The candidates and the issues: a concise summary

It's still early in the campaign; nonetheless, I'm forming a tentative picture of how the presidential candidates are sorting themselves out.  They fall into three camps: left-leaners, right-leaners, and Rudy Giuliani. 

Here's a concise status sheet I've assembled to summarize where each camp stands on several issues.  It's my assessment; yours may vary.  If so, let me know why.

I'm thinking Bill Richardson and possibly even Mitt Romney might belong in the same camp as Rudy; if so, I'll have to think of a more generic name for that one.  (Fred Thompson might belong there, too, but he's not in the race yet.)  In any case, I give priority to the issues of national security and economic growth, as you can probably tell.  I'll revise this mental picture as the campaign unfolds, but this race is distinctly different in one respect from all the others I can remember: it's maturing earlier than ever before.  We should have a good idea who the two nominees will be by November of this year. 

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End note:
I pulled the plug on my PC today, so I'm 100% Mac now.  Assembling the graphic above was a good exercise in how to jump around in OS X apps.  I'll write up my 2-month "switching" experience in more detail sometime soon.

Comments

[Bob]

I don't understand the bedroom category. Rudy is pro-choice if that is what you mean though I don't know
how that relates to the bedroom.

No surprise about left and right, though. It's been that way since I can remember.

BTW, even though it is early I expect to Hillary to get the Dem. nomination.

[Jim]

Bob,

I'd guess that Steve is referring to Rudy's stance on gay marriage as well.

[Bob]

Jim,

From Rudy's official website:

Rudy Giuliani believes marriage is between a man and a woman. He does not - and has never - supported gay marriage. But he believes in equal rights under law for all Americans. That's why he supports domestic partnerships that provide stability for committed partners in important legal and personal matters, while preserving the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman.

[Perry Willis]

I find the political "debate" about national defense perplexing. Frankly, I can't remember the last time anyone on the left or the right actually did anything that made us more secure. It seems to me that the favored political approach to foreign policy is to constantly do things that create more enemies for the American people and make us less secure, and always at great expense. You see things I don't see.

[caveat bettor]

Rudy is the most credible limited-government candidate out there in the field. Hopefully, enough voters will want less government in our wallets and bedrooms, and realize this. Unfortuantely, I think Bryan Caplan is onto something when he talks about rational voters being mythical.

[PseudoNoise]

This list is pretty concise, and a pretty stark example on how those of us on the left just don't see eye-to-eye with those on the right.

Bush's foreign policies have made us less safe. Most security experts agree. I don't see anyone in the Republican field pushing against these policies or trying to differentiate themselves from his approach. Just look at the torture question in the last debate; McCain gives the only sane answer.

The Democratic message on national security: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

The Republican messsage: "FEAR!! ALL THE TIME!!!" How is this strength?

Bush has worked to lower the standard of living for the majority of Americans. There are more Americans living in poverty now. Republicans are doing everything they can to dismantle all social safety nets, and since the median American income is ~$46k, this safety net is crucial to most of us.

Republicans continue to push the myth that trickle-down works, that by making things easy for the top 10%, 5%, 1%, even by cutting benefits to most Americans, that this will somehow improve everyone's life. This is demonstrably untrue, real median wage shows it.

But I have no idea how this fundamental difference in perception between us can be brought together, so I guess we'll just keep disagreeing.

[Bob]

Pseudo...

One of the reasons that left and right do not agree is because the left, as a rule, uses generalities, emotion and little in the way of facts. You made these statements:

"Bush's foreign policies have made us less safe. Most security experts agree. "

Who are the security experts you are referring to and what is their number in proportion to all security experts?

"Bush has worked to lower the standard of living for the majority of Americans."

Please provide citations or proof of your claim.

". Republicans are doing everything they can to dismantle all social safety nets,..."

Again, provide specific examples, please.

"Republicans continue to push the myth that trickle-down works, that by making things easy for the top 10%, 5%, 1%, even by cutting benefits to most Americans...

Most generally refers to a majority, >150 million people. Please list all the benefits that have been cut by Republicans to this majority.

[Steve]

Perry:
National security is more than "military"; it is intelligence, diplomacy, military force potential, and national will. Rush Limbaugh glibly states that the purpose of the military is to "kill people and break things"; but he is dead wrong. The proper primary purpose of a strong military (and national security apparatus) is to do exactly the opposite: to *prevent* destruction, i.e., to prevent wars from starting in the first place, if possible.

For the best example of pulling that off, think back to Ronald Reagan: his leadership caused the Cold War to end in a collapse of the Soviet Union instead of a thermonuclear war. He was resisted by the right for wanting to rid the world of nuclear weapons, and by the left for supposedly being a right-wing war monger. But he stood by his convictions and thereby eliminated the possibility of an all-out thermonuclear war -- a very good thing for the "children and grandchildren" of his generation (I'm one of the "children").

That's an example of improving "national security," and it's also an example of leadership and statesmanship. [Since then, we've seen less leadership than opinion-poll-followership from those at the helm, in my opinion.]

PN:
There's no such thing as "trickle-down" economics; see "Straw Man #3" at this article: http://tinyurl.com/2tfn4p

Regarding Bush's foreign policy: although it's mostly off-topic for this blog, I'll summarize my take this once: The intent had been to enhance our nation's security by seeding that Islamic region with an island of democracy. It was a gamble. Did it (or will it) pay off now or eventually -- or backfire? Hindsight makes it easy to say the Iraq war "made us less safe"—and I'm frankly not sure the resources we've expended on Iraq will turn out to be as good an investment as we could have made in other ways. [Afghanistan is different.]

Lastly, as long as we're using 20/20 hindsight, we should go back a little further than the current administration to envision a better overall solution. As I noted above, it's called war prevention. Stephen Ambrose aptly summarized its importance: "I sometimes think the biggest price we pay for war is what might have been"—as I noted in this article: http://tinyurl.com/27enxk

[Perry Willis]

Thank you for your response Steve. You and I would agree about the purpose of a national defense establishment. We would almost certainly disagree about how big, and how far flung that establishment needs to be in order to accomplish that limited mission. I believe it is over built, and that it's excess size tempts our politicians to do things that make us less safe, like invading Iraq. We would also disagress about the cause of the end of the Cold War. This is a subject of great interest to me, and I have read extensively about the behind the scenes developments in the Soviet Union during this period. I see little evidence that Reagan had very much to do with it. It came about because of problems inside the Soviet Union that had very little to do with anything the United States did or did not do. The Soviet Union would have collapsed on pretty much the same time table even if Reagan had done nothing, or so it seems to me. Again, thanks for your response and your excellent, thought provoking blog.

[workindev]

"The Democratic message on national security: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

The Republican messsage: "FEAR!! ALL THE TIME!!!" How is this strength?"

Not quite.

The Democratic message on national security is "Maybe if we are really nice to those people who want us to pray to Mecca they will stop blowing us up".

The Republican message is "Hmmm. Maybe we shouldn't give those lunatics the chance."

[Jon Thompson]

Perry:
It is interesting to note that most leaders of the former Soviet Union disagree, and think that Reagan had a lot to do with ending the Cold War.

[Jon Thompson]

Perry:
Also, I think if you look at things like the Spanish-American war and the various interventions that have occurred in Latin America and the occupation of the Phillipines, it becomes pretty clear that the size of the military has relatively little to do with the desire to make war. I think Iraq was a mistake (the theory that Steve puts forward is reasonable, but I don't think the danger posed by Islamic terrorism justifies military intervention), and I think most or all of the things I listed were mistakes (indeed, I feel most every war in American history was a mistake), but I don't see this as being caused by the military, or the military-industrial complex. Sadly, the fault is not in our soldiers but in ourselves. I don't think cutting the budget for the military will make our politicians any wiser, and I believe it may genuinely make us less safe.

[Matt]

I love the safety discussion. Safe from whom or what? When it comes to "who makes you safer" neither party is convincing. And, if the Republican position really is the "hmmm..." one outlined above, then perhaps their foreign policy ought to be more sophisticated than to arm them (Afghani rebels, Hussein, etc.) in the first place. Reagan might have won the Cold War, but he lost the Cultural War by arming the very people we are now fighting.

[Perry Willis]

To Jon Thompson:

I would agree that there are other factors, many other factors, that lead our country into unwise wars and meddling than just the size of our military establishment. It is a secondary point for me. The main point is that we don't need as much as we have in order to deter threats.

I would also agree that most of our wars have been mistakes. Korea turned out okay, and World War II was about two thirds okay. It was good to defeat Japan and Germany but I think there are things we could have done to keep half of Europe from falling into Soviet hands, so even that war was a mixed bag. The others we fought in this century, including dead-of-night interventions like the 1953 coup in Iran were unwise at best, disastors at worst. It's not a good batting average.

As for Soviet leaders thinking Reagan and U.S. policy played a major role in the fall of the Soviet Union, this was exactly what I looked for in my reading. I didn't find much. If you can point me to a book with primary evidence for this, I would be grateful.

[Dave Justus]

Matt,

The 'armed our enemies' is largely bogus. In the Afghan-Soviet war there were two largely seperate groups of Afghan freedom fighters, nationalist Afghani's mostly funded by the U.S. via Pakistan, and Arab Jihadis mostly funded by Saudi Arabia. Certainly the U.S. encouraged the Saudis in that effort to some extent, but it was also known then, both by us and by the Saudis and others that participated, that this funding was explitly designed as a counter to U.S. influence. Of course you can guess which group eventually evolved into the Taliban and Al-Qaida.

We did make a huge mistake in Afghanistan, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we abandoned our allies in Afghanistan leaving the country ripe for takeover by these still funded Jihadi forces. The freedom fighers in Afghanistan continued to fight however, evolving into the Northern Alliance and their greatest leader, Ahmad Shah Mas'ud was assassinated by Al-Qaida on Sept. 9, 2001, almost certainly as a hope to forestall American counter attacks following 9-11.

As for Saddam, the idea that we armed him is a myth. The Iraqi army both during the Iran-Iraq War, Gulf War I and the Iraq War used primarily Soviet equipment, although they did have a large number of French Mirage jets. Certainly we were willing to encourage those hostilities, but we didn't send him weapons or equipment.

Once again, isolationism more then involvment is the core of this problem. We didn't want to deal with the troublesome Iran ourselves and instead kidded ourselves that by encouraging, even mostly by simply ignoring the issues, that the problems would go away and we could play off our enemies with some real-politik games. Sadly of course this helped encourage Saddam to believe we would have the same attitude toward Kuwait (and of course that we would ignore any atrocities he commited against his own people.)

[Bob]

Well said, Dave. Appeasement has all sorts of nasty unintended consequences. Or maybe "deferred" consequences is more accurate.

[Ken]

"For the best example of pulling that off, think back to Ronald Reagan: his leadership caused the Cold War to end in a collapse of the Soviet Union instead of a thermonuclear war. He was resisted by the right for wanting to rid the world of nuclear weapons, and by the left for supposedly being a right-wing war monger."

Steve,

I think you are having selective memory syndrome here. The only resistance from the right was to unilateral disarmament, which Reagan didn't support at all. In fact, Reagan increased the nuclear weaponry (the MX and intermediate missles in Europe and Minute Man II). That is part of what brought the Soviet Union to the bargaining table for the START talks, the other item being Missle Defense.

Yeah, Reagan wanted nuclear arms reduction, but so did the rest of the right (at least those who counted). He read the Soviets correctly, that in an "arms race" they would blink first.

[Ken]

Steve,

In the context of the Presidential election, what "right leaner" thinks that the government knows what's best for the bedroom?

And why is the bedroom more important than other social areas that the left leaners get a free pass on (like racial quotas, glass ceiling stuff)?

Perhaps more importantly, does society have an obligation to enforce rules of behavior amongst its members?

[Matt]

Dave Justus - According to Wikipedia...
In 1982 with Iranian success on the battlefield, the U.S. made its backing of Iraq more pronounced, supplying it with intelligence, economic aid, normalizing relations with the government (broken during the 1967 Six-Day War), and also supplying weapons.[14] President Ronald Reagan decided that the United States "could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran", and that the United States "would do whatever was necessary and legal to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran."[15] President Reagan formalized this policy by issuing a National Security Decision Directive ("NSDD") to this effect in June, 1982.[16]

Sure sounds like support to me.

[Ariah]

Pseudo - I don't believe anyone has ever proposed a tax cut for the top 1% or even 10%, although I'd love to see it anyway. I want to make that ~$46k median you mentioned, and I figure that the more income other people retain (and can therefore invest), and the more incentives they have to invest it, the better off I am.

As for the politics of fear, I think politicians in both parties utilize that emotion quite regularly, they just attach it to different issues. However, which fears seem more reasonable depends on your perspective on those issues.

[Steve]

Ken:
I checked, and my memory is intact on this. Here are two of several examples I remember from the Reagan books I've read.

Regarding Pershing and SS-20 missiles in Europe...
Conservatives (Weinberger and Perle) didn't like where Reagan was going on that issue, and came up with the "zero option" specifically because they were convinced (a) Reagan would like it, and (b) the Soviets would surely reject it. (See Lou Cannon's "President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime" p.260-261.)

Regarding SDI...
"Resistance came not only from Shultz's State Department but also from Pentagon hardliners who usually supported Reagan. As the [SDI] speech approached, Richard Perle telephoned Keyworth from Portugal and told him to fall on his sword, to go so far as to tell the president he would oppose the new idea publicly, to do anything to stop the speech. Keyworth said that even Fred Ikle was 'violently opposed.' 'I guess I have never seen such opposition to anything,' Keyworth estimated. 'But [Reagan] was absolutely committed.'" (See Paul Kengor's "The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism" p. 176.)

[Perry Willis]

One of the things I applaud Reagan for is his gusto on arms control negotiations. This is an area where I think his defense build up did have a positive effect. I think, however, that many confuse this with reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are two separate issues. Reagan's policies did help with arms negotiations, but I think they had little to do with the end of the Soviet Union.

[Ken]

Perhaps its my memory that is faulty (I was only in high school at the time, but was knowledgable of then current events).

However, I'll note that Weinberger and Perle, in recommending the zero option to Reagan, were proposing a reduction in nuclear arms. So I don't see why these guys don't get credit for eliminating nuclear weapons.

ISTM that Reagan out manuevered the Soviet Union at every turn, despite the vocal (useless idiots) peace activists against him. And, generally speaking, I think the right supported his policies.