I used to be a Republican. Technically, I still am but I've noticed one or two things over the last eight years that got me thinking. Over time, I've changed my views from "small government" with private industry filling the gaps to "medium-sized government" with little involvement from private industry. From everything that's gone on with the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina and other situations that have gone on over the last eight years it's been a real eye-opener. I've seen that, given half a chance, a private company will take payment without delivering the product/service they were hired for, or they'll price gouge and deliver par or sub-par service.
Even going back to Enron, we see a private company that was encouraging electricity-generating plants to shut down to perform unnecessary maintenance in order to keep electricity prices high, despite the fact that they were causing rolling blackouts due to a lack of electricity in the grid. They were able to manipulate the market so greedily thanks to deregulation legislation passed by Senator Phil Gramm (McCain's top economic adviser and #1 recipient of contributions from Enron to a US Senator), and Gramm is also responsible for deregulating the Banking industry (UBS was another company that donated quite a bit of money to him while he was in office, and he took a job with them after leaving the Senate), which removed oversight over the banks that would have prevented them from mislabeling the risk profile of their investments, along with other regulation that would have collectively prevented this current economic crisis from ever happening.
Certainly Gramm is not singlehandedly responsible for the problem, but the Republican party base (of which I considered myself a member until recently) strongly believes in small government, meaning deregulation and allowing private industry to fill the gaps. The last eight years have shown me they're dead wrong. Deregulation virtually ensures that greedy executives, using an corporation to shield them (at least to some extent) from accountability, will game the system no matter who gets hurt or what the consequences for everyone else (see: Grandma Millie). Executives drive their companies straight into the ground and then jump out with their golden parachute to the tune of millions of dollars (for doing a terrible job and destroying a perfectly good company) while the shareholders who actually own the company get nothing.
Now the Democrats are fighting tooth and nail to make sure taxpayer money in this $700 Billion bailout isn't used to pay for golden parachutes, essentially rewarding the people who caused the problem in the first place — with TAXPAYER money, since they have no more money of their own — and the Bush administration and house Republicans are STILL giving them pushback over it, calling the provisions "punitive measures" that they find "inappropriate" in this time of crisis. The Bush administration essentially just wants to hand the money straight over to the corporate CFO's and "let private industry fix it" even though it should be painfully obvious how blatantly irresponsible that is considering private industry has just once-and-for-all proven that without oversight and consequences they will take the greediest possible action. This bailout is ostensibly intended to create (and/or not lose) jobs and to keep the lending system up and running so people can buy cars and houses, but I don't see that happening if the bull-headed Republicans (led by Bush holding a veto pen) force the Democrats to cave-in or else have their bill vetoed and thrown in the garbage.
I completely disagree with the Democrats on a wide number of policies ranging from gun control to their distaste for Nuclear energy but it seems to me that we're in a crisis that is a direct result of the Republicans getting their way, and didn't even take long. Bill Clinton was President just 8 years ago, the economy was doing great, and it wasn't like he wasn't spending any money on traditionally Republican areas like the military — He did made some cuts but Clinton was also the one who approved ordering more Stealth Bombers, at a price tag of $2 Billion EACH. Sure, taxes were higher but other than that things were actually pretty great compared to what we're dealing with now. And now we have McCain doing his little dance, on the one hand saying he's virtually aligned with Bush, and on the other hand saying he's a "maverick" that has fought Bush.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ycPJr7YWmQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnb2IrsU1Cg
And if it wasn't bad enough that McCain agrees with Bush and the Republican base on the economy, his agreement (or OVER-agreement) on foreign policy should have his would-be supporters running scared. McCain has not only belittled Obama for wanting diplomatic talks with Iran (and Russia), he himself instead chose to go the path of tough talk and outright threats. McCain was pushing to invade Iraq practically since we left in 1991 and when Bush got elected McCain started pushing heavily to invade Iraq even before we were attacked on 9/11. He's also the guy who did this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-zoPgv_nYg
Pat Buchanan, obviously an old-school conservative by any measure, said during the primaries that McCain was a "Bellicose, red-faced man" who will "make Cheney look like Ghandi". Buchanan, being a conservative, doesn't actually have a problem with McCain's economic policy or even his foreign policy that much except that he seems convinced that if elected McCain would force the issue of permanent bases in Iraq (even if the Iraqi government said no) and waste little time starting a war with Iran. We've already seen that the Iraqi government effectively endorsed Obama's withdrawal plan when they released their own that closely paralleled it. As far as the Democratically elected government of Iraq is concerned, they want every last US soldier out of their country by the end of 2010. As far as John McCain is concerned, he's still calling Obama's 18 month withdrawal plan "failing in Iraq" or "losing the war" and is still saying we'll "stay until the job is done" without even offering any benchmarks for how we will know when that is.
Recently on Roland Martin's new show on CNN he brought in four viewers to share their thoughts on the debate. Two supported McCain and two supported Obama. Of the two McCain supporters, one of them seemed to think that as long as our army was in Iraq that terrorists were somehow unable to attack us here in our own country. Not only is that overlooking the fact that Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 but even if she said that about Afghanistan it would be a gross oversimplification that doesn't make any sense in the real world. I have no doubt that she honestly believes it, but that doesn't change the fact that it's patently absurd. People who have the inclination and ability to attack our homeland are not going to waste time shooting at US troops, nor are they going to plan their attacks from anywhere the US military might be raiding at the drop of a hat.
The other McCain supporter, unbelievably, was worse. He showed his astounding ignorance by repeating McCain's line (read: lie) about how it's important to give tax cuts to big businesses in order to create jobs because the US has a 35% tax rate on businesses, "one of the highest in the world". How could he possibly still believe that when Obama came on two seconds later to call McCain out on that B.S. and pointed out we actually have one of the LOWEST effective tax rates in the world once you consider all of the write-offs and tax loopholes we already offer. Did he just turn the TV off after McCain stopped talking? And still unspoken is the clear fact that the Republicans have been giving tax breaks to businesses and those businesses haven't been creating jobs, they've been shipping them overseas.
John Zogby (of Zogby polls) was on the radio yesterday saying that the Democrats, throughout the last three election cycles with Gore, Kerry and Obama, have constantly struggled because they give off the impression that they think "smart people are Democrats and stupid people are Republicans". Well, if they're giving off that impression then they certainly do need to change that in order to avoid losing votes, but from where I'm sitting that rings uncomfortably true. His own polls show it's true; college educated people tend more towards the Democrats and non-college voters are more often drawn to the Republicans. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the Republicans have expertly manipulated a lot of uneducated people into thinking the Republican party is their friend and that the Democrats are evil (or Muslim — which really shouldn't even be an issue, shouldn't be equated with evil and is just another sign of the lack of education in this country).
Basically, as much as many reasonable Republicans might think Obama's going to implement policies they don't like, if McCain gets elected this country is absolutely screwed. He fully approves of how Bush has strengthened the executive branch relative to congress and he's already looking to strengthen it further by bragging about how he will veto EVERYTHING that comes across his desk unless he approves of it 100%, no compromises. With social security reaching criticality, he'll likely get his way and dismantle the system for future retirees and congress will have to play along just to be able to keep paying benefits to existing retirees.
His healthcare agenda is to remove the tax incentive for employers to provide health insurance, forcing people to buy it on their own but giving them a $5,000 tax credit (per family). Decent family health insurance costs over $8,000 per year. For people that no longer receive it through work, they will potentially have an extra $8,000 of annual expense out of nowhere (they certainly aren't going to get instant, automatic raises at work to compensate for the money their job was contributing) and they'll even have to pay taxes on $3,000 of that money to-boot; and that's not even taking pricing into account. McCain's plan assumes that health insurance will become more affordable because of "the market" when in reality we've seen health insurance prices go up 4x the rate of inflation every year for the past decade on average. That's completely unsustainable.
And that's even before we consider McCain's continued (although suddenly modified) laissez faire policy towards private industry, replacing up to three retiring Supreme Court Justices with conservative judges that he will encourage to overturn Roe v. Wade, and his hawkish insistence that the answer to every foreign policy question is military force. These are the reasons why I am (for the first time ever) voting for a Democrat for any Federal office, much less President. If there were truth in advertising, McCain's campaign slogan would be "Hell in a Handbasket". These Republican policies are so outrageous, so manipulative, and so destructive to the point of being indefensible; yet you have people who still defend the Bush administration for political firings in the Justice department, politicizing the hiring of long-term employees, and not even showing up to say, "I can't answer that question" when you're directly subpoenaed by the House of Representatives. You have people saying congress is "abusing their power" even while they're denying congress oversight expressly given to them by the Constitution.
You have Dick Cheney saying the office of the Vice Presidency isn't part of the executive branch because he's President of the Senate, but he's not part of the legislative branch because he's the Vice President, therefore no one has oversight over him. And that was years ago, the matter is bogged down in the courts and he'll likely never have to answer to anyone. This is scary, scary stuff. This is what happens in dictatorships, it's not supposed to happen here. The fact that McCain is on board with all of this, that he thinks it's ridiculous that someone would require the President to have a warrant before issuing blanket orders for wiretaps, that he's fine with what went on in the DOJ, that should scare the hell out of everyone; and yet his Republican counterparts in congress are mostly on board too, making this even more frightening.
However bad the Democrats are, we're practically facing down armageddon here and the Republicans have their pedal to the metal and are driving us straight towards it.
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