and told lies by those with agendas we can only guess at. We can work with other countries to improve conditions and education in other parts of the world to stop the spread of terrorist propaganda instead of taking a my-way-or-the-highway stance. We can do all this and more.
Our choice is clear. Either way we will have change. With a McCain-Palin ticket, the change will be catastrophic. We will find ourselves morally and financially bankrupt. Our shrinking middle class will disappear and be replaced by a system that can only be described as feudal. There will be the rich and there will be the rest of us: the system our Founding Fathers rejected when they sat down and hammered out the Declaration of Independence.
Or we can give our vote to an intelligent man with a real vision for the future and an understanding of what is needed to get us on the road to where we need to be. A man who can give us hope and inspire us to achieve the greatness we once had and can have again. We can choose a vice-president who is an expert on world affairs and who will have the true attention of a president who has lived the American dream and wishes to pass it on to the rest of us. We can elect Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
The only question is what kind of change do we want?
