A Disappointing Show in Denver

The first presidential debate came and went, and it was awkward.  On one hand, I was pleasantly surprised; there was more policy and detail in this debate than in the preceding 9 months.  On the other hand, there’s more water in an empty cup than there are details in the Romney or Obama campaigns.  Maybe America doesn’t think it deserves better than this?  I deserve better.  I am disappointed mostly because I didn’t see a competent debater on the stage.  I’m pretty sure I could have done better.

Near the beginning of the debate, Obama tried to pin Romney to his own policy suggestions by brining u the $5 trillion in tax deductions.  Romney countered deftly, saying, “I didn’t recommend that kind of tax cut.”  If I were Obama, I would have counter-punched: Mr. Romney, you have said repeatedly that you would stay revenue-neutral, but you never gave the slightest hint as to how.  I took the liberty of calculating the fiscal impact of what you did specify, not the impact of things you did not.

The real problem is that, in 2008, two candidates took to the podium, having enumerated their ideas and policies in detail on the trail previously.  They defended these positions against each other and gave America a clear choice.  In this election, Romney plays the judo-master: he moves in and out of positions before his opponent can even throw a jab.  From this, I find it hard to trust Romney.

Stephen Colbert made the joke once: George W. Bush will believe the same thing on Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday.  I would say that Obama will still believe the same thing Wednesday, unless some major new details emerged Tuesday.  With Romney, it feels like the only thing he can be certain not to believe on Wednesday are the things he professed his love for on Monday.

That was quite a tangent.  But there are other points to be made!

Talking about Economics, I can’t help but feel like both candidates are clueless.  Maybe it’s just me, a guy who has taken a few economics classes in recent years, but I don’t think taxes are killing jobs.  Do businesses really spend all available cash to hire workers?  Not even close.  In fact, these days, profits are at record highs across all publicly traded companies (and small business, like, uh, every single hedge fund or sports team).  Sure, hiring is up slightly as of late (or so says the headlines; employment figures have yet to show any evidence), but most of the cash is sitting in company coffers, not paying for new talent.  There are some legitimate reasons for this, though, lest I be called an uninformed, anti-business radical.  Businesses face tremendous amounts of uncertainty from fiscal policy and regulatory policy.  Mitt Romney wants to attack Dodd-Frank?  Why not start with the tremendous number of “TBA’s” written throughout the legislation.  Obama wants to win economic points?  Talk about how he will steer us off the fiscal cliff and balance the budget.  Without these things, the business environment remains hopelessly unreliable, making large cash commitments (in the form of salaries and benefits) untenable.

Getting any legislation to pass is practically impossible these days, though.  Partisanship is a cancer infecting the capitol.  Both candidates should try to use the bully pulpit to fight it into remission.

Obama could present some fairly compelling arguments to damn his Republican colleagues in the House.  My argument would be as follows: Today, the positions and attitudes presented in congress are remarkably similar to terrorist regimes world-wide.  There is no compromise, only destruction.  There is no conversation, only warfare.  From the first day of the Obama presidency, numerous senior Republicans explicitly called him a failure (in the case of Romney himself, he called the Obama presidency a failure within the first two weeks).  Obama also went out of his way to bring Republicans to the table for health care and debt talks, even when they were overly combative.  He needs to build public pressure for compromise.

Romney, on the other hand, finally talked up his governorship as evidence for his leadership.  He says he worked with a majority Democratic assembly to push through health care in Massachusetts.  This much is absolutely true.  What he omitted, though, was that he was a center-left governor (despite how often he proclaims himself as “very conservative” now) with a left-leaning assembly in a liberal state.  It’s not hard to see where there’s room to maneuver.  However, in Washington, we have a center president (possibly even center-right; a liberal Obama is not [see the numerous policies and officials that Obama carried over from Bush as evidence]), a left-leaning Senate and a hard-right House.  There are no more true centrists in Washington, only various levels of extreme.  Even if Obama can get agreement from the House, he would fail with the Senate, and vice versa.  It makes governing impossible.

Lastly, on healthcare, Romney’s claims that it is a state issue seem untenable at best.  Massachusetts, as a wealthy, liberal state, was the exception when it took on such a monumental task.  However, especially in light of the current economic climate, states are poorer than ever, and overburdened with vitally important legislative objectives.  Health care wouldn’t make the cut.  Furthermore, why should health care be a state issue but not social security or Medicare?  Oh, right.  Because, like state pensions, various governors would raid their trust funds to pay for other items on the legislative agenda.  People would retire into disease and poverty.

There’s so much more, but I can’t keep going on like this.  I am developing an aneurysm  or maybe an ulcer, or both.

Maybe my next post will finally be about something other than politics.