After watching Republican presidential primary battles and candidate debates rock along in eight states since Jan. 3rd’s opening round in Iowa, Tennessee’s Republicans will finally get to cast their own votes in the Super Tuesday presidential primary on Mar. 6. Surely some independents will join in the open balloting, and possibly so will a large band of Democratic voters interested in crossing over to skew the results.
Given the roller-coaster ride so far in the GOP field, it would take a sure-footed seer to predict the outcome, but that doesn’t stop us from making recommendations on the candidates.
For Mitt Romney
Our choice in the GOP field is Mitt Romney, whose actual record as Massachusetts governor belies the dreadful shape-shifting persona he’s adopted to appeal to the hard right element of his party that controls the primaries. His record reflects a reasonable balance of conservatism leavened with civic advancement and humane compassion, demonstrated most notably by the popular and largely successful health care reform in Massachusetts that helped inform the model for President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
Contrary to the Republican destroyers who would push ordinary American families back into the cruel realm of exclusions for pre-existing, limits on coverage, unaffordable deductibles, hopelessly skeletal coverage and medical bankruptcy, Romney actually led a bipartisan path to reform. Instead of kowtowing to the interests of big health insurers, price-gouging pharmaceutical companies and for-profit hospitals, he opted for a plan that provides the broadest insurance participation rates of any state in the union.
The plan didn’t go far enough: there’s still work to be done on controlling provider costs. Yet the people of Massachusetts rate the effort highly in broad citizen polls, and give Romney decent marks on taxation, education and other major issues.
That’s not to dismiss his troubling disconnects on national tax policy and his tendency to pander and revise his positions depending on the nature of the crowd before him at the moment. He has become a contortionist in the primaries. But at least his official record of governance, unlike those of his chief opponents at the moment, suggests some inclination toward wiser, centrist policies.
Rick Santorum, by contrast, was stridently harsh in his Senate tenure in pursuit of special interests — notably extreme against women’s right to choice, and conspicuously pliable for the corporate ear-mark crowd. Newt Gingrich’s transparent moral hypocrisy and unvarnished racism haunts his campaign. And Ron Paul’s extreme libertarianism is equally unsuitable to represent the broad national interest.
For Barack Obama
The case for endorsing President Obama in the uncontested Democratic presidential primary is far more compelling. Obama’s wrongly maligned stimulus plan was infinitely more helpful than his critics either know or acknowledge. A large portion of the roughly $800 billion stimulus was phased in over three years to stabilize state government budgets and minimize cuts in education, vital state services and jobs. Most of the rest went for tax cuts to America’s working families. His rescue of American’s automotive industry — over lockstep GOP opposition — paid off in spades. With Detroit roaring back, it’s become clear that Obama’s vision maintained a vital manufacturing industry and saved millions of American jobs, when suppliers, dealers and dependent commercial jobs are factored in.
His fiscal policies, including the credit windows to industry opened by the Federal Reserve in 2009, further helped the economy climb out of what easily could have become — in the fiscal nadir of 2009, when 700,000 jobs were lost in a single month — a second great depression.
Obama’s steady, constructive policies have provided 23 consecutive months of job growth, more than 3 million new jobs, restored a positive record of economic growth, brought the last 100,000 troops out of Iraq, and produced legislation to rein in the casino-style speculation that caused the 2008 financial implosion.
His greatest achievement, health care reform — if his opponents don’t destroy it before it’s fully phased in 2014 — may yet save America from its singular status as the only industrialized nation without universal health care coverage.
In every other industrial nation, universal health care and better health care indices for citizens is accomplished by expenditures that range from 8 to 12 percent of GDP. Conversely, health care spending in America is approaching 18 percent of GDP, and 50 million Americans , who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, remain uninsured.
Regardless, voting in the uncontested Democratic presidential primary is bound to be light. The contest in the GOP primary will be the star, at least for the moment.