No Loss for Words

Much has been said about the lack of foreign policy experience of candidates in this presidential election.  If you are a Democrat, you point to Joe Biden’s years in the Senate and feel comforted that you have an experienced candidate on the ticket.  If you are a Republican, you point to John McCain’s years in the Senate and feel comforted that you have an experienced candidate on the ticket.  Is there a difference between the jobs these two men are running for?  Most would suggest that the man with the nomination for President would be the one we want to have the experience.

In light of the fact that three of the four candidates on the podium in this election are United States Senators, history will demonstrate that most of the folks elected to the highest office have been governors.  Bush, Clinton, Reagan and Carter were all governors with no foreign policy experience before being elected president.

If there is an anomaly in this election, it is the fact that no governor or former governor made it through the primary to be the nominee of their party.

In the course of this presidential campaign, Joe Biden acknowledged his respect for John McCain and the fact that they worked together successfully in the Senate in a bi-partisan manner.  Joe Lieberman is another Senator with lots of experience in the Democratic Party.  He was a Vice-Presidential candidate himself under the Democratic banner.  He was an outspoken supporter of John McCain during the Republican Convention.

In the Democratic Primaries, Joe Biden indicated that Barack Obama was not qualified to be President.  Hilary Clinton and Bill Clinton indicated that Barack Obama was not qualified to be President.

I think that Sarah Palin is inexperienced in the ways of Washington DC just as Bill Clinton was prior to his election.  He did have a few more years experience as governor of his state than Palin does currently, but he was running for President and not Vice-President.

When you look at the people who served as Vice President in the past thirty years, George H. W Bush is the only one elected to the Presidency in his own right.  If you go back to Richard Nixon who was VP under Eisenhower, elected President after Lyndon Johnson decided not to run.  Johnson was a Vice-President who moved up after the assassination of John Kennedy, then elected in his own right.  Jerry Ford moved up following the Nixon resignation, but failed to be re-elected.  Vice-Presidents are number two’s because they are generally not Number One’s.

Sarah Palin may not be the best person for the job, but the same could be said for every other person who has served in that capacity over the years.  Strangely, when it has been necessary for the VP to step up to the responsibilities of the Presidency, all have managed adequately.

Gerald Ford was a Congressman elected by a very small number of people in his Congressional District in Michigan and thought to be “not up to the job” if Nixon were to be impeached.  I think history views him as doing an adequate job.

Over the years, our two major political parties have nominated candidates to be President and those individuals in turn selected their own running mates.  In some cases the voters were perplexed with the choice, but they moved forward.  Maybe there was second guessing, maybe there wasn’t.

If McCain had chosen Governor Tim Pawlenty or Governor Bobby Jindal, both relative newcomers to the national scene, would we be hearing the same criticisms for them that we are hearing for Governor Palin?  The media seems to be hung up on the fact that Palin is a conservative woman rather than a conservative man.

I don’t remember John McCain ever saying that he thought a conservative woman running for Vice President would attract the liberal woman vote.  I do remember the media folks talking about it though.  Palin is more conservative than McCain.

The media folks must not hold women in very high regard if they think women would vote for another woman just because of her gender.  The suggestion that Hilary Clinton supporters would change parties just to vote for a woman is crazy.

In the end, voters will select our next president.  I doubt that too many will face exit pollsters and admit that they voted for Obama because of Biden on the Democratic side or that they voted for McCain because of Palin on the Republican side.

Voters in the Puget Sound area are being asked to support another Transportation Funding package this year that will increase sales tax rates by about .5% for fifteen years.  It will raise $17 billion to pay for a bunch of projects in King County, a couple in Pierce County and a couple in Snohomish County.

Sound Transit Board members are wildly in favor of this measure and lead us to believe that it will solve our regional transportation problems.

I’m a pretty radical guy so the information I read is probably not credible, but it is my understanding that the best case scenario for light rail is that it will carry about 5% of the predicted commute load in the areas it serves.

I think about light rail system as a public works boondoggle that will produce a product but not one the majority of us really care about.  It will provide employment for many workers in the construction trades for many years.  It will trigger significant investment in land areas around the stations.

If you are one of those people who works along the service corridor of the train, you might see some value in the system, but it only magnifies the problems already existing with transit systems; the system doesn’t offer service from where workers live to where workers work.  In addition, with an expensive rail system, there is no second guessing or re-evaluating where the better route might be like we can with a bus system.

Former State Transportation Secretary Doug McDonald has been traveling with Tim Eyman this fall promoting the “no vote” on Initiative 985.  I have listened to their patter on a number of radio and television broadcasts.  Over the years I have disagreed with McDonald on a number of issues, particularly when he was the State Transportation Secretary.

After listening to him talk about the issues with Eyman, I started to come around to McDonalds way of thinking a little.  In the course of investigating him, I discovered a lengthy piece he wrote this summer outlining why we should “vote no” on the Sound Transit issue.  The three part series he wrote can be found on Crosscut.com.

For lay people who generally have only common sense to guide us, it helps to get credible information from generally reliable sources to give us confidence to make critical decisions like this one.  Doug McDonald makes a compelling case for us to vote “NO” in November.

For me, I prefer to focus my attention on making Snohomish County less reliant on King County or anyone else.  If we develop our own tax base and transportation plan that positions us to work toward our border with King County as a partner rather than a poor step child, we can negotiate from strength rather than weakness.  Our current situation puts us at a distinct disadvantage.

In the early 1990’s, when I was working with our peer cities and the county as the Snohomish representative to Snohomish County Tomorrow, we regularly had presentations from Puget Sound Regional Council staff outlining the regional plans and how our County fit into their plan.

Those meetings left me convinced that if we throw in with their plan, we will forever play a third class role in the region.  At that time the plan was called Vision 2020.  Now it is called Vision 2040.  The map shows Seattle as the center of the universe and everything else emanating from the center.  It called for all the best things to happen in King County and if there were any crumbs, the little people could fight over them.

I cannot name too many people that would choose for our county to look like King County.  Our vision for our county needs to be fleshed out by people making the investment to live and work in Snohomish County, not in King County.  What happens in Snohomish County can be a product of our efforts to inspire investment in a transportation plan that works for us.

Approving a Transportation plan that sucks hundreds of millions of dollars out of our county doesn’t make sense.  We need to have our County Council members go out into their districts for community meetings to gather public input on a Transportation plan that serves the needs of local communities, not a King in some far off land.

The people in Stanwood, Arlington, Granite Falls, Lake Stevens, Snohomish, Monroe, Sultan and Gold Bar might have a different perspective on this issue than Edmonds or Mountlake Terrace.

There are 17 billion reasons to “Vote NO” on the Sound Transit issue.  Let our voices be heard.

Vote NO on Initiative 985 too; Doug McDonald says it’s the thing to do.