- Ezekiel 16:49-49

Choosing a candidate:

Introduction:

Union endorsements are one way some people choose their candidates; others go for personal charisma, or that ever-elusive electibility. Some just line up all the various policy proposals and tick them off in a list of pros and cons. Commentator Robert Reich says that this is a dangerous oversimplification.

Commentary for American Public Media (link), January 9, 2008, from Robert Reich, former secretary of labor, and professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley: 

Comparing candidates issue by issue or policy by policy is seriously misleading. It suggest every individual problem we face is neatly separable, calling for a distinct solution. But in reality, almost every big issue facing the nation is tightly linked to almost every other one. The first step to finding real solutions is to understand these linkages.

Start with foreign policy. The major challenges today are centered in the middle east, Russia, and China. They’re linked together, and that linkage is oil. Even absent Islamic extremism and Russia’s remaining nuclear warheads, we’d still focus on these places because more than two-thirds of the world’s oil supply comes from the middle east and Russia, and our economy still critically depends on oil. And why is China building up its military?  Most likely to protect its own global lifelines to oil. Global oil consumption in turn is the leading cause of global warming, and reducing global warming depends on alternative sources of energy.

Nuclear energy is a top candidate, but how can it be generated safely and be kept out of the hands of terrorists? Meanwhile, agricultural sources of energy, like ethanol, are expensive, and agricultural subsidies inevitably distort world commodity markets, which brings us to global poverty.

It’s worsened by crop subsidies in rich nations, and also by climate change. Global warming is bad for everybody, but especially if you’re poor, living in a low-lying part of a city increasingly subject to flooding, or an area of the world turning into desert, losing its capacity to grow food.  Global poverty in turn is a leading cause of the increasing flow of immigrants around the globe.

So you see candidates can’t really talk intelligently about one issue without talking about the others, and rather than give us fifty words or thirty seconds on each, we need people who can explain the connections, and tell us how their response to one will help us deal with the others, or at least not make the others worse.