The other day I heard a recording of the Saddleback Church thing, and I heard Obama pull out perhaps one of the most common phrases in political debates: "And this is a fundamental difference between myself and John McCain." Or something like that.
Candidates always do this in debates.They try to win over the middle and in doing so they sound like there was little difference between them. Which is why they go to such great lengths to point out what difference there is.
We know already that when the right plays to the middle, they are lying. Whatever McCain has said about himself being an average American and on the side of average Americans is bull. Average Americans don't buy $520 shoes and get rewarded for graduating at the bottom of their class. The rest of us work for a living.
What what about Obama? He's not lying. He has no reason to lie. He's almost a metaphor for America - biracial, immigrant father, worked for his success in life, Constitutional scholar, etc. Obama's IN the middle. Which is to say he's not a whole lot of difference from the status quo, aside from all of the major moves to the right over the last 8 years. But what would a candidate who is truly different look like?
What would a candidate look like if they really called for radical change. And not just radical change for the worse as we've seen over the last eight years. What would radical change for the better look like? And how would it go over if it were expressed in a debate to the American people?
Publicly Financed Elections & No More Election Fraud Bullshit
Step one in changing our small-d democracy for the better is publicly financed elections. Get the money out of politics. Close the loopholes. It's not right that we all have free speech (even to lie) but those with more money have more freedom of speech. $28k buys you face time with a presidential candidate right now, but what does that do for the other 99.5% of us who care about the fate of our country? Nada. I got a handshake from Obama for free and it's not worth a whole lot in terms of influencing him.
Also, we need to make damn sure everyone can vote. That means making sure felons know they can vote in states where they can (most states!) AND making sure election officials let them. That means no BS voter ID laws that keep college students and nuns from voting. That means paper trails and no more of this blackbox nonsense in which a private corporation owns our elections and won't share any of the details with us because they are proprietary. And if you really want to go nuts - make Election Day a holiday and make all of the public transportation free that day.
Break Up Monopolies, Especially The Media
Why is it OK for Rupert Murdoch to own Fox News AND the Wall Street Journal AND whatever else he wants to own? Why is it OK that we get all of our news from a handful of companies and we're duking it out for net neutrality on the side? It shouldn't be. The more voices in the media, the better. Period. And if you want to go nuts, mandate that they are non-profit institutions so there's no profit incentive for this dumbass infotainment they give us today.
The same goes for other monopolies. The laws are on the books. They aren't enforced. Right now there's a major merger in the news between JBS and Smithfield. We've already got major consolidation and little competition within the meatpacking industry. This merger would make it worse. We need a government dedicated to making it better. In all industries.
Universal Healthcare and a Living Wage
How many people do you know who are only in their jobs for the health benefits? Or who have no health care at all? What about people who work more than one job because just working one full-time job won't pay the bills? We would have a better society if everyone could work one full time job and make enough money to live on, and we would have a better society if we all had health care as a fundamental human RIGHT.
If you look at the amount of money that goes into pushing paper around and not actually delivering care right now, or the amount of money that goes to pay for people who show up at the ER when they are very sick because they couldn't afford to go to a primary care physician when they were only a little sick (or not sick at all, for preventative medicine), it's obscene. I don't have actual numbers on hand but I've seen presentations on this before that did have the numbers available.
I would absolutely bet that we could spend no more than we spend now on health care and cover every American. No problem. And it wouldn't be government run health care. The government wouldn't run your doctor's office and make it like the DMV. It would be like Medicare now. Not perfect but far, far better than what we've got.
Think of what kind of freedom and security that would be. Just imagine it. You could be an entrepreneur if you wanted. You might not be rich but at least if you got cancer suddenly you wouldn't have to die because you didn't have health care.
I have to run to work right now, but I'm not done here. I want to see the us get out of Iraq and start working WITH the international community on international matters instead of fighting wars every time we don't like another country. What if the military didn't get half of our tax dollars? I'm sure they don't need it. I'm no military expert but trust me, we don't need to spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined and we don't need enough nukes to blow up the world 13 times. We've only got 1 world to blow up.
With the extra money that would leave us with, we could start pursuing green initiatives in the way we actually need to. If the end of the military industrial complex leaves us with unemployed Halliburton employees, we could retrain them to work on converting our nation to renewable clean energies like wind and solar.
Not only that, but we could have free educations for all, through the PhD level. Denmark does it. Why not us? How many people do you know who didn't go for an advanced degree because of money? Or who are totally prisoners to their student loan debt? I was going to get a masters at one point until I did the math. Forget it. It would take 10 years for me to come out ahead financially and that's assuming that I got a high paying job at some huge multinational corporation. No way.
With free education, talented people could afford to graduate with advanced degrees and then go into non-profits or teaching or other careers that won't pay for their student loans right now but will benefit society.
And - I realize this puts me in the category of "tax and spend" liberal - but I wouldn't mind seeing higher taxes on the very rich. Because I don't like the huge incentive we have for greed in this country. If you only kept 40% of every dollar you made over $2 million, you'd still be plenty rich but there'd be less incentive for the greedy schmucks that are running this country today to keep stealing from us. And I do believe they would get what they paid for, with quality free education for all of the people they would employ in the future, and a wonderful public transportation system that their employees would use to get to work, etc, etc.
Taxes aren't a net loss for people when they aren't totally mismanaged right into the hands of Halliburton. The basic idea behind taxes SHOULD BE that we all come out ahead.
So there's my big radical plan that no candidate would ever, ever say. Including Barack. And I realize it's not mainstream. But think about that whenever you hear Obama and McCain talking about how different they are from one another. One's a lying elitist thief in sheep's clothing and the other's extremely mainstream, but neither's going to turn America into Denmark. The best we are looking at is a return to the Clinton years.