Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
Kerry... has fudged and obfuscated enough to make me believe that he will do none of it. The True Kerry could not win this country, and he knows that. Look at his history of campaigns - he has done this over and over. Plus, he always comes up with some image-fix in the short weeks before voting day, wins the vote, and then sort of quietly ignores what he promised to do in that short period. Those who ignore history are doomed to _________. (Fill this in for extra points.)
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Doomed to repeat it. George Santayana.
Now, on to your main point here. The historic Kerry who makes campaign statements he has no intention of keeping.
Compare and contrast with Bush's "compassionate conservative" tripe. We already covered stem cell research. Let's look at his tax cuts.
I'll give him a nod for the child tax credit and for starting to move towards equalizing the marriage penalty. But he gets more demerits for the dividend tax break. The only people who benefit from this are the wealthy. The vast majority of middle class and working sitizens who own stock do so through either 401(k) plans or IRAs. A dividend tax break does nothing for the average taxpayer whose dividends are all tax-free to begin with. And we can move on to capital gains or the estate tax. Again, tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.
Now, how about education. Bush's No Child Left Behind program has failed to make significant inroads. Kerry's proposal has a lot more promise. Provide federal funds to increase the salary of good teachers, dependent upon a commitment to weed out bad ones.
John Ashcroft. Enough said, right?
All candiates make promises. Few end up keeping all of them. So we choose based upon who we feel has the better overall program. If you start handicapping candidates based upon what we actually believe they will accomplish, we will all end up voting for Gerald Ford, who promised nothing and made us all confident he would deliver just that.
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