Sam Nunn and Campaign Issues

I lived in Atlanta many years ago, and Sam Nunn was a man for who I had great respect. He had character. I remember one time while chairing the Armed Services Committee he favored a Boeing proposal over a Martin-Marietta one for the Air Force, even though the latter one would have had the planes being built in his home state of Georgia. He drew a lot of heat for that, but the Boeing proposal was the more cost effective one.

I had been gone from Georgia for some time by the time he retired, so I don’t know what happened to him. I do know that he has been active in nuclear non-proliferation issues, which is certainly effort well spent.

Now he is launching a series of seminars to try to coerce the presidential candidates to address serious issues that he feels are being neglected in the present campaign; issues like the federal debt, national service and failure of this country to adopt a comprehensive energy policy. He is drawing a lot of criticism from both sides about this “bipartisan” effort, a label that as far as I can find has not been used by him but has been applied only by his critics.

I am seriously unhappy about his decision to include Bloomberg in his efforts, and the impetus that such a move provides for Bloomberg as a third party presidential candidate. Third parties in the presidential election have been pretty disruptive in the past, sometimes disastrous, and Bloomberg is a particularly awful choice to put in such a role.

However, he has a valid point in saying that the presidential campaign to date is giving us pretty much nothing on which to base any kind of decision on who is best suited to guide this country. Look at the subjects he named and ask yourself how much discussion has been held regarding them in the campaign so far, by any candidate of either party.

To the list mentioned by Sam Nunn I would add one, the fact that our spending on the military exceeds that of the rest of the nations in the world combined and what little talking is done about that is to the effect that it should be increased.

The two subjects that are discussed are the war in Iraq and healthcare. As to Iraq, Republicans will keep us there and Democrats will get us out but the promises of getting us out are short on specifics as to implementation and are always hedged with conditions about the need of “keeping us safe.” On healthcare Republicans wants to leave individuals on their own and Democrats promote variations on the theme of increasing the role of the insurance industry which is the only present winner in the current debacle. Yes, these statements are oversimplifications, but not by much.

The rest of the campaign is fluffy statements that are geared to the audience of the moment, empty rhetoric designed to make the speaker sound good and/or make the other candidate(s) sound bad. “I’ve been fighting for you for 35 years so you should vote for me,” whatever that means.

The federal debt? We cannot talk about that because untying that knot requires talking about raising taxes on somebody, probably on campaign contributors, or cutting services, to people who vote, or reducing pork barrel spending, on projects being built by contractors who are campaign contributors. We are spending the resources of future generations, which is irresponsible to the point of criminality.

National service? Perish the thought that we should talk about patriotism in the form of actually asking men and women to bear arms and die for their country, or even telling them that it is their duty to do so. Duty is to go shopping and to put a magnet on one’s car in memory of other people who bore arms and died for their country. No politician can say today what Kennedy said so many years ago that stirred a country to action, “Ask not what your country can do for you…”

An energy policy? We cannot form a sensible energy policy with gasoline that costs about half what the rest of the world pays to fuel their cars. We can’t do it with auto manufacturers being free to set their own mileage standards, and with other manufacturers free to set their own air quality standards. We can’t do it with corporate America running Congress with lobbying dollars.

Sam Nunn has one thing right, the presidential candidates need to talk about the hard things. The Iraq war and healthcare are the popular things to talk about, the easy things, and the candidates are not giving us real talk even on those. The easy things matter, but the hard things matter too, and they won’t go away just because we don’t talk about them.