First let me start off by saying that during the primary season, which seems like forever ago, I supported Ron Paul. While Ron Paul did manage to gather some attention and a decent amount of votes he ended up falling short.
I had always liked and admired John McCain. Most Republicans lost favor with him because of stance on illegal immigration but since I agreed with him my opinion did not change. However, as the primary season began to roll on I was afraid that McCain was going to jump on the party bandwagon right along with the Giuliani’s, Thompson’s, and Huckabee’s. It was in the summer when I told my father and a friend that I was going to vote for Obama as a punishment to the Republican party. However, that all changed September 4th, 2008.
Standing in front of thousands of supporters and millions watching on television, John McCain told me that the Republican party had failed me. The party became power hungry and had abused it. He told me, “we let you down.” I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. John McCain was ripping into his own party at the keynote speech of its national convention. It was that day that I realized he was not falling in line with party policy and thinking.
I also spent the last few weeks looking at issues and stances that I care about and the following are why I voted for John McCain.
Education
John McCain supports competition among public schools and keeping teachers accountable. To this day the teaching profession is probably the only job without any consequences for poor results. Allowing children the option to attend different public schools or use vouchers for private schools will only create better opportunities for a child’s education. We have competition in every other aspect of life so why should education be any different?
Health care
While I am not extremely fond of McCain’s plan I think it is much better than Obama’s alternative. Every Western country that has adopted socialized medicine has seen their overall health care quality drop and also seen their advanced health care’s quality drop, IE surgeon quality/cancer treatment. One of the reasons America has the top surgeons and doctor’s is the competition among hospitals and care centers.
Foreign Policy
John McCain is a veteran and has served in the senate for 22 years. Barack Obama has served in the Senate for 3 years and was doing cocaine at the age McCain was serving his country. It is my opinion that past judgment is the best predictor of future judgment. Obama’s only senate votes were to stop funding the troops and voting against the “surge.” Unfortunately for Obama those votes, along with hundreds of present votes, are all I have to look at. Now I’m not saying Obama has bad judgment, but rather that my view of his judgment is simply incomplete, mainly due to his age.
The following were the most important issues to me.
Abortion
It is my opinion that as a society we should do all we can to promote and encourage life. Last year in America over 1.3 million abortions were performed and of those 98% were done so for social reasons. 1.3 million. I am not going to go into why I believe abortion is wrong I do feel that abortion will become our current generations black mark, ala slavery, women’s rights, internment camps, red scare.
Taxes/Economy
The top 1% of tax payers are paying for 40% of our federal income taxes, where as the bottom 50% are paying 3%. Under Barack Obama’s tax plan, this top 1% will have their taxes raised while others will see their taxes lowered and in some cases actually receive a tax limit up to $1,000. I would have no problem with Obama raising taxes on one part of society but it’s when he lowers taxes for some at the same time do I have a huge problem. This is tantamount to bribery but instead of the person offering the bribe paying, the briber makes someone else pay it.
American corporations are paying the second highest corporate tax rate in the world. John McCain thinks this is too high and Barack Obama doesn’t think its high enough. I simply can not support a candidate that believes in “trickle up economics”. Never in the history of economics has it worked and I have no reason to believe it will.
In conclusion, unlike past elections where I found myself disliking the opposing candidate that does not ring true here. I think that Barack Obama is an extremely intelligent person with altruistic motives to do what’s best for America. I think his ability to inspire people is truly remarkable and that he has come this far is incredible. The pride and jubilation from African Americans in newspapers editorials and TV interviews is something that I will never be able to understand no matter how many text books I read or museums I visit. However his candidacy is the sign that our country has truly come a long way in a very short amount of time.
While electing Barack Obama President will not be the end of race problems in the United States it will mark the day when every child in this country can truly grow up and be anything they want to be, including President of the United States.
4 comments:
"John McCain supports competition among public schools and keeping teachers accountable. To this day the teaching profession is probably the only job without any consequences for poor results"
Parents have a lot more influence over their kids than teachers. Terrible parenting can't be corrected by teachers who spend 1 hour with a kid a day. If parents fail at raising their kid, it is unfair to punish teachers for this.
Parents have more influence than teachers however teachers are still responsible for a curriculum.
Every job has parts that the worker can't control. A lawyer can try a case perfectly and still lose it. A surgeon can perform an operation by the book and still have complications.
Yet teachers don't think they should be judged?
I have to agree with anonymous on this one. Every job does have parts that the worker can't control, but I can't think of one job where the worker has less control than a teacher. The dominant factors in a child's academic success are (1) innate intelligence, and (much more importantly) (2) parents who invest time, energy and (of course) money into their child's success. The services of a good teacher are necessary, but certainly not sufficient for a child to reach his potential, whatever that may be.
I'm not familiar with McCain's plan, but to the extent that he will measure a teacher's success on the performance of her students on some standardized test McCain's approach is conceptually flawed. I'm not against holding teachers accountable for doing a bad job, but in order to do that, we must be sure that we are measuring their job performance accurately and fairly. Measuring students' test scores--or even changes in their test scores--does not get to the quality of the teacher, and is therefore an unfair basis upon which to hold teachers accountable.
McCain is against no child left behind. He favors a system in which schools and not teachers are judged. This same system has been implemented in DC and it has been extremely successful. Obama even admitted as such during the last debate.
But as I said earlier education wasn't one of my biggest concerns.
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