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Edited on Thu Jul-24-03 02:52 AM by JackSwift
I think our message for the upcoming election has a good foundation laid. But we need to take it to the swing voters. 1) Victory in the war on terrorism with no punches pulled against our real enemy, Al Queda. 2) Fiscal responsibility in our government, and in publicly traded companies. 3) Elected officials who love doing their jobs right a lot more than month long vacations.
The war against terrorism has so far been insufficiently focused on our direct enemies. Our foreign policy needs to gather any stable government in the world as our ally in this fight, and reject alienating potential allies because of imagined insults. The terrorist attacks against us should harden our national resolve to end the threat against us as a nation, not to use as a bludgeon against our domestic political opponents.
Just as we must be responsible in our personal spending, our government must be responsible in managing our national budget. The best way to cut spending is to value a balanced budget and set priorities and honor our committments to our military personnel, our elderly and our children. Without honoring our committments, our nation has no future, and our markets know it. Democrats have demonstrated that when they control the executive branch, that the budget gets balanced, spending is put under control and the detail work gets done.
We have many candidates who have the ability and the desire to do the work that they are standing for election to do. It is not enough to have a grandstanding figurehead who cannot settle turf disputes among his own staff because he doesn't, can't and won't understand the disputes. Figurehead administration and delegation leads to several conflicting policies being carried out by different departments, each defeating the other. Nor is it acceptable to have cabinet level officers who cannot be bothered with the details presented to them. For too long we have not had a laser-like focus on national security so much as national security posing.
Our current national leadership is engaged in endless finger-pointing. They pass the buck to each other, they scapegoat political opponents as foreign enemies, they have made a high art of snubbing foreign allies and pay no attention to fiscal matters. We need leadership that truly can build coalitions domestically and abroad, that understands that financial choices must be made, and who understand that political opponents are not enemies to be humiliated, but whose very differences can be harnessed as strengths to accomplishing all of these ends.
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