Candidate questions remain

By Joel Myhre (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Saturday, February 9, 2008

With Mitt Romney out and John McCain all but wrapping up the Republican endorsement, I think it’s safe to say that the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama battle should get more play over the coming month without having to hear from conservatives complain about biased coverage.

That said, I’m not quite sure who I favor, and not in the sense of who I think McCain can beat, or who can beat McCain.

I also would like to get away from deciding on a candidate based on their opinions on a particular issue or issues. That probably flies in the face of many who say that’s the only thing that should determine a person’s vote. Here are two primary reasons why:

1.) On many issues, a candidate’s opinion doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in terms of whether they can do anything about it. Take an issue such as abortion. I ask those who voted for George W. Bush solely because he was pro-life — and I know there were people out there who did — did it do any good? Did the Supreme Court decision get overturned? Did Bush even appoint a Supreme Court judge who was definitively pro-life? I believe the answer to those questions is no. So if the president can’t, or won’t do anything about a particular issue, his or her opinion on it shouldn’t matter.

2.) Even if a president should — and wants to be able to do something about a particular issue, the question of whether they have the ability to get what they want to get done accomplished should surely be in question.

Some had criticized me about my praise for presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s flat tax idea. The bottom line is, no one should vote for Huckabee because they like his flat tax proposal, because there isn’t a snowball’s chance in the sun that Congress will ever pass it.

A president isn’t a king or a dictator. A presidential candidate can talk about change, and come up with all of these great ideas about how to do things differently. But unless he can sell the Congress on the idea, make sure it’s constitutional so the Supreme Court doesn’t block it, and then ensure that all of those government workers out there can actually implement and enforce it, the “changing” idea isn’t going to happen.

Which brings me back to the race between Clinton and Obama. Clearly, Obama has people believing he can bring change to this country. His oratory style is a combination of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy. His goals, of course, are lofty: get out of Iraq as quickly as possible, give a tax cut to the middle class, prevent jobs from being shipped overseas, fix the mortgage crisis, and reduce the high school dropout rate, among the many.

Clearly, he sounds more enthusiastic about making change than Clinton.

But one has to wonder whether his enthusiasm is built on a true understanding of what is possible, or whether, if he does indeed get elected president, he’s in for a rude awakening. This is a guy who is 47 years old, and has been involved in national politics since 2004, when he was elected to the U.S. Senate.

Of the two, no one questions that Clinton knows what she’s in for. She already ran into that brick wall when she helped her husband attempt to create a national health care program. She knows what can be done, and what can’t.

Then again, maybe she’s, in a term used in the sales business, pre-qualifying. It’s possible that Clinton has shrugged off ideas that may indeed be possible today, ideas that, with his gravitas, Obama can pull off.

Obama has done a good job so far of selling the voters. If he’s elected, his challenge will be in selling a far more cynical bunch.

Joel Myhre is The Journal’s general manager. E-mail him at joel.myhre@fergusfallsjournal.com