The Opinionated Bastard

First off, ask them to come up with 3 positive things to say about Kerry, without saying something negative about President Bush, and without mentioning Vietnam.

Most of them can’t. Sympathize with them, and then tell them:

It’s not a mystery why that’s hard to do. The fact is, Kerry’s is an empty suit. He looks good, but the reality is that he has no major accomplishments in his life since Vietnam. In the 20 years in the Senate, he’s only passed 6 laws, and one of them was to rename a building. [*]

Now I suspect that you’re really an anti-Bush voter, so I’d like to tell you some positive things about him, and counteract some of the negative things you’ve heard. Your vote is your own of course, but perhaps you’d like to be able to vote “for” a candidate instead of “against” a candidate.

The major issue for you is probably Iraq. While the media likes to nitpick about this detail or that, if you review all of the president’s options, he really didn’t have much of a choice but to go into Iraq, even without the stockpiles we thought were there. [*] What would you have done if you were President, you’d been told personally by Putin that Saddam was busy planning terrorist attacks against the US, and you also knew that he had been bribing members of the Security Council?

President Bush has been willing to take the fight to the terrorists, something Senator Edwards praised in the debates saying: “The best defense is a good offense.”

So that’s probably the big negative issue for you this election. Let’s talk about some positive things about President Bush:

President Bush doesn’t just say he has a plan, he actually will tell you what it is, and you can download it in detail from his website. If you do that, you’ll find some interesting things.

President Bush has been willing to discuss reforming Social Security for the younger generation, and has promised to do so. Social Security is famous as the “third rail” in American politics, so this shows a lot of political courage to do so.

If you work for a big company, you have an alternative for your retirement: A 401K plan. If you work for a small company, you have at best, an IRA, but you can only put a little bit of money in that every year. Don’t you think its silly that big companies can help employees plan for their retirement when little companies can’t given that most people work for small businesses? If you do have a 401K, if you change jobs, you have to move the retirement plan. Part of President Bush’s plan is to let everyone have access to the same sort of quality retirement, and attach that plan to the person, not the company.

President Bush did something else that needed to be done, but was politically courageous. He helped reform the rules for overtime, something Clinton tried and failed to do, because the overtime rules had been last updated in 1945. Except President Bush was willing to do this in an election year. Now that’s a minor detail in our government actually. But it was something that needed to be done, so the President just did it.

President Bush has worked really hard to promote education, and responsible education at all levels of life, from elementary school to secondary education. There’s plenty of money in our educational system, the United States spends more then any other country per student, for which we get the least. The fact is that education is a simple problem: most of that money gets spent on administration instead of the classroom. No Child Left Behind is really about making schools actually responsible for teaching children, something that strangely enough, doesn’t happen now.

President Bush knows that tariffs or trade barriers don’t protect American jobs, they cost American jobs, because they always have. All over the world, not just in the United States, manufacturing jobs have declined. Manufacturing jobs are 20th century jobs, we need to have people that can work in 21st century jobs. We need to work smarter, not harder, so that’s why President Bush has already increased tuition grants for community college, and wants to increase them some more.

Everyone likes their own lawyer, but hates all the other lawyers. Its our lawyers that drive jobs overseas. We really need tort reform.

If you’re a big business, you can offer health insurance and provide your employees with a cafeteria plan to pay for medical expenses tax-free. If you’re a small business, you can’t offer health insurance, and if your employees buy their own plan, they get taxed on it! President Bush has promised to both make it possible for small businesses to afford health insurance, and for everyone to have their own medical account so that everyone can pay their medical expenses tax free. Now health insurance is a tough problem, so his plan is just a start, but it comes from a key idea the same idea that you see in his retirement plan: Health Insurance is about the person, not who they work for.