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Obama’s Three-Pronged Reform Plan
Obama gave one of the clearest, most substantive explanations of the election (by either candidate) about what “changing Washington” means in Green Bay yesterday. Unfortunately, it wasn’t laced heavily with attacks on McCain or soundbites and therefore got very little coverage (even on political blogs).
But if you’re interested in actual issues and plans, give it a watch. He divided the speech into three sections: Political reforms, government reforms, and regulatory reforms. He may not be able to live up to all of his promises, but I haven’t heard these kind of specifics from McCain. As far as I can tell, McCain’s plan for reform is 1) vetoing earmarks and 2) bringing Sarah Palin to Washington.
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5 Responses to “Obama’s Three-Pronged Reform Plan”
It is kind of hard to argue that the Republicans were for deregulation when they passed Sarbanes-Oxley in 2002 and President Bush signed it into law.
Maybe the problem is that Congress and the federal government is always trying to solve the last problem without being able to see the next problem coming.
Of course, we can expect all of these reforms to come to pass during his first term, if not during his first 100 days in office, as evidenced by his long record of past reforms. For example…..
Well, we can always hope that he will walk the walk when he's done talking….
Actually, the Democrats have filthy hands, as usual. (Consider Chris “Countrywide” Dodd, the same idiot who kept lying about “extreme” politics and “extremists” after the 1994 elections.) However, many will look at the timing of this and the S&L disaster and will blame the Republicans and deregulation, and this won't be limited to the low-IQ instinctive Dem voters. Deregulation after 1980, in about nine years there were serious S&L problems under Bush the elder. Bubble-related nonsense in the 1990s and a big law change in 1999 (defended by Robert Rubin, incidentally, covering Clinton's ass), and nine years later, a financial disaster under another Bush.
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Obama's speech in Green Bay (TWO WORDS! *#@$@#$*#) can be found here.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ar…
Does anyone think the ideas in his speech are good one or bad ones, or does it not matter because Obama's evil, lying, or just a Democrat?
pacatrue, don't be silly–he's actually talking about issues. Had this been some sort of 'gotcha' moment, this comment board would be loaded. I'm at work so I can't watch the whole thing, but I took the Cliff Notes version instead from a paper that covered it:
http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/apps/pbcs.d…
FWIW, my take–he discusses how he plans on going through the budget line by line to eliminate programs that do not work. This is very murky and I can only imagine that he's going to run into some trouble with members of his own party if it's some sort of pet project. Does this mean he is in favor of a line-item veto? If he's truly serious about going through the budget and eliminating waste then I think that is a step in the right direction. But then again, you've got McCain talking about eliminating earmarks. Are these two in the same? I'm not sure.
I like his idea about transparency but I'm not sure I understand the rationale about establishing a market advisory group. These seems a bit more bureaucratic to me. Why not just make all financial records publicly accessible. I think if the public really knew what was going on with the expenses, they would serve as the advisory group and let him know when things weren't going well. I don't recall, but I think that's what McCain is out there advocating.
Just a couple of things that caught my eye.