PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS REVISITED

I started blogging 6 months ago and looking back, my initial posts were basically Op/Ed pieces. Things have changed in the last 6 months. I have gone from being a Romney supporter to volunteering for John McCain. The press and to a lesser extent, the public have started focusing on the presidential campaign. Perhaps the biggest change is that even after changing my SiteMeter preferences and eliminating my visits to my blog, I seem to have a growing readership. Thank you all.

So I decided to go back and revisit some of my old posts and see if any were still relevant today. I found this one from April 30th and repost it.

Comments are encouraged. Please SHARE YOUR WISDOM.

Anyone who has been paying attention to politics, especially presidential politics has been watching or reading the news to see what the candidates and to a lesser extent their respective parties stand for. Unfortunately, aside from how much each candidate has raised and spent, the news doesn’t tell us much. The national polls, which don’t tell anyone a thing about how candidates are fairing on a state by state basis, which is in fact significantly more important, tell us even less. So, like the aforementioned news/political junkies (Anyone who is paying attention to Presidential politics in April of 2007 is a junky), I have been scanning the internet, other blogs and candidate websites for indications of where the candidates stand and what they would do if elected.

After doing so I am left with one overriding question…WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA? What idea, what overarching theme or goal of governance does a candidate believe in that will shape all the decisions that he or she will make in office, what programs will be offered, which of the other parties ideas will be opposed and why? Another way of thinking about this is that perhaps candidates should consider their “legacy” before they are elected instead of two years before the end of their second term. “If I can only accomplish one great goal domestically and one internationally, what should they be and how will I be remembered?”

Instead, we get shopping lists or perhaps more accurately the equivalent of holiday “Wish Lists.”

Now, I am not suggesting there aren’t some great things on those lists, but after looking at the (Brownback just dropped out so I think it is 16) people currently running for president, I don’t see any that have been such a good little boy or girl that they are going to find all of their requested items under the world’s Christmas tree at the end of four or even eight years. Maybe they should do what my family did as kids and put ***** next to the things they really Really REALLY want. And sorry to say, I don’t think many of our current candidates are getting a pony.

So what is my pony? Domestically, it is putting our fiscal house in order and internationally it is reducing poverty. What is great about this debate is that everyone has a different ****** item and a different way to get it. But those are my two; fiscal discipline and an increasingly wealthy world. Without going into a significant amount of detail (Maybe I should be a presidential candidate) I would accomplish the first with significant reductions in spending, modest increases in taxes and a pledge to reduce the National Debt to no more than 20% of GDP. I would accomplish the second by utilizing bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations to increase the flow of goods, capital and labor across borders as well as funding micro-lending in lesser developed countries.

If, at the end of their term in office a President could look back having accomplished those two things they would not have to spend any time worrying about their legacy and they would have accomplished a lot of the other things on their wish list or at worst, set up their successor to do so.

Shared with my friends at Stop the ACLU, Perri Nelson's Website, third world county, 123beta, Adam's Blog, Stix Blog, Right Truth, The Populist, The World According to Carl, Pirate's Cove, Blue Star Chronicles, The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, The Bullwinkle Blog, The Amboy Times, and Dumb Ox Daily News, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.