an open letter to non-Obama/Biden voters: thinking outside the echo chamber

[jrtom]

I'm looking to have some conversations about the upcoming elections. (The US Presidential elections, primarily, although if there's anyone that wants to talk about WA Congressional or state-level elections, that's fine too.)



Most of my friends are, if not stalwart Democrats, pretty much in the tank for Obama. This means that I don't have as good a handle as I'd like on the views and motivations of everyone else: people that haven't decided, or that intend to vote for McCain/Palin, or that intend to vote for a third-party candidate, or that don't plan to vote at all.

If you are such a person, I would like to have a respectful conversation with you: to find out where you're coming from, and what your reasons and motivations are (and your fears, if applicable). I'm a bit of a political news junkie, so I've read any number of essays dissecting the mood of the electorate in various ways, but I'm not convinced that the pundits' and analysts' condensations of people's opinions are anything like the whole (or true) story. Anyway, ultimately it all comes down to people. You. Me. Everyone else here, whether you show up to vote or not. One way or another, we're all going to be living together after the election, and I think it's past time for me to learn more about you and why you think and feel as you do. Even if Obama were to win in a huge popular landslide--say, 65-35, which is unprecedented in recent memory--that's still more than a third of voters (and probably quite a lot of non-voters) that will really disagree with the outcome.


I freely admit that I am also an Obama partisan, although I do not agree with him on every issue. If you would like to ask _me_ where _I'm_ coming from (either my political philosophy, my feelings on various issues, or my own reasons for having decided to vote for Obama), that's welcome. I'd also be more than happy to help you convince yourself to vote for him, too, if that's what you want. (You are welcome, in turn, to try to convince me to vote for some other candidate, although you're unlikely to succeed.) But my _primary_ purpose here is to learn from (and about) people that are _not_ Obama partisans, not to proselytize.


People who support Obama/Biden are welcome to join in these conversations, but I want one thing clear from the start--to everyone, but especially to Obama partisans, because of my intended audience: be respectful, or your comments will be deleted. There's a lot of free-flowing anger and resentment, from a variety of sources and for a number of reasons. I want to understand those reasons and the opinions that underlie them, so please be respectful of them so that they'll be expressed freely.


If you fit the bill, and are interested in such conversations, feel free to post a comment to get the ball rolling, or to contact me via email. If you know someone else who you think might be interested, please point them here.



Let's talk.

Comments

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

If I'm incorrect about any of Obama's stances, please do correct me. Much of my info for this comment comes from votehelp.org

* Environment: Obama supports a trade of carbon credits. While that's a good start, I would like an even more aggressive approach, with absolute maximums also. And I think we should be investing US taxpayer money in getting China and India off on the right foot with their increasing industrialization.
* Abortion: While Obama supports abortion rights, he does not seem to do so strongly, and I worry that he might be convinceable, or allow the edges to erode (current examples such as the "partial birth" abortion ban, or redefining contraceptive pills to be abortion).
* Gay Marriage: Both Obama and Biden say they are against gay marriage, but are against a constitutional amendment banning it. I am for gay marriage and I'd be for a constitutional amendment legalizing it.
* Death Penalty: I'm against it, he's not. I feel that it should be a correctional system, and it's hard to correct someone who's dead. Not to mention all the money we spend trying to kill the guilty, and the fact that we do make mistakes. I'd rather we changed laws regarding paroles for people with life sentences.
* Civil Liberties / Defense / Foreign Policy: He reauthorized the PATRIOT Act; I'm against it. He wants to channel more money towards defense and Homeland Security; I think that money's better spent elsewhere. He thinks we should have an interventionist foreign policy to prevent hostile regimes from taking over; I think our meddling causes regimes to become hostile.
* Immigration: He thinks we should rigorously enforce current immigration laws by increasing border security and penalizing employers. I think illegal immigrants are hard working, useful members of society. Interestingly, he also supports amnesty for illegal immigrants currently here (which I support), so his stance on this is a complex one.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Taking these in order...

* Environment: I don't know as much as I should about his approach and how carbon credits, etc. work, so I'm withholding judgement on this. As for the latter...mixed feelings. What sort of investment are you talking about?
* Abortion: I read him as being in the 'safe, legal, and rare' crowd. This works for me, at least as a point of departure. I haven't seen anything that suggests he might flip on this point.
* Gay Marriage: I have a somewhat different take on this. My feeling is that it's not obvious why government should be involved in these things, for the most part. I'm for equality in whatever legal recognition of such relationships exists, however, and I grant that in the current political climate the most plausible path to this is legalization of same-sex marriages. However, I'd be for some kickass federal law specifying that civil unions must be granted the same status in all legal respects as marriage.
* Death Penalty: Mixed feelings. I acknowledge that it is often--perhaps even usually--misapplied. But I tend to believes that there are some rare individuals for which it's an option that we should consider.
* Civil Liberties: Agreed.
* Defense: I'd need specifics.
* Foreign Policy: I think that his approach is more nuanced than that. I also think that he's found it expedient to imply that he's willing to be interventionist if the circumstances require it. I'd like to know how he thinks that we should have addressed Afghanistan in the first place.
* Immigration: Seems to me that if illegal immigrants are generally useful, then the right answer is to figure out how to make them legal. Penalizing employers that use illegal immigrants could tend to reduce their exploitation, so I'm not convinced that's a bad idea.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

* Environment: The idea behind carbon credits (also known as "cap and trade") is to use capitalism to help regulate carbon emissions. The government sets a limit on how much carbon companies can emit, with stiff penalties. Some companies will naturally (or through effort) end up with lower emissions than their cap, and some will end up with more. Rather than facing the penalties, the companies with more go to the companies with less and say "hey, I'll pay you to claim that my excess emissions are actually yours." They agree, and instead of one company having too much and one having too little, we now have two companies at or just under the limit. It sounds really shady, and it took me a while to understand, but I think I get it now.

As for other countries, I think we should be helping developing nations such as China and India to build green infrastructure in their nations. By helping I mean give them money outright, and hire civil and other engineers and send them over there.

* Gay Marriage: Yeah, I'm kinda of the opinion that marriage should be taken out of the civil arena entirely (i.e., the goverment shouldn't have a stake or role in marriage at all), but that's not gonna happen.

* Death Penalty: I was disappointed to hear Obama last night say we have to find and kill Osama bin Laden. I was saddened when Saddam Hussein was put to death. *sigh* I'm a pacifist, what can I say?

* Foreign Policy: I'm glad Obama says we should talk before attacking nations. I'd rather we didn't attack them, but at least we should talk first.

* Immigration: Good point, that I'd rather they weren't exploited. It seems to me it's a fine line to tread though, between preventing them from being exploited, and preventing them from being hired at all - and therefore losing their livlihoods and having them then become a burden on the US instead of a boon. I wonder if we could come up with some sort of guest worker visa, where the formerly illegal immigrants will now be allowed in legally, and have some protections of the law, but maybe have a lower minimum wage limit for them.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Environment: I know how cap-and-trade works, but the devil is in the details and I don't know enough about them. (How do we decide how much of a cap to give out? Does it depend on the industry? How about the size of the company--and if so, measured in physical outputs, revenue, or people employed? Etc.)

I'm more in favor of pouring money into developing green technology and then providing incentives in the form of good licensing terms. I don't think that either country is short of civil engineers, and they'll go green if there's an economic benefit.

* Death Penalty: bin Laden is, I think, one of those edge cases. He's demonstrated both a desire and an ability to kill Americans because we're Americans. Should we undertake to support him the rest of his life if we could capture him? Life imprisonment strikes me as a weird sort of punishment: "we believe that you're unfit to be a member of our society, so we're going to...support you indefinitely in a way that we adamantly oppose doing for the poorest members of our society _unless_ they commit a pretty serious crime"--huh? I mean, prison as a context in which to rehabilitate, maybe (although it doesn't seem to work so well for most of those incarcerated) but the purpose of life imprisonment can't be rehabilitation, by definition. *shrug*

* Immigration: the reason why we get so many illegal immigrants is _because_ people will hire them: if they couldn't get jobs here, they wouldn't come here, so the "burden" argument doesn't seem to hold up very well. If the economy needs these workers, then we should employ them outright and legally.
This also could fork off into an entirely different discussion about under what circumstances anyone (including people who were born, and whose grandparents were born, in the US) should automagically be granted full citizenship...but that's probably best left to another thread.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Death Penalty:
Well, various studies have shown it costs more money to put a person to death than to have them live out their life in prison. (Primarily b/c of the legal process, AFAIK.) [source]

Of course when we're talking about cases like Saddam Hussein, he was tried overseas so their process was more ..."streamlined" and anyway the cost burden was not borne by our country. I expect if we ever do catch bin Laden either the same thing will happen, or else he'll be tried at Gitmo and the process would again be "streamlined" so although the US would bear the cost it would be less than a normal death penalty process.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Interesting figures. I do note, however, that those figures are all from California (one of the references mentions in passing that the cost difference exists elsewhere but does not cite anything to support it), so I have to wonder (a) whether this is true elsewhere (and if not, why not), and (b) the specific reasons why the costs are so high: does this point to procedural or other inefficiencies in our legal/justice system that we need to fix anyway?

I believe that these processes _should_ be efficient insofar as that is consistent with ensuring that justice is done and that the innocent are not condemned...but again, that sounds like a systemic problem rather than one with the death penalty per se.

FWIW, it's also cheaper to simply not imprison people or punish them at all, so the 'cost' argument is clearly not the only one we're concerned with...although I acknowledge that I brought it up. :)

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I noticed it was all California too, but in a quick search that's the first website I found.

Also these studies only looked at the cost through the courts, they didn't look at the cost of feeding a person for their lifetime, nor paying the guards, providing medical service, etc.

[gwyd.livejournal.com]

My understanding is Obama's also in favour of spending some of the money we've been wasting on Iraq on R % D for green energy tech.