This is an extraordinary claim in a country that's used to politicians being incompetent and corrupt. After eight years of Bush, who could blame us for being wary? But Obama's policies are big things, important things, and his specific positions on them are surprisingly smart.
Economy
For starters, take a look at Obama's positions on science-related issues. He supports doubling federal funding for basic research! He wants to make permanent a tax credit to encourage companies to do research and development in the US. He supports stem-cell research, embryonic and otherwise. And he says that he'll continue his track record in Illinois of making math and science education a bigger priority (and backing this up with funding, unlike No-Child-Left-Behind Bush).
This kind of thing is crucially important to our country. China and India have huge masses of people willing to work cheaper than Americans are legally allowed to work. Other countries are even cheaper than they are. Our big advantage is that we have a large educated population, combined with lots of money and land and resources and the world's best university system. Under the Bush administration we've been squandering the biggest advantage the US has in the global economy: science and technology. For example, our broadband Internet infrastructure is pathetic compared to that of more population-dense developed countries, when by rights we should have municipal wireless networking and fiber to the home in cities, with really fast Internet connections cheap and widely available. This is every bit as important today as universal telephone access was in the last century -- probably more important, actually, since the Internet is a gateway to a huge amount of ever-growing useful information, and can do long-distance telephone calls with Voice over IP.
Obama wants to do some major improvement of our Internet infrastructure, allocating a bunch of money to get cheaper, faster Internet access to everyone. He's a little vague on the specifics, which is good; even if he had a perfect plan today it would soon be outdated as new networking technology is introduced. For example, by using a combination of special high-tech light fixtures and broadband over powerlines, we could get Ethernet-speed wireless networks in our houses with a connection to the Internet that's about the same speed as DSL in the simplest configuration. Even an ideal plan would have to change once this technology becomes commercially available. Lack of flexibility is part of what gave us the incredibly clunky telephone system we have today; I think we can do better with the Internet.
He also supports Net Neutrality. For those of you who somehow escaped hearing about this last year, I'll explain what it's about. Some of the telecommunications companies that have local near-monopolies on Internet access want to introduce stratified service, charging web sites extra for the priviledge of being fast and pleasant for the telecoms' customers to use. The consequence of this would naturally be that the big companies that can afford to pay extra will be able to tilt the playing field toward themselves, stifling the small companies that are the Internet economy's lifeblood. And the telecoms would make a bundle, at our expense. Net Neutrality is one of those big issues where it really is about as simple as "the people versus the big companies", and Obama is on the right side. The fact that he gets his advice on intellectual property law from no less a hero than Lawrence Lessig (the guy who came up with the Creative Commons) completes the trifecta: Obama is a great candidate for technology development.
He's a great candidate for infrastructure in general, actually. Have a look at his transportation policies. The quick summary: rebuild our crumbling roads and bridges, both now and over the long term; commit to long-term funding and reform of Amtrak; build new passenger and freight rail; change city planning to focus more on pedestrians and bicycles; increase access to cheap public transit for lower-income workers who spend too much of their money on gas and car maintenence. The stuff about railroads is more important than it sounds. Ignoring subsidies, rail is the cheapest, most energy-efficient way of transporting huge amounts of goods over land. Our rail infrastructure has been slowly decaying for decades, but the good news is that building it up again will be easier than you might suppose. We still have large tracts of railroad-owned land where railroad tracks used to be and could be placed again, thus saving us the cost of massive earthmoving and land purchasing. There are old unused railway trestles that seem to be basically sound. We can do it.
An advantage of high-speed passenger trains in cities is that the density of passengers is hard to beat. A train packs a lot of people into a fairly small space and sends them quickly down a narrow track without needing to worry about stoplights or rush hour traffic. This does wonders for city planning. It's also cheaper all-around than cars, and pollutes less, and is not particularly sensitive to the cost of oil. If you electrify the tracks, you can power a city's trains using nice green power sources like wind, nuclear, and solar. I've often wished that more places in the US had something like Taipei's Mass Rapid Transit system, which can get you anywhere in the city, usually faster and always cheaper than driving.
Social issues
Obama's web site doesn't mention this very prominently, but he has a good record of supporting gay rights. About the only thing he doesn't publicly support is outright gay marriage -- he's going the separate-but-equal route by supporting civil unions. That's still an immense improvement over the typical Republican response, as illustrated by John McCain: oppose both while shouting non-sequiturs like "PROTECT THE SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE!" and "KEEP FAMILIES STRONG!". Obama's position on gay rights is pretty much identical to Hillary Clinton's, but I have more confidence that Obama would try to actually do something about it. (I strongly suspect that Obama is a good deal more liberal than he says. But Kucinich tried being honestly sane and liberal, and look how well that worked out for him.)
Moving on: while the mention of the words "religion" and "politics" in the same sentence always makes me nervous, Obama seems to have the best possible politically-feasible position on it. He somehow managed to support separation of church and state in front of an evangelical audience and not get shouted down from the podium. The fact that he actually came out and said the right thing without pussyfooting around it is very impressive, as is the way he managed to make this go over well with evangelical Christians. I think we could all use a change from the kind of extreme pandering to the Religious Right that made the Bush administration even worse than it would otherwise have been.
Education
Senator Obama's voting record on education has been good, and it looks like his record as a president could be even better. Near the top of the list of issues is fixing No Child Left Behind: fund it, somehow change the tests so that teachers don't spend huge amounts of time teaching the test, and when schools do badly, help them instead of punishing them. This sounds like it has potential for abuse -- schools looking for extra funding might try to artificially lower their test scores -- but I'm pretty sure that will be hashed out somewhere along the line to get a system that mostly kind of works. At this point, just about any change to NCLB would be an improvement.
I'm still very skeptical about how much Obama could improve our horrendously broken K-12 education system, but as usual when you look at higher education things get less grim. He has two big proposed improvements for higher education, and both of them are intensely excellent. First off, he wants to ditch the FAFSA. Filling out the FAFSA is a huge pain in the bum every year, and it could be eliminated by taxpayers "checking a box on their tax form, authorizing their tax information to be used, and eliminating the need for a separate application." There are an enormous number of people who miss out on financial aid because they don't fill out their FAFSA. This is an easy fix.
Second, and even bigger, he wants to create something called the "American Opportunity Tax Credit". This is a $4000 per student per year tax break, for which everyone is eligible if they or a dependent are going to college. With college tuitions spiralling ever higher and debt becoming a bigger and bigger issue, we really need to do something if we're to stay an educated and solvent society. The page I linked to neglects to mention, though, that there's a string attached: in order to get the $4000 tax credit, the student must complete 100 hours of some kind of voluntary public service each year. That's equivalent to $40 per hour in untaxed cash. Not bad for a student job.
Of course, this leaves us with thousands of college students needing to do something with those 100 hours a year. Obama has some ideas about that as well: he has plans to dramatically expand the number of public service opportunities and make them more attractive. He wants to make a Classroom Corps to help improve education (especially in poorer areas that can't afford to spend a reasonable amount on schools), a Health Corps to help improve public health (thus potentially saving billions on medical bills down the road), a Clean Energy Corps to work on building up our clean energy infrastructure and make buildings more energy efficient, a Homeland Security Corps to make sure we're organized the next time an emergency like Hurricane Katrina or 9/11 comes along, and several others. These will also be available as part-time jobs for college students, in an effort to move work-study students away from traditional library-and-cafeteria campus jobs.
I really like the fact that Obama is planning to make public service one of the big causes of his presidency. It's been way too long since we could feel good about our country. Wouldn't it be nice to have a president who asked you not just to feel good about your country, but to make it better? I would love to have a president who seriously asks us to donate our time and energy to make our world better! I would love to have a president who tells us that we can make a difference, and then hands us opportunities to actually go and make a difference. If the mark of patriotism is putting one of those "Support Our Troops" bumper stickers on your car, then patriotism is nothing more than a particularly hollow word. But if the mark of a patriot is freely choosing to serve your country and your world, then we can feel some pride again.
I miss the kind of idealism that made people volunteer en masse for the Peace Corps in the 60s. Incidentally, Obama wants to double the size of the Peace Corps by 2011 and "work with the leaders of other countries to build an international network of overseas volunteers so that Americans work side-by-side with volunteers from other countries."
Obama also has plans to use public service as a way of helping people out of poverty. Take the YouthBuild program, for instance: the idea is that "disadvantaged young people" can build public-works housing to get some decent income while completing high school and learning marketable skills. Now, construction jobs are not the best-paying -- they tend to get filled by Mexican immigrants willing to work for low wages -- but it's a darn sight better than dope dealing or picking up aluminum cans. And as a bonus, you get affordable housing. I helped build a couple of cheap houses in high school, and they were some of the sweetest little domiciles ever made. It's pleasant, rewarding work.
Government Openness
I really like one acutely underrated part of Obama's plans: make the government more transparent by making all its information available to the public: who voted how on what bills, all the govenrment documents, videos of meetings -- the whole thing. That's nothing new; people have been pushing for this sort of thing for years, with some success. The new thing, the big idea, is that he wants to make this stuff freely available over the Internet in machine-readable open formats. This has two subtle points going for it:
- That bit about "open formats" means that anybody can read the information without needing to shell out a bunch of money for the software to read it. It's more important than it sounds.
- The "machine readable" part is crucial. The sentence "Representative Hidebinder voted for HB2718" is easy enough for humans to read, but computers have trouble understanding arbitrary English. If all such information is in formats that computers can handle, then we could have web sites that track exactly what's going on in the government, as it's happening, with the full text of bills and recordings of debates and discussions in the news just a few clicks away. It's inevitable, if Obama's plan is put in place.
And now, a look at the competition
The primaries will be over soon enough, so I'l pass over Hillary and focus on the guy who's almost certainly going to get the Republican nomination: John McCain.
After looking through Obama's list of policies, McCain's platform was a sulfurous blast of Republican more-of-the-same. He tries to look bold and tough, panders shamelessly to social conservatives of every stripe (even toadying up to prominent nutcase televangelist Jerry Falwell), pushes more tax cuts as the omnisolution, talks about staying in Iraq until we "win" an ultimately unwinnable conflict, and essentially positions himself as being the guy who's probably not quite as bad as Bush. In his defense, he would probably get the government to mostly stop torturing people. He might even reinstate habeas corpus. Faint praise indeed!
If McCain is elected, it'll be Bush part 3. It's too horrifying to contemplate, so back to cheerier things:
Political feasibility of Obama's plans
The great thing about most of what I've mentioned is that they're not one-party issues. They're not even exclusively liberal issues, although liberals tend to focus on them more. Most of the great things Obama wants to do are things that can get bipartisan support.
Sure, Republicans aren't going to be too happy about Obama's liberal views on social issues like gay rights and stem-cell research and abortion and not being afraid of everything all the dang time. And there's still a minority of people who'll get mad at him for pulling our troops out of Iraq. Building railroads and maintaining our highways, on the other hand, is something both parties can support. And the public service? Republicans claim to be all about honorable sacrifice for your country! They pay lip-service to it every day! How could they possibly be against someone having the guts to actually straight-up ask Americans to serve their country? And everyone claims to support more government accountability, so Obama's brilliant machine-readable government information reporting plan has a good chance of going through in some form. The same goes for his No Child Left Behind reform, streamlining FAFSA, tax cuts for families sending students to college, and most of his other good ideas. These major improvements can actually happen, with broad bipartisan support!
I believe that Barack Obama will be a truly great president. He's the first candidate I've ever been able to honestly support. Ever.
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