Category: Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

It seems that in the recent presidential campaigning in the US, both McCain and Obama tend to have problems with endorsing and supporting pastors, priests and various other reverends making outlandish, intolerant and otherwise inappropriate remarks.  This has led to both campaign staffs developing extensive "Faith Based Disaster Management" skills, as one recent blog described it.

I like the term.  Not sure where I'm going with the concept, though.

Ever since the popularization of the Rev. Wright "problem" (and note that it is merely a "popularization," not a revelation, as Wright's views have been public and even well-documented, all along), I have been having some concerns about the Obama campaign – in how it's handled the "scandal," in the statements he's made (especially his speech last Tuesday, which I, uniquely among people of my political stripe, found weak-kneed and slightly vacuous), and in general, in a sort of indeterminate discomfort I've had with the quality and level of the "pro-Obama" discourse.   But I couldn't put my finger on what was bothering me, exactly.

And today, surfing the news and blog sites, I finally found a fabulously articulate and cogent summary of all my concerns about this issue, in the form a column by a sports commentator for the Kansas City Star, Jason Whitlock.  Go figure.  Thanks, Jason.  And no thanks to all you other political bloggers and opinion-makers out there.

Yet on the flip side, my personal favorite guy in the race, Bill Richardson, turned around and endorsed Obama later the same week.  I wonder if some kind of secret deal is in the offing – did Obama promise Richardson the number two spot, if he wins the nomination?  And, is that based, in part, on Hillary's implied promise of the number two to Mr Obama if she gets it?  What's certain is that although I find a Clinton-Obama ticket plausible, an Obama-Clinton ticket is patently impossible (because Hillary doesn't want to go from First Lady to VP – that's like going from supporting actress to… supporting actress).

And frankly, an Obama-Richardson ticket would be formidable, as Obama's weakest demographic, latinos, would be perfectly complemented by Richardson's obvious super-strength in exactly that area – Richardson's chilangosity is rarely commented upon, but it's a well-known fact among the Mexican-American population that despite his American birth, he grew up in Mexico City. Additionally, Obama, perceived as weak on both foreign policy and executive-branch experience, would be tucking a former ambassador to the U.N. and current popular state governor into his belt.  Such a ticket would definitely remove any lingering doubts I had about Obama. So… we shall see.

The following is excerpted from a speech by Barack Obama, in 2002.  Yes, 2002.

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perles and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income; to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That’s what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

Now let me be clear: I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.

I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the middle east, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda.

Meanwhile, in other news, the incoming president, 이멍박, is saying he plans to merge the republic's foreign and "unification" ministries.  This seems like a very good idea – currently, there is a sort of dissonance between the tones of the two – almost as if the republic has two completely separate foreign policies.

The foreign ministry keeps a somewhat hard line and handles positions in multilateral negotiations involving the north, e.g. with the U.S., China, Russia, et al., trying to contain the north's weapons programs.  At the same time, the unification ministry is a much kinder, gentler bureaucracy that seems focused on nothing so much as extending South Korea's immense wealth and successful social welfare programs to the miserable north, regardless of the extent to which the north's government is complicit in creating all that misery.

I heard a part of a speech by Mike Huckabee, with whom I was certain I would find very little in common, and was stunned to hear a compelling and cogent argument about the core problem with healthcare in the U.S.

It comes down to an MBA-style incentives analysis:  why do insurance companies prefer paying for major healthcare interventions when prevention would be cheaper, in the long run?  Because, from a strictly actuarial standpoint, they have almost zero interest in the long run, since the average person is covered by a single given healthcare provider only for a short or medium run (i.e. a person keeps a given job at a given company for, say, 5 years, when prevention-oriented healthcare requires much wider windows of 8 or 10 years, at the least).  Thus, to pay for prevention-oriented healthcare for covered workers is only to subsidize a competitor, who would be the next insurance provider down the line in a given worker's career track.

One can question the accuracy of the individual bits of fact or statistic in the above analysis, and I didn't get a chance to hear what he thought the solution might be, but I was nevertheless pleased by the argument's underlying clarity and logic – it had an almost marxist-dialectic appeal.

No doubt, someone's been writing Huckabee's policies and speeches, but that he would sign on to such an assumption-challenging exposition speaks well of his intellectual integrity.  I'm not saying I would vote for him – he is, after all, the current favorite of a fundamentally intolerant Christian right – the all-American Jihad, made-in-Arkansas.  But, he's been condemned more than once as a new example of something that might be called an "evangelical liberal," and this example may provide some support to that categorization.