Presidential Candidates

I favor Barack, myself. That's okay -- I know people who favor Hillary, and I think no less of them. My reasons for backing Barack Obama are, possibly, unique to me. I can explain them, but I can hardly require others to agree with me. Here they are:

My parents were born in 1914 & 1919, respectively, so they grew up Depression children. They were both Roosevelt Democrats, and their stories of FDR were inspiring to me as I grew up. Like him or not, I gather he had at least three things going for him: 1) He was a gifted speaker, using rhetoric to support, console, reassure, and rally a nation facing a profound economic crisis that affected everyone, and then the attack on Pearl Harbor and our subsequent entry into WWII. 2) He got things done. You can argue about the New Deal, but it did something. You can argue about his foreign policy, but it did something. 3) He got us into a just war.

I was born in 1956. Here's my personal report card on the presidents in my lifetime:

Dwight D. Eisenhower: Not a great speaker. Got things done, though (I love the Interstate system). Not sure about the Korean War. Final grade: B-

John F. Kennedy: Great speaker. Got some things done (space program, Peace Corps); didn't get other things done (civil rights; foreign policy crises). Got Vietnam started. Final grade: B

Lyndon Johnson: Not a great speaker ("my felluh Muricans"). Got some cool domestic things done (civil rights -- for which I give him, as a Texan, extra credit). Escalated the Vietnam War rather than shutting it down. Final grade: B+

Richard Nixon: Terrible speaker -- it's never a good sign when you're that easy to satirize. His accomplishments in foreign policy (China) are vastly outweighed by his bungling of the Vietnam war, and I can't think of a domestic accomplishment to offset Watergate. Vietnam turned out to be an unwinnable war. We withdrew after killing far too many of everybody: our troops, the South Vietnamese troops & civilians, and North Vietnamese troops & civilians. Yes, we should have respected the sacrifice of our military men and women when they came home; that's a national shame I hope we've forever learned not to do, but I wonder why our current leaders don't respect their sacrifice by not inflicting it so cavalierly on a new generation of military personal and families. Final grade: D- (I gotta grade on a curve, and someone is actually worse. See below.)

Gerald Ford: Not a great speaker. (Personal disclosure: My opinion of Ford's speeches was warped by the fact that my dad went to law school with him and said when Gerry spoke in class, he was particularly bland and vacuous.) Can't think of anything bad he did, nor anything good. He tried to heal the nation after Watergate: enh. Didn't get us into war, though. Final grade: C.

Jimmy Carter: Not a great speaker as president. No great accomplishments while in office, and the hostage crisis was not his finest hour. (Can't help thinking FDR or Truman would have done something...) Didn't wage war, though. Tough one for me, but I have to say it. Final grade: C+ (Final grade as a former president: A+ Truly, he lives and thinks as we all should, but don't.)

Ronald Reagan: Not a great speaker, for me personally. Joviality does not a great president make, I think. I personally have a hard time naming his accomplishments, perhaps because I don't think trickle-down economics made sense. (I'll concede he advanced the conservative Republican agenda; you'll forgive me if I don't list that as an accomplishment. If you think that was great, write your own blog.) I think he endorsed the notion that we (Americans) get it all and pay nothing for it, which is one of the reasons our environmental & energy policies are so screwy now. Iran-Contra was a problem too, and either he tacitly endorsed that, or he was asleep at the switch. I can't really hold Granada against him, but I don't think he gets credit for the hostages being released on the day he took office, nor the collapse of Communism. (I'd give the nod to Mikhail Gorbachev for that one.) Final grade: D+

George H. W. Bush: Not a great speaker (think Dana Carvey's "Not prudent at this juncture"; see Nixon, above). I totally give him credit for raising taxes, and I think he was right to do that. No big surprise that it was political suicide. Doesn't matter, it was what we needed and I'm glad he did it. Hated his domestic policy, though -- 1,000 points of [expletive deleted], if you ask me. I do give him points for getting the Kuwait/Iran thing right. Too bad his son couldn't leave well enough alone. Final grade: B-

Bill Clinton: Great speaker, even if Darrell Hammond skewered him on SNL. (No, I wasn't a great Bill Clinton fan, but even I was able to stomach the State of the Union when he did it.) Didn't get health care done (recognizing that it needs doing doesn't really count, particularly as he darn near left it undoable for a political generation); did get welfare reform done.* Economy boomed, and he actually accomplished a surplus. Whoo-hoo! Did not take us into war -- unless you count Kosovo, which I don't. Final grade: B

George W. Bush: Worst speaker of the bunch. Seriously -- worse than Nixon. (Nixon actually was a pretty smart guy, regrettably.) I can't think of a good accomplishment, and the list of bad ones keeps being written. (Latest example: he's threatening to veto a tax incentive for renewable energy like wind and solar because it's funding would come from cancelling tax incentives for oil and gas companies. I mean, seriously -- that's not even close to passing the smell test after the record profits Exxon & the like have posted recently. Let them fund their own damn exploration! Insanity.) And he fails the "unjust war" test worst of all, particularly as he has created the very condition he lied about to get us in there. I have some sympathy for John McCain's predicament -- he may be right that we have to stay in there because now (NOW!) there are terrorists in Iran because Bush took away the dictator keeping al-Qaeda out. And don't give me that "But Saddam was a brutal dictator" crap -- we've been supporting brutal, torturing Right-Wing dictators in South American for years. Final grade: F

So there you have it. About the candidates, here are my predicted grade ranges:

John McCain: Not a bad speaker, but not great. His potential accomplishments, or lack thereof, rather depend on whether he'll do the same switcheroo as Dubya, only in the other direction. When Bush ran in 2000, we heard a lot about compassionate conservativism, but that sure didn't seem to be a part of his presidency (with one teeny exception: inexplicablyly he funds HIV services worldwide). Well, we're now hearing a lot of mainstream conservative positions from McCain as he panders to the Christian Right, the anti-immigration crowd, and so forth. If we get the old McCain for president, he could be very good for the country: election reform would be a great boon to our political process! If we get the new, Genghis Kahn-version of McCain -- well, that will just be very sad. He'll be maintaining a bad war, which is a thankless task. Potential grade range: anywhere from a Reagan-esque D+ to a LBJ-style B+

Hillary Clinton: I'm not a fan of her speaking style, which isn't as rousing as her husband's. She has accomplished a lot as New York's junior senator, so we might really do well. I worry, though, that she'll be a micro-manager who gets bogged down in details and her paranoia goes off the charts, resulting in some really ugly stuff. I know she won't take us back into war unless she really needs to -- that's an area where I think a woman is an excellent choice. (Seriously -- moms know how to pick their battles with bullies.) Potential grade range: anywhere from a Nixon-like meltdown-causing D- to an outstanding A-.

Barack Obama: Great speaker. First one in a LONG time to inspire and heal, I think. I have real hope for his accomplishments because I think he understands the value of learning what works by trying lots of stuff, and then putting in place the one that works. Like Hillary, he'll get us out of Iraq and I believe he'll use a much more global/diplomatic approach to combating terrorism. And so he's the only one I can see getting an FDR-caliber A+. At his very, very worst, I can't see him getting lower than a Kennedy B.

But that's just me.


*Here's my sidebar on economics vs. entitlement programs: I'm all for entitlement programs. I would fund Headstart to the max. I would fund a huge increase in TeachAmerica. I would have sent in the Army Corps of Engineers to the Gulf Coast post-Katrina and told them to stay until. But, we have to get real about Medicare and Social Security. They will bankrupt us eventually, and while it surely has not helped to launch and fund a morass-of-a-military-campaign in the Middle East, that's chicken-feed compared to the two worst economic problems looming. I applauded Bill Clinton's welfare reform because I believe it's good to get entrenched programs out of the trench and re-formed. We have to do the same with our programs for the elderly.

The problem with Medicare and Social Security is that no one will ever vote against the interests of Grandmas & Pop-pops, particularly with so many of us heading inexorably into old age. We can't pick on old people -- they don't deserve it the way "welfare mothers" did. (For some reason, you have to demonize the recipient of an entitlement program before you can "reform" it.) Well, that's just crazy. How is it going to help Grandma & Pop-pop if the country is bankrupt? I am not suggesting we cut them off cold turkey, but we have to do something now about the money we're going to owe then. If we announced, "The minimum age will go up in X years," we have a chance to get people used to the idea. But we talk about the "third rail of politics" and do nothing. Boy, what a great suit the emperor is wearing today!