Recently a friend of mine posted a pretty short and simple bulletin on her MySpace profile, encouraging people to vote for Obama. A commenter posed a simple question: “what makes you say that?”

It’s utterly impossible to post a lengthy, well-formatted comment on that damned site (they’ve been at it for years; you’d think they could get basic formatting right), so I’m just shoving it here Read on if you care.

Jason: Are you serious, or just trolling?

On the off-chance you’re of voting age, you’ve registered, and are planning to vote, I’ll pretend you’re not just trolling and try to educate a little.

Our country has problems. Lots of them. A big chunk of the financial system just fell over and died this past week (did you somehow miss the news about some big banks failing spontaneously and being absorbed by the government?). Congress is haggling this very moment over the nitty-gritty details of a nearly-seven hundred billion dollar bailout for this.

The housing market collapsed two years ago and the fallout from it is still hitting us (bad debts stemming from it is partially responsible for last week’s tacnuke on Wall Street). Those who bought housing when it was expensive either lost their homes or managed to survive insane ARM adjustments but are now barely able to stay afloat because their homes aren’t worth what they borrowed to buy them.

Fuel prices hit $4 per gallon this summer. That means you either spend more money at the pumps or you don’t drive as much. That, in turn, means you have less money to spend on other stuff, and/or you don’t travel as much. That, in turn, kicks the tourism industry right in the nuts.

We’re (globally, not just in the U.S.) running out of oil, temperatures are steadily climbing each year, and more and more of U.S. work is being shipped overseas.

The United States continue to operate at a loss — borrowing money to keep afloat, importing more than it exports, and it’s eventually going to reach a point where the rest of the world stops lending us money or letting us buy things on credit.

Meanwhile, religious nutjobs in this country do everything they can to stop research that “offends” them (the Large Hadron Collider, stem cell research, etc.) and still try to shoehorn “intelligent design” down our schoolkids’ throats (via public funds, no less), all while just about everyone openly admits our education system is broken and is churning out non-competitive graduates. China just had its first spacewalk a couple days ago … they’ve got a lot more brainy/smart people now than we do, so we can expect more face slaps like this one from other countries where “hard” subjects like math, physics, chemistry, and even history are still more important than arguing about talking snakes in trees.

Then there’s our health system. I don’t have health insurance and can’t afford to buy it. It is genuinely less expensive for me to simply pay cash out of pocket for the limited lab work, doctor visits, and prescriptions I’ve needed over the last year (seriously — $4 a month for the pills, about $50 for an office visit and $50 for the bloodwork) than it would be to find a health insurance plan that just pays for generic prescription drugs and for routine office visits/labwork (think $200 or more per month). If I fall ill, it will still be cheaper for me to visit an emergency room or urgent care clinic than it would be to maintain insurance. There are tens of millions of Americans out there just like me, doing the same thing.

Ironically, we could actually fix most of this crap if we weren’t spending billions every month in Iraq. That’s not just hyperbole — just removing this one expense from the budget would stem the hemorrhaging in our coffers.

Take all that cash we’re blowing in Iraq (where thousands of Americans have died already) and dump it into other projects: solar, wind, and nuclear powered generation stations along with a national power grid refit, and suddenly we’re a 100% emissions-free nation (as far as power generation goes) in 10 years. Dump just a little of that cash into energy storage technology (batteries, fuel cells, etc.) and in ten years we very well could have all-electric cars with incredible performance and fantastic range, where “gassing up” after a thousand miles just means pulling into a gas station, just like you do today, and swapping out a dead battery for a charged one, for, say, $20. I bet that whole project (repairing ancient power lines, building new power generators, decommissioning old ones, reprocessing and handling spent nuclear fuel, etc.) would create a really big pool of jobs, too. Jobs that pay well. We can’t all work at Wal-Mart.

That’s just one idea, too — there are countless others. Here’s another one: Take all that money from the Iraq war, and create a new universal health insurance plan. Every American citizen is eligible. Pay a fixed (and low) premium monthly, and you get to go see a doctor. The same rules about “no cosmetic/unnecessary stuff” that apply now would apply in the new plan, too — no free fake boobies on Uncle Sam’s dime just because you want them, though if you have to have a breast removed to deal with a tumor, we’ll gladly help perform reconstructive work to restore your former appearance. Expensive? Hell yes, especially at the start. Abuse potential? Absolutely. These are both things that can be fixed as we go along. As acutely ill people begin to get treatment for their sicknesses, costs will drop as they stop just hitting the ER every week with a new crisis then skipping out on the bill. As healthy people who aren’t sick but also aren’t getting routine health checks done now start getting them done annually, we’ll catch diseases and problems faster, before they become expensive to treat. People will live longer, and will be healthier, and it won’t be as expensive either.

That’s just another idea. There’s lots more. There is so much we could be doing with the money we’re wasting, that would better our country and make us stronger again.

You’ll notice I’m not advocating stripping down our military. I do think we need to withdraw from a strategic and tactical nightmare (Iraq is our generation’s Vietnam … sorry, guys, but we’ve already lost) to stop the financial bleed, but we most definitely need a state-of-the-art, well-staffed and well-trained military. We’ve pissed off a lot of people in the last thirty years. Even Russia is getting its teeth back (look at its reaction to our “input” in the Georgia thing).

I’m not advocating isolationism either. We need to stay engaged with our neighbors and we need to fix what’s broken instead of just closing off the borders and saying “screw it, we’ll stick to ourselves.” There’s room for us on the world stage — they’re still trying to get us to participate without us just taking over.

To more directly answer your question, McCain is openly supportive of more of the same politics that got us into this mess. He wants to smirk in a debate about owning a bracelet, and brag about how he got caught as a soldier and held captive for years (as if this has anything whatsoever to do with his leadership abilities) while the economy was falling apart as he spoke at the debate. He supported (and still supports) many of Bush’s proposals and ideas. Bush currently has an approval rating in the low teens — that means over 80% of this nation’s citizens thinks he’s done a bad job.

You really want to replace him with a guy that he’s endorsed, that will do the same things he’s done?

Don’t even get me started on McCain’s anti-woman policies, beliefs that religions deserve more public money than they already get, and his desires to further gut the public school system with budget-sapping vouchers. Then there’s the tax breaks for the wealthy and for corporations … sigh. And if he’s so big on getting out there into these foreign lands to negotiate and figure things out, why the hell did he pick a running mate who’s afraid to even talk to the domestic press?

I don’t like everything Obama’s said and done either. He’s voted “yea” on things in the Senate I really wish he’d voted “nay” on (that damned “PRO-IP” nonsense comes to mind — thanks, guys, for giving the RIAA the power to permanently seize your computer equipment just based on an accusation of piracy; that’ll show us). But he’s eager to change many of our government’s policies in positive ways.

This change is coming, whether you (or I) like it or not. Even if McCain wins the election, and everyone smirks at how he won despite this promise of change from Obama, reality is going to assert itself more and more strongly as the months and years go by. Don’t want to change our broken health care system? No problem — let lots of people die. That always looks great on a president’s resume. Think “peak oil” is nonsense? No problem. Keep going like we are. I’ll start saving now for that $10 per gallon price that’s coming. Think global warming is total bullocks? Good for you — it’s your right as an American to crank up that air conditioning to keep your home nice and cool. Say, that electric bill is pretty thick this month, isn’t it? $300 to $400 a month? Outrageous! Who’s responsible for this?!?! Oh. Heh. Yeah.

The change is going to hurt. It can either hurt a little bit now (yes, jobs will be lost as the health care system is transformed, and the health insurance industry will take a hit, but other jobs will be created as well, including in other sectors, especially if we start taking our aging power grid problems seriously), or it can hurt a lot later (take your pick: job shifts and confusion about who’s paying your doctor now, or routine rolling blackouts and $1,000 annual physicals ten years from now).

We can’t just keep sticking with the “old guard” because it’s funny to keep “pissing off the liberals,” or because it’s “what we’ve always done,” or because “my dad was in the military so I have to vote Republican,” or because “they’re both the same so it doesn’t matter anyway.”

You have to figure out what’s important to this country and the world, then compare the candidates to figure out who’s going to be able to best achieve that. You can’t just vote for you anymore. I can’t believe Bush actually got into office back in 2000 by promising every American a three hundred dollar check (and by stealing the election, but I digress). Surely you’re not just going to vote for McCain because you think he’s got a better smirk than his opponent or because you actually think we belong in Iraq. Right?

Anyone? Hello?

Technorati Tags: 2008 Presidential Election Politics