Written debate, and I'm not sure if we'll get much (if any) rebuttal space, in addition to time constraints on the part of my Republican counterpart. Therefore, I've structured my first salvo like a speech. I've never actually engaged in any sort of debate before, so I could use some help. This is a rough draft I just put together in about two hours, I was hoping to get some feedback while I pause to eat?
It's after the jump.
In short order, Americans from all around our nation will cast their votes for the next President of the United States. It will be a relief to all of us to reach the end of, “My name is X-Y, and I approve Z message.” But what comes to a close might be more than just another election - as a nation, we have the opportunity to finally banish the ghosts which have haunted our politics for more than forty years.
It was Barry Goldwater who first gave us the lie that we should distrust a large government. Of course there should be limits on government; that was a founding principle of the United States. But unregulated monopolies do not create a freer marketplace; they create a shadow government, built on collusion, feudalism, and plutocracy. And right now, we have the lowest tax burdens of any affluent nation in the world; google it. When lowering taxes improves the economy, it does so according to the Laffer Curve. But by all measures, we are well past the peak of this curve. Every income or capital gains tax cut in recent decades has failed us. It’s clear that this path will not lead America to a golden age, merely another gilded age.
Barry Goldwater was defeated in a landslide - but his associate, Nixon, carried on. The two of them created the Southern Strategy - implicitly appealing to racism to gain votes. In a sickening bit of irony, that is what enabled Nixon to defeat first Hubert Humphrey - the man who chartered the Democratic Party’s explicit rejection of bigotry - and then George McGovern - the politician often called the “most decent man of his time.” The Southern Strategy persists to this day, and is occasionally acknowledged by a handful of Republicans.
The lingering whispers of Goldwater and Nixon primarily haunt the Republican Party. But the degenerate state of that party harms us all; America has slowly crawled to the right even as our closest allies walk to the left. It was Bill Clinton, after all, who signed NAFTA and the repeal of the Glass-Stegall Act, which helped to turn a strong economy into a bubble economy. Clinton was inaugurated by announcing the end of big government. Even President Obama’s historic achievement in giving us universal healthcare was not immune. While all of our peers use single-payer healthcare, President Obama hoped for bipartisan support, and reused the Republican individual mandate proposal from the 90’s. Instead of cooperation, the creators disavowed their own ideas - and shifted even harder right.
The President’s economic policies are not perfect, but he is vulnerable from the left, not the right. Austerity does not work; in Britain, the two leading parties went for austerity as a bipartisan measure. It was such a failure that party leaders were forced to publicly apologize, beneath the weight of ridicule. On the other hand, our stimulus was an actual success, preventing our Great Recession from becoming a Greater Depression. Overwhelming consensus places its failing in being paired with tax ‘relief’ and being too small - not that anything larger would have passed.
Yet, America continues an inexorable march rightward, in defiance to both peers and history. Nowhere is this more evident than in Mitt Romney himself. His father viewed high taxes as a patriotic duty; his mother ran for Senate on a pro-choice platform. Sadly, this legacy of Romneys from a Christmas Past has vanished. Barry Goldwater and George Romney could not have been more at odds within their party forty-years ago; but Goldwater’s urge to ‘saw off the Eastern Seaboard’ has now found a vessel in Mitt Romney’s callous disregard for 47% of the American population.
We have the opportunity to exorcise Goldwater, Nixon, and other harmful spectres from our national discourse. It is time to say enough to dishonest austerity; we must return to believing that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people will not perish from the Earth. It is time to say enough to hyperconservative partisans; we must return to having a loyal opposition, not a corporate one. And it is time to say enough to the Southern Strategy, and move to a Fifty State Strategy. We can only do that with a vote for Barack Obama. To close, I will not say, “God Bless America.” Rather, I exhort us one and all to do our very best to bless America ourselves. Because yes, we can.
6:03 PM PT: Updated! Second Draft!