Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] [MLUG][Politics] State of the Union

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 1/31/06, Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> Jonathan King wrote:
>
> > ps--Tim Kaine seems to be a nice guy and an okay speaker, but I can't
> > say I'm inspired by his response.
>
> I'm listening to a rerun of Tim Kaine's speech.  His main point seems to
> be that the Bush government is running the country in an incompetent
> fashion.

Or that his party can do better.  I gues that's the point.

> I think that this is a rather difficult accusation to make.  The problem
> is to know whether the fault for mistakes can be laid at Bush's foot, or
> whether they can be laid at others getting in the way, or whether the
> problems are so difficult that mistakes are impossible to avoid and
> no-one else could do much better.

I'm not sure what to make of this.  Nobody asked Bush to do any of the
following:

1) Declare war on Iraq without planning appropriately for the
occupation.  Even if you thought this was a good idea, the lack of
planning was atrocious.  In particular, the effect of this action on
our military will be felt for years to come.

2) Throw the budget into complete disarray by insisting on tax cuts
that even Greenspan (secretly) thought were unwise.

3) Pass a Medicare prescription bill that dramatically exacerbates the
financial situation we will face in a few years, and then implement
that bill in a way that cannot really be termed a success.

4) Leverage complete control of Congress into a situation where more
pork barrel spending is happening now than ever before.  The man has
vetoed nothing.

and there are other things as well.

> I think a good example is education.  A lot of people talk about how
> much money is spent.  But the real test is whether people are getting
> better educated.  (Even test scores are not a totally adequate measure
> of this.)  Clearly the American education system has deep flaws, and we
> seem to lag behind other countries.  But is this because we don't spend
> enough money?  Or is it because some people are trying all kinds of
> different wacky education techniques?  Or is it because teachers are not
> given sufficient authority to keep good discipline in the class?

Interestingly, I wouldn't lay much blame on any one cause for the
state of our educational program today.  I think NCLB is a fiasco, but
that was a bipartisan effort.  The one positive proposal on education
I noticed in the SOTU was the (vague) plan to get better math and
science teachers into the classroom.  That coudn't hurt, but it almost
surely would cost real money, since one big reason why people who know
math and science don't go into teaching is that the salaries are
uncompetive, especially once you figure in the lost wages involved in
getting certified.

> To be honest I don't know what the real cause of the problem is.  And I
> think that most people see that they don't know what the cause of most
> of the country's problems are.  That is why speeches like Tim Kaine's
> don't have a lot of impact.

I think another reason why the impact of most speeches is low is what
has been noted before: the speeches tend not to be very important in
the sense that they don't usually lead directly to policies and
legislation.  If the SOTU is seen like that, then the reply to the
SOTU by the party that has no real power is even less impactful, kind
of by definition.  I'm not sure what the best response would be, but
I'm guessing that it would be something that focused on one concrete
proposal of great importance.  Currently, no Democrat can introduce
meaningful legislation and have any chance that it will be passed, but
if you set one (popular) goal and then kept hammering it in whenever
your  efforts in Congress were blocked, you would at least be drawing
attention to what you wanted to do and the fact that the party in
power was standing in the way.  That might be something.

jking

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