You thought the title of my diary referred to poll results? Why, isn't that funny of you. Actually, it's the number of months after their inauguration it would take Presidents Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John Edwards to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. In the case of Senator Clinton the 59 is actually extraordinarily generous, considering it is based on her promise to, conditions allowing, withdraw most U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of 2013.
I'll return to that in a moment, but since I've been able to hijack the attention of at least some you for a brief moment I want to discuss the way we talk politics at dailykos, and how far these discussions get from the brass tacks of real-world policy and what the candidates will and won't do should they be elected president, and how close they come to the bizarre chimerical world of TMZ, Britney, Paris and Perez.
For instance, now we're seeing a ferocious debate raging over the fact Barack Obama praised Reagan, which in my book is neither here nor there, but which people seem to be interpreting as if Obama thinks he will be the second coming of the Reagan revolution.
Let's test that hypothesis against just one thing, by way of example, Obama actually says he would do if he became president:
Expand the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit: The Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit provides too little relief to families that struggle to afford child care expenses. Currently the credit only covers up to 35 percent of the first $3,000 of child care expenses a family incurs for one child and the first $6,000 for a family with two or more children. And the credit is not refundable, which means that upper-income families disproportionately benefit while families who make under $50,000 a year receive less than a third of the tax credit. Barack Obama will reform the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit by making it refundable and allowing low-income families to receive up to a 50 percent credit for their child care expenses. Coupled with Obama's "Making Work Pay" tax credit, this proposal will help put more money directly in the pockets of hardworking low and middle-income parents.
http://www.barackobama.com/...
Because this tax credit is, as things stand, not refundable a family must pay more in income taxes than it receives in refund to be benefitted at all by the current policy. In short, millions of families receive no help from the current credit, and the ones who need it most are the ones actually excluded. Imagine: the parents who support children by cleaning hotels, working retail, and making coffee basically get no help at all while the ones working white collar jobs can get $1,000 off their taxes. Moreover, remember that in many of these families parents--and usually in our society these are mothers--who are unable to find affordable child care stay home, trapped in poverty.
So Obama's plan would in fact do more than give every poor family in the United States $1,500 to get childare for one child, or $3,000 for two children. It would allow the parents in many of these families to go out and get jobs where now they cannot, to begin building resumes and developing workplace skills. Basically, this is dollar for dollar perhaps one of the most effective anti-poverty programs the federal government can create. And while we're on the subject, Obama would increase the earned income tax credit, as well.
Does this sound like a Reaganite to you?
Of course, I don't agree with Barack Obama on everything. I continue to favor John Edwards in general and think Edwards has a superior approach to health care in particular. My point is less in support of a particular candidate than it is in opposition to a particular style of argument I see everywhere here, in which we argue over the meaning of slogans, gestures and utterances as if the candidates' ideas were neatly enclosed within them.
It is one thing to say Barack Obama's health care plan is not truly universal, and that the effects of it not being universal would seriously hurt its chances at success. It is another to make an argument about the nature of the idea "hope" or "change", derive from that argument a number of abstract precepts that could fit on a fortune cookie, and then craft that into an attack on the real-world candidate Barack Obama, when it really has nothing to do with the specifics either way of what he is actually saying he will do for the country. And of course people attack John Edwards the same way, only with a different set of tropes substituting for the substance of the man's beliefs, "anger" instead of "hope", "fight" instead of "change," as if the differences between these words could substitute for the difference in their prospective presidencies.
Quite frankly, Obama or Edwards could confess a powerful, overriding sexual attraction to Ronald Reagan, and it still wouldn't matter to me as much as their details of their plans to get us out of Iraq.
But strangely enough, and one would think the price of admittance to the Bill and Hillary Clinton fan club would be the realization that policy matters more than personal pecadilloes, the Hillary-ites at dailykos seem driven to distraction by every bit of empty detail or symbolism. They are peculiarly afflicted by content-aversion. Uncorrobarated rumors about song selection at a private victory party, fliers made by one Obama precinct captain in Nevada without the campaign's knowledge or consent, the demographics of Obama's church have all been the target of opportunistic hit pieces here.
And all the while I read them I actually counted the cantilevered levels of irony involved: they were written by diarists who claimed to support the "all-content, all-the-time" candidate; that for all these authors seemed to know about their candidate's policy views, she could favor the mandatory consumption of cats as food-stuffs, or the collectivization of agriculture (no, and no); and that their candidate herself had been the object for the last half of her public life of the most vehement and personal slanders, touching on her own religion, sexual orientation and marital life, and so one might quaintly think her campaign would be loathe to inflict that pain on someone else.
And every time someone ventures into the realm of policy with the hit-piece Hillaryites, they honestly seem to scatter into banalities like mice behind a wall. Bill was the first black president, but not only do they not know who it was who called him that (Toni Morrison), they can't name anything he actually did for African Americans. But those of us who watched CNN in that decade remember the racially discriminatory treatment of Haitian immigrants, his failure to defend affirmative action, his capitulation on welfare reform, his support for racially disparate drug sentencing, and his willingness to deplete domestic funding for social welfare programs so that he could run a huge budget surplus to out-Republican the Republicans.
But this avoidance of real issues of consequence to real people is at its worst when it comes to Iraq. Is no one willing to acknowledge that there is at this point a huge difference between the different candidates' ideas on withdrawal? And is no one willing to acknowledge that thousands of Americans may die in Iraq during the hypothetical months between President Barack Obama's May 2010 and President Hillary Clinton's December 2013? Or that Hillary's statements on withdrawal themselves contain enough hedges that she, like McCain, could very well pave the way for American forces to be there for a hundred years?
More and more, the election here is as it is elsewhere being Brittany-ized. What-so-and-so did today, and how shocking it is, and what-so-and-so will say about it tomorrow, is obscuring what the election needs to be about, which is what these candidates will do for the country if they are elected.
Start thinking about actual policy detail and the differences between candidates as if lives depended on it. Because they fucking do.