On the First Debate

I haven’t written a post in a while for a number of reasons: I have been working full-day shifts at the UCSC ensuring that we have a great group of community service-minded first-years to work with, and I have been a little sick.

But none of this stopped me from watching the first presidential debate last night in the dorm’s Rec Room. About 50 new and returning students (a third of the dorm) watched the debate together, and it was clear from the group’s laughter and groans that the University of Chicago is, by and large, turning out in November for Obama.

We thought Obama sounded smart and thoughtful, though he should have remembered Jim Lehrer’s name (“Well, Tom… I mean, John…”); McCain was long-winded about government spending, but didn’t address the financial crisis well; and Lehrer—he needed to give up on orchestrating a presidential debate during which the candidates would actually debate.

It was clear that Lehrer would have preferred the candidates to strip down and mud-wrestle to solve the financial crisis—a topic he kept returning—but I’m willing to settle for the candidates’ re-hashing of talking points for now.

My stances on many of the issues discussed are clear: I believe Obama when he says he will open up talks, on his terms, with non-democratic, “terrorist” governments like Iran and North Korea. I also believe that the U.S. needs to set a timetable for troop withdrawal from Iraq, though I understand that an immediate withdrawal would only further de-stabilize the region.

And there’s the topic of government over-spending—a problem Republicans traditionally like to pin on Democrats, despite Bush’s steely determination to approve just about every spending bill to go before him during his eight years in office. McCain tried to juxtapose his plans to cut government spending on domestic programs with Obama’s intentions to transform public school programs, alternative energy development and health services, but one comment Obama made stood out: “You are using a hatchet where you need a scalpel,” there are some excellent programs in the U.S. that are under funded, such as early childhood education. This is the kind of discerning, nuanced comment that attracted me to Obama in the first place.

But what I really want to focus on is the way the candidates’ talked about energy policy. It’s good. Four years ago energy independence was not such a catch phrase, and I am happy to here candidates from both parties trying to address this issue.

I think Obama made the clearest case for energy independence last night, when he described his 10-year plan to wean America off foreign oil. He wants to raise the fuel efficiency standards of cars manufactured in the U.S. to compete with Japanese makers.

Obama made this point about Wall street, but I think this kind of thinking applies to the energy crisis as well: “We did not set up a twenty-first century framework to deal with these problems… [Instead, we have] a twentieth-century policy that doesn’t believe in regulation.” Again, there’s nuance to his statement that sounds to me like mature policy-making (as opposed to the kind you write with “a pen that’s very old”).

But I’m also glad that McCain emphasized the creation of nuclear power plants, which would in turn create thousands of new jobs. And like me, McCain does not support ethanol subsidies, which encourages farmers to over produce corn, bringing the prices of corn-based processed food down and good, healthy and cheap vegetables harder and harder to come by.

I’m a college student hesitant to enter the working-world because I see all of these twentieth-century systems breaking down, and a nation unsure how to learn from them. I need a president who resists the dichotomies that the U.S. has consistently relied on post-WWII and is unafraid to take a more complicated point of view in foreign and domestic affairs.