Skip to main content

For the folks who insist on seeing major differences between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. . .

. . . and who insist that those of us who think they are pretty much the same are only pursuing a "third party strategy" of equivalence. . .

. . . this editorial cartoon in today's News Journal suggests that our meme might be catching on:

Comments

Dana Garrett said…
I believe that your claim that there are not big differences between Obama and Romney is both true and misleading. While their is substantial *close* agreement between them, the slight differences between them can make a big, possibly even critical, difference in people's lives. For example, voucherizing Medicare would cause irreparable harm to many people.
Dana,

I am not blind to differences in some policy areas.

But every person, regardless of party or ideology, has their own list of prioritized reasons to support or oppose, discriminate between or lump together candidates.

Just as I don't think Barack Obama ever seriously thought he could achieve single-payer health care or even negotiated drug prices, but held those out from time to time in his career to win votes, I don't think that Mitt Romney seriously believes he can ever voucherize Medicare--it's red meat for the base. It is rhetoric rather than reality.

That's point one.

Point two is this: MY personal list for president considers foreign policy, military intervention, and US-sponsored human rights violations around the world to be one of my highest priorities. With respect to those I see little or NO difference between Obama and Romney.

If you rate saving Medicare as a higher value for selecting a president, you are not going to see it that way, obviously. And that's OK.

But please remember that it was Barack Obama who cut Medicare by $750 billion (I admit the GOPers would have liked more) and it was John Carney I listened to at UD last week say (I paraphrase but very closely) "to pay for the ACA we're going to have to pay providers less."

Continually paying doctors less is not the way to get high quality health care.
anonone said…
Steve,

If you consider women's health issues as human rights and civil liberties issues (as I think they are), then there is a tremendous difference between Obama and Romney. Also, teh gays.

Still, I am voting Green this year.

a1
So despite the fact that you rejected both candidates (as I did), somehow my point is invalid?

Man, you really have a case of the ass, don't you?

By the way, on abortion rights and marriage equality I'm fine with Gary Johnson. His support of marriage equality as a constitutional right is about, what, five times better than Obama's opportunistic but hollow posturing?

Ironically, however, we do have this in agreement: despite my complete lack of use for her domestic policies, Jill Stein would be my second choice, because at least she'd follow a de-militarized foreign policy, restore civil liberties, and cut defense spending.
Dana Garrett said…
I certainly agree that the differences between Obama and Romney on foreign and military policy are so marginal as to be invisible. But I do think that domestic issues, particularly pocket book issues for the middle class and poor, are paramount. About that the albet slight but real differences between Obama and Romney are significant for millions of people.
And that, Dana, is where we part company--albeit amicably.

I can't bring myself to choose one warmonger over another based on better domestic policies. Seems to be like getting bribed to ignored Pakistani children being shredded by our drones.

And since, inside Delaware, my vote won't matter anyway (Obama will win in a walk), a vote to open up the political system is hardly going affect Medicare or whatever this time around.

But it might provide some more alternatives in four years.

Wonder how many more brown people will be dead by then who'd have been alive if Gary Johnson were actually elected President?

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?