Senator Obama: Debate This, Part II
Electability
Senator Obama has made the claim that Senator Clinton’s record makes her unelectable. In part 2 of a series of debate challenges to Obama, let’s take a look at the remaining two candidates ‘base,’ their constituents. Obama has made the claim that his voters won't vote for her. Michelle Obama has suggested that she'd have to "think about" whether or not to support Hillary if she's our candidate, suggesting that something in Hillary's stance on things would need to get Michelle's closer attention.
Senator Clinton’s base is working adults, mainly working mothers and the least affluent working Americans who have worked 'for' women, and who thus have some direct experience with female supervisors. Mainly her base is single working mothers. Why do these working Americans support Hillary?
(1)Her universal health care pledge. Working parents know the hard choices they make daily, between ‘survival’ choices, food, lodging, medical care, dental care and ‘life enhancement’ choices, such as nice clothes, extra school help for their kids, enrichment toys such as computers, an occasional night out at some inexpensive restaurant or movie theater. These are the parents who will get medical insurance for their children, but may not purchase it for themselves, as they may forgo dental care for themselves, because they want to provide not only necessities for their children, but some of the ‘extras’ more affluent parents take for granted. While more moms back her candidacy then dads, in this demographic she gets both, all those parents who will forgo their own advantages for the sake of their children. One choice, medical care, should never be a choice, we all need medical insurance, to provide health care for the parents of children as well as the kids themselves.
(2) Her education plan: Clinton’s educational plan is based on two principles: the first is that all children need the advantage of universal pre-school, which has been consistently shown to improve educational performance in later school years. Parents who can afford high quality child care already have this benefit for their children, it’s the parents who can’t afford private pre-school who can’t give this advantage to their children. A level playing field starts with early childhood education. There is also the need for post-secondary education, and in her plan it’s either two years of trade school or two years of college. This also dovetails with her economic recovery plan, as businesses need a skilled labor force, and young adults need to be qualified for jobs. Rich kids can get internships, disadvantaged kids needs to be prepared on day one. They need to be paid for their work.
The second principle, and the one that permeates all her plans, is getting the right people to implement her plans. As in her Iraq exit plan, which depends on retired military personnel, generals and lower rank retired military administrators to oversee the exit plan and to monitor the progress, her education plan depends on retired teachers, educators, and education administrators. The quality of educational reform depends solely on those who have the know-how and the experience to design a national educational program that gives every American child a ‘supplement’ to the normal public education that is available in her or his own community.
Clinton wants every child to have access to the best education. The only way to achieve this goal is to have supplementary schooling that can be utilized at home, in libraries and by those college students who elect to engage in public service tutoring to help pay for their own college and graduate school expenses. Thus under Clinton we’ll have something like an education corps, free supplemental course work for all grades, and for each subject, that provides the highest quality texts and learning modules with self-tests so that each child can monitor her or his own success before moving on to the next phase. This would allow little future mathematicians and scientists, music theorists, computer engineers, and literature professors et al to go deeply into their own future fields, even without the advantage of highly educated parents, expensive tutors, or the highest quality neighborhood schools. Clinton will level the educational playing field.
(3)Clinton’s pledge to bring jobs to Americans. This entails the government investing in green technology, in competition with purely profit oriented investment, which will depend on 'best science,' and placing these companies in currently disadvantaged communities. Clinton sees no rational reason why businesses avoid disadvantaged communities. There is as much or more profit available in these communities, and she’ll make sure that government investment businesses and government agencies will be located primarily in our disadvantages communities.
Obama also has a voter base, which also includes some who hope he’ll do things as well as Clinton. African Americans may support him because he’ll be a great role model for minority male children and because he’ll be a symbol of the end of racism and the possibility for all minority males to strive for success and to overcome whatever ‘internal’ barriers to achieving success there may be for this large and to date undervalued group of citizens, but without him they'd be solidly behind Clinton.
Obama mainly appeals to upper income Americans who want to see a new movie, they've been disenchanted with the diminished status of america, both at home and around the world, and they're excited and some are even thrilled with the idea of a biracial Harvard law review editor being our public face. They see the possibility that his image will change the way Americans view ourselves. They may also hope that he's going to follow the same route as Clinton and take over her plans and her exert advisors. Some hope he'll take her as a vice president and put her in charge of implementing her plans. There are some who hope he'll also fire the hacks and put in professionals to begin the process of cleaning up the Bush mess and making government work for Americans as well or better than it has in the past. He may make fun of her over 'travelgate' but one hopes he'd also have tried to get rid of incompetent workers and put in place standards so that future incompetents would be quickly identified and replaced.
He also appeals to those who fear a woman being elected president, who may think this will mean that women will take over political jobs, just as women have crept up in professional jobs that mainly depend on test scores and professional degrees. Women account for more than half of college enrollees, as well as professional school slots, for example in law and medicine. More then half of most graduate school students are now female.
So, my debate question to Senator Obama is: how will you recruit the best retirees and experienced professionals and experts if you’re our next president? What will you do to level the educational playing field so that no child, truly, is left out? How will you make sure working parents will have their own health care, if they can “afford” insurance only by taking something from their children that they may decide is more important than their own lives?
For those of you who doubt she'll do these things, I suggest you ask Senator Obama to ask her, in the next debate. I'm not going to put up a tip jar because I'm tired of having my tip jars trolled. As someone on Saturday Night Live used to say, talk about it. I'll sit it out.