It's all I've been hearing the past couple of weeks: Either Clinton or McCain
Anybody but Hillary.
Soon enough the presidential race is going to start looking like the Huckabee-McCain-Romney-Thompson-Giuliani carousel of a few months ago. I encourage Democrats and progressives to take a step back for a moment and consider a couple things.
First, did it strike anyone else as strange that neo-conservative talking heads such as Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh said they would rather support Hillary Clinton than John McCain? Their fallback line was She's more conservative than McCain is. Let me shed some light on that (hopefully I'm not the first to do so). Hillary Clinton has not voted with the Republican Party 87 percent of the time that she has been in the U.S. Senate, as McCain has. She does not want to make George Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest permanent, as McCain does. She does not want to privatize Social Security, as George Bush and John McCain do. She does not want to send more of our soldiers to Iraq like George Bush and John McCain do, but instead wants to begin the process of bringing them home and increasing Iraqi accountability for their own government.
In fact, Barack Obama has very similar goals. Both Democratic candidates promise a stark contrast from the failed Bush-McCain policies of the last seven years. So why are we buying into the notion that it has to be one or the other?
Conservatives here on campus have tried to paint Hillary Clinton as the better candidate, even publicly supporting her candidacy much like national-level pundits have.
With the disarray the Republican Party is in after nominating a candidate they can't stand, they are now desperately trying to divide Democrats along fabricated lines. The bottom line is, both Democrats in this race are more than qualified for the position, and both would make great presidents. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have supported the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) that was vetoed by President Bush and opposed by John McCain.
Both Obama and Clinton want to create a substantial tax credit for college students, making the education we receive here at Ohio University and other schools that much easier to achieve. I couldn't find any proposals like this from John McCain. Maybe his straight talk express left us students behind.
Don't buy into the divisive politics of the right wing. When deciding whom to support, look at what the candidates have done, but also what they will do. If there were a standard set in stone for what gives a person the experience necessary to be president, all of our leaders through the decades would have followed in the exact same path. We have had enough of the divisive politics of George Bush and the Republican Party. When you cast your vote for change, remember there will be two candidates who can deliver that. They will both have a (D) after their name.
Matthew Crawford is a junior political science major.
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