This reader spells out the price of electing Romney and Ryan:
I completely agree with you and the author of the original post. It’s all well and good to promote ideological purity when it’s only your own neck on the line. When I was in law school, my torts professor challenged us to always consider this when making a policy decision: Who pays the price? Who bears the burden?
Who would pay the price for a Romney Ryan presidency? Even if we assume Obama is “the same” as Romney-Ryan on education (which is not really the case) what about everything else? I think these people would pay the price:
* Seniors and impoverished people without ID’s who will be denied the right to vote;
* Children and adults with disabilities or preexisting conditions who will be denied health insurance coverage;
* Middle-income taxpayers who will bear an undue burden because their income is earned from labor rather than capital gains;
* Women who will be unable to secure needed health care when Planned Parenthood is shut down;
* Women who will be denied the right to terminate a pregnancy without government interference in her private deliberations with her doctor;
* People who will lose their life savings in an unregulated Wall Street (2008 was no so long ago);
* All citizens who will breathe polluted air and drink polluted water because of lax environmental standards;
And then, as Tim points out, there is the Supreme Court. The current conservative majority, through the Citizens United case, has allowed staggering amounts of private anonymous funds to be pumped into efforts to influence elections. They have also dramatically weakened affirmative action. Brave Americans fought for years to win precious victories such as Brown v. Board of Education. Are we willing to let Romney pick any more justices?
Sorry to rant and rave. I am nearly 62 years old. When I was born, Brown v. Board had not yet been decided, women who needed an abortion needed to arrange an illegal procedure, and male teachers were routinely paid more than female teachers. Discrimination against those who were gay or lesbian was unquestioned. During my first year in college I watched the televised draft lottery that would send young men off to die in Vietnam.
There is no question that I will vote for Obama and do my best to see that he is elected. My life experiences tell me that Romney would be so much worse on so many issues. I am also not willing to have the most vulnerable of my fellow citizens pay the price for a right-wing Tea Party controlled administration.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I love reading your blog Ms. Ravitch, but I totally disagree with this post. This teacher will vote for Romney because I do not believe in the re-distribution of wealth. I do believe that if you can’t produce an ID at the voting booth, you should not be allowed to vote. I believe that taxing the rich heavily will mean less hiring. I actually believe in one flat tax for all. As a woman, I believe that if you can’t afford birth control, then don’t have sex. Additionally, if birth control for women is to be paid for by the government, then condoms should be paid for too for men. As a Catholic, I am offended that Obama would try to dictate the availability of birth control to Catholic employers for their employees–don’t take the job with the Catholic organization if you don’t like their terms. I believe it is unconstitutional for the government to require people to buy health insurance. I believe both political parties will make education worse in America with their devotion to standardized testing and love affair with charter schools, so I can’t take sides on education issues.
I grew up poor. Neither one of my parents graduated from high school because their fathers died when they were young and both had to go out to work. They struggled at every financial turn. We got one present each for Christmas and a new outfit for school for our birthdays. Yet, through hard work and perseverance, they put four kids through college–one teacher, one engineer, and two accountants. They never accepted food stamps or welfare even though they qualified for it. They were too proud and embarrassed to take it, so they dug in and took any jobs they could find. My father worked several low paying jobs seven days per week. My mother took any work she could find too. They knew education was the ticket out of poverty, so they were militant about our doing well in school. So I don’t want to hear about redistributing the wealth after you have worked hard for it. If you want to be charitable, it is your choice to make donations to the less fortunate, but I believe the government should not dictate it. Hence, this 25 year veteran teacher will be voting for Romney.
It’s depressing enough when ordinary citizens fall for the “redistribution of wealth” scam, but I truly mourn for my country when teachers do.
The crash of 2008, which left millions of ordinary Americans bankrupt and/or homeless was caused by billion-dollar banks which paid fortunes to lobby Congress to repeal nearly all of the regulations that were established after the Great Depression. Among other things, investment banks, which are allowed to speculate freely, were allowed to merge with commercial banks, which are insured by FDIC (as in, our money). Knowing that they need never worry about the losses, these banks speculated wildly with our money. On top of that, they pushed mortgages on borrowers they knew were unqualified because they didn’t care – they immediately resold all of those mortgages as triple A rated securities which were further sliced and diced into unregulated credit swaps. When the whole house of cards collapsed, the banking executives, already multi-millionaires, walked away with millions more, while the rest of us faced job loss, bankruptcy and foreclosure.
I guess that kind of “redistribution of wealth” doesn’t bother you, since after all, the rich are “job creators”, right? The only kind of “redistribution” you oppose is restoring reasonable regulations to protect those of us who don’t have billions to influence Congress. That’s some kind of democracy you believe in. Don’t go complaining to me when the only teaching job you can find is being a private tutor to some snotty little rich kid (and you’ll be lucky to get that).
Well-said and thanks for the reminders. I am 46 so I have not had some of your firsthand experiences, but your reasons are my reasons for voting for Obama in spite of my disdain for his educational policy.
A very well reasoned argument although perhaps a bit strongly stated. However, the issue that continues to plague me as I decide who I will vote for (Obama or the dem ticket minus Obama) is that a vote for Obama seems to be a vote for the continued efficacy of the owning both sides of the aisle. What do the king makers and would be kings learn when we vote for a sitting president whose policies have generally been more beneficial to corporations? We learn that the citizens can be relied on to vote for the the lesser of two evil and therefore don’t matter to the win. And, The only important constituent is the one with the deep pockets.
On the other hand, if the radical right does win the election because the democratic base refuses to endorse the less scary republicanism of their democratic nominee it does two important things.
First, it tells other democratic candidates that the base is not the sure thing and that behavior in office can win or lose them an election regardless of who the opposition is. This is an important message for future elections and removes the ability of king makers to offer the illusion of choice and triumph where it doesn’t actually exist. Don’t come as a democrat in name only. Good info for the Cory Bookers and Andrew Cuomos waiting
In the wings to be our next faux democrats.
The second benefit of a Romney win would be to put a declining economy in the hands of republicans. If they can turn it around for the people on main street, good for them. Actions should speak louder than party affiliation. If they continue with their let them eat cake attitudes, it helps to solidify support for a more progressive agenda and wakes more people up.
Take the pain now or be stuck with a strategy that disenfranchises us as we vote? Maybe a demcratic congress and a republican president would be in our long term interests if not our short term ones. Decisions, decisions.
Jill, the redistribution of wealth UPWARDS started with Reagan and would continue under Romney. I hope you’re not a history teacher.
Jill, the redistribution of wealth – UPWARDS – has been going on for years. http://www.epi.org/blog/confirming-redistribution-wealth-upward/
I hope you’re not a history teacher.
Obama plans a sellout a Social Security and Medicare as well. Please remember the “Grand Bargain” he wanted to make with John Boehner and House Republicans on the deficit back that included stark cuts and changes to Social Security and Medicare.
http://www.americablog.com/2012/03/obama-wanted-cuts-to-social-security.html
Please also remember the “Cat Food Commission” Obama has put into place run by Alan Simpson that is also calling for stark cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Medicaid is also on the list to be cut:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2010/08/obamas-cat-food-committee-alan-greenspan-and-dancing-grannies-medicare
Let me also remind you that Obama has already cut food stamp allocations to poor people in order to save his Race to the Top school privatization program:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/race-to-the-top/cutting-food-stamps-for-race-t.html
Let me remind you how Obama has put a mortgage relief plan in place that has screwed millions of underwater homeowners and been a great big bailout for the banks:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-zombeck/loan-modifications-a-4-bi_b_438837.html
And of course Obama has continued the bankster bailouts begun by Bush, simply renaming TARP to TALF and handing out all the free money Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein can hold in their grubby, criminal hands.
Yes, a Romney/Ryan presidency would be disastrous for senior citizens, children, working people, etc.
But let’s not forget what a disaster the Obama presidency has been too.
The insidious thing with Obama is that these right wing neoliberal programs get put into place without any push back from progressives because Obama is a Dem.
If Romney tried to push through these very same programs and initiatives, there would be a tremendous fight (think how Dems fought Bush’s Social Security privatization push.)
I’m not saying anybody should vote Romney over Obama or that Obama is as bad as Romney would be.
But make no mistake, Obama is selling us out to corporate interests just as Romney would – he’s simply doing it at a slower rate.
And just as it took Nixon to go to China and Clinton to “end welfare as we know it,” sometimes Wall Street needs a Democrat to make the neoliberal changes they want on programs like Social Security, Medicare, etc.
Obama is their man for that.
It all happens starting December 2012.
That’s when Obama pushes the Cat Food Commission report as a solution for the debt crisis we’re supposedly having.
Meanwhile corporate profits are at an all-time high while corporate tax rates are at a 40 year low and wages are at a 25 year low.
That’s the REAL crisis we’re having – but Obama, fed on Goldman Sachs money, isn’t going to solve that crisis any more than Romney will.
Like Jill, I am a Catholic. I agree with some of her beliefs. However, like ‘a concerned teacher’ I believe we need to vote for the lesser of the two evils. Those who think we ‘can’t get any worse than Obama’ have no clue what we could face. I like the reference to ‘king makers’ and ‘would be kings’. John Kasich definitely thought he had become the King of Ohio, but the voter referendum showed him otherwise. I believe Romney is working for the same ‘king makers’ as Kasich did. That is why I will vote for Obama. We can get worse. We just don’t know what degree of worse Romney and Ryan would be. Where is Ross Perot, or someone like him, when we need him? A strong third party candidate could have made a difference this year.
I concerned that people still believe in a party, who’s philosophies was a major cause for the situation our country is in now, will be the best choice to get us out of it. I guess people don’t believe in facts anymore *sigh*.
Sadly Jill, you are misinformed. If you watch Faux “news”, then you fell for the highly edited Obama video from 1998 that they tried to use as a distraction from Romney’s distaste for poor people. I would suggest you watch the entire video – in context – and see what he really said. The Obama campaign has made it available.
Additionally, you should also see how many Catholic organizations previously offered birth control – done so under previous Republican administrations. It wasn’t until Obama put out his health care plan that they started having a fit. So either they are playing politics with women’s lives, or they are racists – you pick.
While Obama’s education plan is not to my liking, voting for Romney and what he represents is completely abhorrent. I cannot control my own uterus? My students who come from poverty will receive even less help than before? Bain-like business principles applied to education?
Finally, I get tired of all the stories about how other people’s families grew up in poverty and managed just fine. Times are different. What may have been possible 50 years ago is no longer possible. Even my own parents – neither of them wealthy – admit that if they were starting out now, they’d never be able to have or do anything close to what they could manage on in the 60’s. And honestly, there’s nothing more depressing to me than having the kids of colleagues in my classroom and knowing they are on free and reduced lunch because that teacher’s salary doesn’t put that family of 3 or 4 above the poverty line. Romney will only make that worse.
Of course, I’m going to vote for Obama, but my protest is to devote my campaign energy and contributions to leaders of either party who will speak out and take action to defend public education, and who have shown they have the courage to oppose the Obama administration’s corporate subservience. Of course I’m disappointed. I understand that the neoliberal corporatists chose Obama as their standard bearer, but it was we who lifted him.
The only Republican I ever supported was Charlie Crist, I’m afraid. He’s long gone. Bernie Sanders gets my support, and my own state senator and representative, who voted against the 2010 Reform juggernaut.
I choked up when I watched Guggenheim’s Obama video, though, to think what he might have become, once the weight of history fell on him. Maybe this time…
So right!! A Romney presidency would be a disaster for the middle class, the elderly, women, and the environment. I hope that my fellow citizens recognize the obvious.
Appreciate the civil debate in this dialogue. I’m a woman. I’m a senior and I’m a retired teacher. I can not go to the polls and vote for the Romney/Ryan ticket. I don’t agree with all the stands and initiatives that Obama has made, but I don’t agree with any that the Republican ticket has.
For anyone who thinks there is really just a coin-flip between Democrats and Republicans, you HAVE to read IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN IT LOOKS: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, the new book by Thomas E Mann and Norman J Ornstein.
I believe their analysis of what’s been going on in this country, particularly in terms of Congress, makes clear that this is not a case of “Both sides do it,” as the major news outlets continually try to present. The GOP has gone stark raving mad. Its conservative wing, which is now so powerful that there’s virtually no OTHER wing – just different degrees of extremism – has made governance impossible, unless all resistance to Tea Party ideology is given up or the American people elect a Democratic majority so large that it can override the complete unwillingness to compromise that has been the tactic Newt Gingrich brought into play even before he was Speaker.
Boehner seems like he’s almost sane compared with the extremists who are calling the shots for the GOP: Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and other “Young Turks” who are so committed to ideology and winning on every single issue that they would happily see the collapse of the government and the economy rather than let Obama, any Democratic president, or any Republican president who doesn’t completely dance to their tune have success. This is as insane as the country has been since right before the Civil War. And a Romney-Ryan administration would be a disaster on a host of issues that seem to go unmentioned by most folks on the left who complain about Obama.
On my view, education is probably a push regardless of who is president, but I’d still sooner have five minutes with Obama to discuss education issues than Romney or Ryan. And go down the list of other issues where the left is deeply disappointed with Obama and find one – just one – where things would be better under Romney.
Then look at the issues where there is no question whatsoever that things would be deeply and direly worse under Romney/Ryan. Throw in any Supreme Court nominations that come up between now and January, 2017, and it’s impossible for me to imagine a progressive who seriously thinks we won’t be better off with Obama.
Finally, those whose religious/moral convictions lead them to think that Romney is the better choice: I can’t speak to what makes folks believe that there’s a god or a church leader that wants gays not to get married, wants women to be forced to have babies they don’t want to have, regardless of rape, incest, threats to their physical or mental health or their lives (and at the same time doesn’t want easy access to birth affordable birth control in order to avoid unwanted pregnancies.
But I do know that the Catholic Church in this country has historically done a lot for social justice, particularly with poor people. And I do believe that Jesus fellow you’re all so fond of was pretty clear about how the poor should be treated. And none of that jibes with Mitt Romney’s view of things. He is the worst sort of self-centered elitist. He calls his mandatory tithing to his church “giving to charity.” He is not a self-made man, but was born into wealth, yet he acts as if he came from nothing and with no help made himself rich (purely through hard work, of course). It’s such a transparent tissue of lies that I despair of any teacher who believes it. And to claim to be following the precepts of any flavor of Christianity by supporting a ticket with such completely heartless disregard for the old, the young, the ill, the poor, the infirm, etc., borders on the obscene.
This country cannot continue to function with such complete inner contradictions between its founding precepts and its actual divisive economic and social inequity. We still have a chance to achieve the full greatness of our potential, but we will never get there through the hateful, selfish policies of the extreme right. And as things stand, the GOP is ONLY comprised of such policies and mostly of those who want ever more for themselves no matter who suffers. It’s no longer just contempt for poor people in the Third World, but utter contempt for our 25% domestic poor. The rest of the civilized world must be horrified by what we have become. I know I am. And no matter how much of a compromise on some issues I have to accept, I’m old enough to know that I’m not going to EVER get my way on everything. Cutting my nose off to spite my face, however, is not an acceptable alternative.
Thank you for this post. I also believe that, even in education, as bad a Obama’s policies are, he can be influenced.. Unless I am delusional, his campaign no longer emphasizes K-12, but talks about pre-K and higher ed. He let Rahm swing in the wind during the CTU strike. Baby steps for sure, but if we build a big enough movement he can be pushed. (Shamed?) We are getting the Obama we deserve. I do not believe Romney believes in public education as a right. No one deserves that.
We are getting the Obama we deserve? I didn’t deserve what he did to me and my fellow teachers. He put into effect draconian anti-teacher and anti-public education policies that Bush could only dream of. Public education is fighting for its life right now. Give Obama another four years and the whole nation will look like New Orleans.
I miss having two parties. Obama has turned the Democratic Party into a subset of the GOP. Have you noticed how Obama and Romney aren’t even arguing over real policy issues? They agree on more issues than they disagree.
He is not the lesser of two evils. He is the more effective evil. He put into place the Republican agenda more effectively than any Republican could do, because he was able to do it without the Democrats fighting him.
He has betrayed more than just teachers in the past four years. He has accomplished the Republican agenda not only on education, but also Wall Street, foreign policy and labor. Do you really believe he won’t go further in the next four years? Do you really believe he can be trusted to not further betray his base? Do you really believe in your heart of hearts that in the next four years we won’t see him slide even further right?
I wouldn’t vote for him to save my life.
I think you’re very wrong. If the only issue that mattered were education, I’d flip a coin. But that’s not the case. And I think if you did more digging, you’d realize that there’s a lot more going on here than what Obama or the Democratic Party (which remains more diverse – in the sense of having a wider range of views on policy and issues, while the GOP has gotten far more monolithic.
Politics is about negotiating and compromising. The current GOP makes that well-nigh impossible. They also make it impossible to govern in any sort of democratic way. I don’t care who the non-GOP, not Tea Party president is: the way things are now, the best we can hope is that s/he can minimize the damage these lunatics are trying to do until enough of the country figures out what’s going on and hands the Democrats a dominant majority. Then, things can finally get done.
But put a spineless weasel like Mitt Romney in the White House with a true Teabagger like Paul Ryan calling the shots (remember the George W. Bush puppet and his puppeteer, Dick Cheney?), and we’re going straight into the worst administration in history.
Blaming the mess on Obama is amazingly naive. I absolutely believe he won’t slide further right. Whether he gets enough support in Congress to keep the country from being dragged into Tea Party Hell is the key question.
We’ve got major political players who are proudly and openly willing to see the country go into economic free-fall and governmental melt-down “on principle.” That’s simply not viable in a democracy. Letting them move things further in that direction is, on my view, gross negligence. And it’s a childish reaction to the sad fact that no, Barack Obama isn’t actually Jesus Christ and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King rolled into one. So we show our displeasure by willingly let the most reactionary group of psycho extremists in modern American history take even more power? I can’t imagine so doing.
“But put a spineless weasel like Mitt Romney in the White House with a true Teabagger like Paul Ryan calling the shots (remember the George W. Bush puppet and his puppeteer, Dick Cheney?), and we’re going straight into the worst administration in history.”
At least with Romney in the White House, the Democrats will fight the Republican agenda. Right now they are supporting it fully, since the guy implementing it is one of their own. And there isn’t that much diversity left in the Democratic Party. I can count on my fingers the number of traditional Democrats we have left, like Governor Brown. The Obamaesque Neo-Democrats are mostly what populate the party now. Look at Pat Quinn and Rahm Emmanual. Look at mayors Bloomberg and Villaraigosa. A couple of weeks ago there was a post on this blog about all the Democrat politicians across nation who have drunk the Neo-Liberal kool-aid.
Even the unions have given into the Republican agenda, supporting merit pay! They never would have done this with a Republican pushing it. It took Obama to get the unions and the Democrats to abandon teachers.
You want me to remember when Bush and Cheney were in the White House? With pleasure. When Bush was in the White House, my administrator never saw my test scores, since my local union was able to collectively bargain to keep her from collecting data on me. Now, with Obama’s Race to the Top, she sees her teachers’ scores and uses them to pit us against each other. Collective bargaining has been seriously undermined in a way that Bush could only dream of.
When Bush was in the White House, merit pay was just a bad idea. Now it’s sweeping the nation. When Bush was in the White House, test scores were used against schools, but not teachers individually. Now under Obama, they are used to fire hundreds of teachers at a time. When Bush was in the White House, charter schools existed, but now they proliferate like viruses. When Bush was in the White House, test scores were not tied to teacher evaluations. Now VAM has become the junk science used to evaluate more and more of us. I never thought I would see the day when it would be a victory for teachers to have “only” 30% of their evaluations consist of VAM. And yet that is the reality in which teachers in Chicago have found themselves at the end of their strike. That was Obama’s policy, not Bush’s, which did that.
I never thought I would look upon the Bush years with nostalgia, and yet here I am. I don’t like Romney, but I’d rather have an enemy in the White House that I–and my union–can fight head-on, than a traitor who stabs me and my fellow teachers in the back while we “sit at the table.”
I’m sick of “sitting at the table.” I want a fight.