Obama: Specifically Better than McCain

One weird criticism the anti-Obama crowd often throws out there is that his supporters don’t know any of his positions on anything. Then the argument goes one of two ways: 1. If anyone looked they would see that Obama has no real positions and is just a lot of hot air. 2. If anyone looked they would see that Obama is just another regular politician whose positions are barely different from those of John McCain. Each assertion is dumb in its own unique way, because 1. Obama has better-articulated positions than McCain, is better able to explain those positions when asked, and has run on the issues instead of on relentless character assassination and a largely irrelevant 40-year old war record, and 2. Obama and McCain have more substantive policy differences than any two candidates since at least the Reagan era.

Anyway, just to have something to link to again and again when this comes up, I thought I’d run down a few of the many ways Obama’s policy soundly trumps McCain’s. For primary sources about their policy, you can easily check their campaign websites.

Foreign policy: This is pretty obvious. Put succinctly, Obama wants to focus on liberal internationalism, which is based on working within agreed-upon international policy as a way to resolve conflict, whereas McCain favors a more extreme version of the Bush doctrine that everything we don’t like is a grave, Sudetenland-esque existential threat that must be met with full-on war. Let’s divide this category so the paragraphs will look shorter:

Iraq: Specifically, Obama wants to get out of Iraq in about 16 months, whereas McCain wants to stay until we “win”, although he has never really defined what winning would look like. We will stay until we win, and if we win, we can stay longer, say 100 years. Obama’s plan is in line with what most Americans, most Iraqis, the Iraqi president, and, indeed, most people around the world want. McCain’s is not.

Other: Obama thinks it’s a good idea to meet with foreign leaders to try and avoid additional wars. By contrast, pretty much the only thing McCain has been consistent on during his senate term is war-like aggression toward everyone from North Korea to Iran to Russia. He is far more likely to get us into another war. And his expertise does not compare favorably to that of Obama, which is one reason foreigners like Barack so much. As an example of this, consider the Georgia crisis. McCain was part of the crowd that acted like it would rush to Georgia’s aid in a Russia conflict. That crowd pretty arguably helped push Georgia toward invasion. Afterwards he blustered about Russia’s plan to take over all its old states (not true) and said that we were all Georgians (also not true). The Georgian president sized all this up, decided he needed American help, and turned to... Joe Biden.

Taxes: Obama’s tax plan increases government revenues by raising taxes on the very wealthiest families while either lowering or leaving unchanged the taxes for everyone else. McCain has most recently been in favor of extending the Bush tax cuts, which require middle class families to pay a much larger proportion of the total revenue, and wealthy people to pay a much smaller portion. Obama would essentially balance the budget through matching revenues to expenditures. McCain cannot possibly balance the budget under his tax plan, and has made vague statements about cutting waste (a meaningless amount of money in context) and nonessential government programs. He hasn’t said what any of them are. He plans to continue devoting vast amounts of taxpayer money to a pointless war. Obama does not.

Economy: Difficult to compare because McCain has been pretty vague and does not have near the level of detail in his policy that Obama does. But in short, Obama favors a variety of economic stimuli to American workers combined with increased government oversight of things like the housing market, credit card companies, and other lending/investment institutions. I really can’t say what McCain favors specifically, because neither can he, but it seems to involve fewer stimuli, less oversight, and more emphasis on cutting waste, which is, in the grand scheme of things, both irrelevant and largely impossible. Of the two, he is more closely aligned with Bush’s economic policies.

Energy: Here again, it’s difficult to say what McCain favors, although this time it’s because he constantly changes his mind. For instance, he opposes his own McCain-Lieberman bill which would have helped curb greenhouse gas emissions. Obama has a coherent plan for increasing investment in green technology while instituting a cap-and-trade policy on carbon emissions, essentially providing a market incentive to stop using oil. On paper McCain also favors these things, but who the hell knows what he actually thinks. One area the candidates differ even on paper is in pandering to big oil. Obama favors a windfall tax on oil profits, which would help regular Americans deal with the increasing cost of oil without creating policies that reaffirm our dependence on it (things like gas tax holidays). McCain is against that, possibly because he has financial and political ties to big oil. Lately his policy has mostly revolved around offshore drilling and a gas tax holiday, which even he knows won’t work.

Education: Obama favors fixing No Child Left Behind, including funding it. He wants government help to improve access pre-school education and after-school programs. He also wants to increase government assistance to college-bound students and simplify federal student aide applications. McCain didn’t have an education policy on his website for most of the primaries. Today, he has one, and it is a long string of meaninglessness revolving almost entirely around the idea of competition, meaning that students should be able to leave a failing school. He doesn’t say how we achieve this or how it will actually improve anything. He has no concrete plan relating to NCLB, pre-school, after-school programs, or college in general.

Healthcare: Obama favors nationalized healthcare. McCain does not.

The assertion that Obama is the candidate of empty rhetoric is almost impressive in its commitment to absurdism. Obama’s positions usually include things like policy, numbers, and plans. McCain’s, when he has them, are typically garbled and bellicose pronouncements with tenuous connection to the world of practical politics. This election features one responsible candidate and one cynically uninformed candidate coasting on negative attacks, fearmongering, and a personal achievement from the Vietnam era. We have rarely had such a clear-cut good and bad choice, even in the Bush/Kerry election. What this discourse needs is not more details of Obama’s already vastly more coherent policy proposals. It needs a second candidate.