EDITORIAL: WE DESERVE BETTER CHOICES What might have been produced by Congress if House Republicans hadn’t wasted so much time voting nearly 50 times on Obamacare and been obstructive otherwise? What could it have accomplished if Congress hadn’t been shut down for days? What will its members do if the majority in the Senate becomes Republican after today and the leadership in Congress changes? Will Obamacare remain the focus of business in the capitol? No matter the resolution of that question, will the House get past it and move ahead with the future rather than stay behind with the past? By the time the polls close tonight we will know no more about what to expect from a new Congress than we did before the election campaign began. It isn’t just in Missouri that members of Congress have kept us in the dark. In many, if not all, states, candidates of both parties have either kept their agenda behind a curtain, or don’t have one. And where we have gotten a peek at an agenda it lacks definition. It is negative. It is bound up in party dogma. Sunday morning my body’s clock was out of whack due to the time change. I was up earlier than my usual early. As is my habit I turned on the television to see if there was new overnight news. There was no new news. I ended up watching C-Span, the nonpartisan, non-ideological network that often features real-time coverage of government and politics without narration. On C-Span was a series of prerecorded candidate forums starring opponents in congressional races. I watched forums featuring candidates from three states. Which three is of little consequence because they were so nearly the same I have no doubt they mirror those in every state. There was little clash between opposing candidates. They might as well have been in the room alone, or with the narrator whose participation was so mild his questions could have been asked by a timid parrot. Republicans railed against the president, his health care plan, his other policies, and his administration, and the usual target--the size of government and its overreach and over-regulation. Democrats spent their time either defending the president and his policies or distancing themselves from him and them. There was no presentation of purpose or plans, only a rehashing of the past. In nearly every state voters are left to vote for representatives on the basis of their views of the past rather than on their vision for the future. We should have better to choose from. flm
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 19:02:09 +0000
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