Mr. President: Please focus on These Things!

The debate is how Barack Obama should conduct his campaign for re-election. Should he imitate FDR and attack? Should he emulate Bill Clinton and run toward a centrist position? Should he continue as the Great Compromiser? Maybe he should just fold up his tent and steal away.

This is what I do know: people are tired of Congress. Obama has spent altogether too much time trying to get them to do something. No one wants to hear another word from any of them, nor about them. Our two-party system has degenerated into trench warfare. There is very little to be said for hunkering down in the trenches, and firing mortar rounds. To try to establish a base in the middle of that gruesome warfare means getting fired at from both sides. Obama should not even run against them. He should run for things!

He should run for a fair tax system, in which everyone is taxed fairly.

He should run for an honest banking system in which customers, and not executives, get a good deal.

He should run for ending both overseas wars, now!

He should run for creating jobs, in any and every way possible.

He should run for protecting Social Security and Medicare.

He should run for the things every poll says the great majority of people want: fairness, jobs, health care, a secure retirement, and end to war; not phony bi-partisan cooperation, stalemate, and blame.

Don't run as a political partisan! Run with a clear program in mind! Let the politicians be for or against those things. When the election comes, the people can decide who they want in office; people who are for, or against, those kinds of things.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames. We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves. For instance, some people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old. Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old. That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together. But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer. It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog