Issues, Plans. Who cares!

[aein]

A pretty standard charge against Obama is he's all talk, yet has no specific solutions for America. As a graduate student, who will start working in Washington D.C. for a governmental agency in the Fall, working on policy, I find any talk of policy on the campaign from both Obama and Clinton kind of vacuous. The truth is, in a campaign, issues aren't important. As a future wonk, I don't expect the president to be as well versed on the issues in my area as well I am. It's better to just get a feeling of where the candidates stands on issues. There are two reasons for this:

1) Because some of the most important issues and solutions are so complex, that they cannot be boiled down to a level that a voter, who has only so much time to analyze them, can understand. For example, one problem is how we're losing industrial and manufacturing jobs to oversea markets. Any real discussion of this issue would involve ending international tax deferral--an arcane issue of international tax law that makes it so that it's more tax advantageous for corporations to use oversea labor as opposed to domestic labor. The average bill from Congress is hundreds and thousands of pages long--do we really expect one person to be able to understand all of it?

2) Another reason is that the President, when voted into office can't get everything he/she promised passed. They have to work with Congress, sometimes modifying Congressionally-originated bills, and sometimes compromising on their own bills.

When I consider someone for President, I'm looking for intelligence, values, temperament, general stance on the issues, and judgment.

Intelligence: both Obama (HLS, magna cum laude) and Hillary (YLS) are smart enough to be president.

Values: I like the fact that Obama, after Columbia, decided to work as a community organizer for 5 years for a pittance. I also like that after graduating from HLS, he didn't take the route to the Supreme Court Clerkship/big law firm. He decided to go to a small civil rights firm, although I have to admit that the firm that Obama went into has extremely strong political ties in Springfield. Clinton went to law school right away, and worked for a big law firm afterwards.

Temperament: a major problem in Washington is its current inability to deal with the tough issues. I think Obama's more bipartisan approach will provide solutions rather than grid-lock. http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2006/10/barack_obama.html

General Stance on issues: The candidates stance on issues are almost identical. Barack is better on immigration issues for me. http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/02/elitist-fools-a.html. Also, Hillary is more of a hawk--which I don't like.

Judgment: Obama was right about Iraq. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXzmXy226po. He's also run a better campaign: extreme message discipline and professionalism. His advisers are better, more competent.

[eleny]

1. Good luck in D.C.!

I hope it doesn't grind you down.

Thanks for telling us your views and how you arrived at them. Our system was set up to move slowly. Your posting illustrated that pretty clearly.

[northernsoul]

2. Issue: Cluster-bombing in civilian areas

Senator Clinton thinks it's okay:

Not only is she willing to support military assistance to repressive regimes, she has little concern about controlling weapons that primarily target innocent civilians. Senator Clinton has refused to support the international treaty to ban land mines, which are responsible for killing and maiming thousands of civilians worldwide, a disproportionate percentage of whom have been children.

She was also among a minority of Democratic Senators to side with the Republican majority last year in voting down a Democratic-sponsored resolution restricting U.S. exports of cluster bombs to countries that use them against civilian-populated areas. Each of these cluster bomb contains hundreds of bomblets that are scattered over an area the size of up to four football fields and, with a failure rate of up to 30%, become de facto land mines. As many as 98% of the casualties caused by these weapons are civilians.

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4803

Senator Obama does not. See http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=2&vote=00232

This is a serious moral/foreign policy issue in which there is a clear distinction between the candidates.