In advance of election 2012, here’s my take — America deserves a strong alternative to Obama…but Mitt’s not it — in video and written form:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIxz0Jy9zPs

Part 1: A nation in trouble

Our Economy, Our Democracy and Our Earth are in trouble.

With regard to the Economy:

• A financial crash that destroyed $11 trillion four years ago has not been investigated and prosecuted.
• Students are still trained for lame 20th century corporate life instead of disruptive and innovative 21st century start up life.
• and Economic inequality is on the rise, ripping America in two and calling into question the continued existence of the American dream

With regard to our Democracy:

• The branch of government that was designed to remain closest to the people — our American Congress — has an approval rating in the high single digits.
• Congressmen spend an average of 30-70% of their day dialing donors for dollars, resulting in Congress to be reliant not on the People alone, as the Constitution states, but rather on the Funders.
• and our elections have become national jokes, leaving us no more informed about federal issues than we were before they started and, worse off, leaving us wrongly believing that democracy is about our role as spectators of the powerful and not as generators of change ourselves.

With regard to our Earth:

• Global warming is real and the most powerful nation on Earth has yet to develop a serious response.
• Drone strikes abroad, in addition to killing over 176 children, have become the recruiting tool of choice for militants.
• Martin Luther King’s call to acknowledge that we are in an “inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny” with our fellow man worldwide remains unanswered when we treat rising education levels and job opportunities in other countries as something to fear.

Part 2: Failed Democrats 

And yet, the contemporary incarnation of the Democratic Party fails to provide a vision to meet these challenges.

• It has become a reactionary party, defending the glorious victories of the past — Social Security, Medicare, women’s health rights and the like — without pairing that necessary conservatism with a progressive vision for the future.
• It has failed to prosecute the financial crisis nor empower the poor.
• Despite claiming to not wish to “play the game better” in Washington, but rather “change the way the game is played,” President Obama — who ran as the transformational anti-Clinton — has embraced the Clintonian politics of transaction and triangulation, utilizing cultural wedge strategies to micro-target voters by demographic, thus continuing the culture war he dreamed of moving us past.  All the while, he has failed to address the implicit corruption of epic proportions that money in politics has been wreaking on our legislative system.
• The party has failed to speak truth to corporate power on global warming and has continued the militaristic rhetoric of the Cheney era.
• Worst of all, it has embraced a politics of personality, inspiring young people like myself to exercise our citizenship not through civic creativity and action in our own communities, but rather through our continued spectatorial support of politicians in Washington acting as proxy citizens for us.

It is no surprise that such a party is polling at no more than 51-52% while facing off against such a weak candidate and a tired, occasionaly-grotesque opposition party.

Indeed, we desperately need an alternative.

Part 3: Inadequate Romney

Unfortunately, Mitt Romney and the contemporary incarnation of the Republican Party is not the alternative that we need.

Their three central claims to the Presidency — that Mitt Romney knows how to create jobs, that Paul Ryan knows how to cut the deficit, and that the Congressional Republicans know how to be bipartisan — are not credible.

3a. Romney is not a job creator

Romney’s claim that his business experience proves his ability to create jobs fails to withstand scrutiny.

Bain Capital is not a standard firm in the Capitalism 101 sense of the term.  It does not make money by selling a valuable good or providing an excellent service, like Apple and Starbucks do… or George Romney’s American Motors Corporation did.  It also is not a standard venture capital firm, which makes money by taking supportive risks on entrepreneurs that want to sell valuable goods or provide excellent services.

It used to be, when Romney helped get Staples off the ground.  But then Bain Capital changed, seeking higher profits.  It became a leveraged buyout operation, which followed a different playbook: seek out a struggling business, put down a small amount of money, get a big bank to put down a lot more, use the two to buy a controlling stake in the business thus buying it out, charge management fees for your ‘consultations’ in turning the business around, occasionally call in ‘special dividends’ as payouts to you and other stakeholders, try to turn the firm around to an IPO, sell your stake, and leave… leaving the target business to pay off your original bank debt and management fees and leaving you to profit irregardless of whether the company makes it far past its turnaround.

Whether Romney’s tenure at such an operation is good or bad is for you to decide.  But what it is definitely not is a credential as a job creator.  A 2008 study showed that the job growth of companies bought by private-equity firms is about one percent slower than that of average similar firms. Even Marc Wolpow, a former Bain colleague of Romney’s, has stated: “job creation was not Romney’s or Bain’s or the industry’s primary objective.  The objective of the leveraged buyout business is maximizing returns for the investor.” And in fact, even Bain Capital’s record at maximizing returns is mixed.  Bain’s returns on 67 of 77 deals were lower than what you would have earned from investing in an index fund at the time.  Only ten investments were home runs and four of those ended in bankruptcy for the targeted firms.

Romney likes to talk about how creative entrepreneurs move our country forward through taking risks, creating jobs and producing valuable products.  I agree…I just don’t buy that Mitt Romney’s work at Bain Capital resembles entrepreneurship: taking risks, creating jobs, or producing valuable products.  And many who do know something about entrepreneurship — like Howard Schultz of Starbucks, Michael Bloomberg of Bloomberg and various tech leaders in Silicon Valley — have endorsed Romney’s opponents.  Take Gary Johnson, Romney’s Libertarian Party opponent as a contrast: he founded Big J Enterprises in 1976 as a one-man mechanical contracting business.  He eventually grew Big J into a multi-million dollar corporation, hiring 1,000 employees.  By the time he sold the company in 1999, it was one of New Mexico’s leading construction companies.  If Romney had a similar background, his claim to being a job creator would be much more credible.

Even more, Obama’s jobs record isn’t as bad as Romney casts it.  The trend of increasing month-to-month job losses turned around immediately after the stimulus bill passed.  As Michael Grunwald reports, “top economic forecasters estimate that the stimulus produced about 2.5 million jobs and added between 2.1 percent and 3.8 percent to our gross domestic product.”  And the stimulus’ green energy investments (like Solyndra) that are so often criticized by Romney?  The program as a whole had only a 2.6% default rate… much less than the failure rate of the investments of Bain Capital.

3b. Ryan is not a deficit hawk

The second central claim of the Romney campaign is that he has a plan to balance the federal budget and roll back the national debt.  They doubled-down on this claim by selecting Paul Ryan as a running mate, who had gained prominence through his famed Path to Prosperity budget.

Unfortunately, Paul Ryan is a deficit hawk like Mitt Romney is a job creator…he is not.  In 2001, he complained that Bush’s $1.2 trillion tax cut was too small.  He lobbied Republicans to pass the 2003 deficit-financed prescription-drug benefit.  In 2006, he opposed a measure requiring that any new spending or tax cuts be offset by new revenue or spending cuts.  He opposed the Bowles-Simpson plan to reduce the deficit (in part because it included a tax increase).  His opposition to deficit-lowering increases to the top-bracket income tax and capital gains tax rates is based on the claim that low rates lead to economic growth which in turn lowers the deficit… despite the fact that a recent Congressional Research Service report shows that changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and capital gains tax rate are not correlated with economic growth.

His budget proposal bases its claim of deficit reduction on promises to eliminate trillions of dollars’ worth of tax deductions, but fails to give details as to which ones. Even more, when it does give details, they’re disturbing.  Because Ryan’s plan does not raise taxes, two-thirds of Ryan’s cuts affect programs for the poor. In Ryan’s budget, proposed sacrifice for the wealthy, the middle class and seniors is vague and distant; proposed sacrifice for the poor is detailed and immediate.  For example, as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops pointed out in a letter to Congress on budgetary respect for “human life and dignity,” Ryan’s Plan threatens the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps feed millions of households.

Obama administration policies (namely the stimulus) have added $1.44 trillion to the deficit, but the entirety of the Obama deficit is smaller than the deficit-financed Bush tax cuts alone.  Romney, in not putting tax increases on the table (with the exception of vague loophole-closing rhetoric), has failed to provide a compelling case that he will do better than Obama at addressing the national debt.  And Ryan has proved himself to be less of a deficit hawk than an anti-tax ideologue.

3c. Congressional Republicans are not committed to bipartisanship

The final major claim to the Presidency that Mitt Romney puts forward is that he — unlike President Obama — is committed to bipartisanship.  Again, both halves of this claim — first, that Obama was inadequately bipartisan and second, that Romney and the Congressional Republicans have proven to be — do not hold water.

On the policy front, Obama was exceptionally bipartisan from the outset.  He invited conservative Evangelical Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural.  He sat down in his transition with conservative writers, like Bill Kristol and Peggy Noonan, before meeting with liberal writers.  He made sure that tax cuts composed a third of his stimulus bill.  He completely ignored calls from the Left-wing of his party to pursue a single-payer health care bill, instead choosing an individual mandate system inspired by a Republican Massachusetts governor.  He continued the Bush/Cheney anti-terror policies, extended the Bush tax cuts and adopted the GOP-favored Cap-and-Trade response to climate change instead of the Left-wing favored Carbon Tax response.  His education policy is widely praised by Republicans and criticized by those from his Left.  He engaged in long budget deliberations with John Boehner throughout most of 2011.  This is not the tale of a partisan ideologue.

Meanwhile, early in Obama’s term, Republican leader Mitch McConnell stated: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”  Pete Session echoed: “The purpose of the minority is to become the majority.”  Indeed, Congressional Republicans have successfully executed on a plan of blanket refusal to participate in any bipartisan achievements. Conservative and respected political scientist Norman Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute recently published a piece titled: “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the Problem.”  It is worth quoting at length:

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional.  In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warrented.  Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics.  It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

Democrats are hardly blameless, and they have their own extreme wing and their own predilection for hardball politics.  But these tendencies do not routinely veer outside the normal bounds of robust politics.  If anything, under the presidencies of Clinton and Obama, the Democrats have become more of a status-quo party.  They are centrist protectors of government.

As proud conservative Andrew Sullivan points out, the contemporary incarnation of the GOP resembles the radicals that have always been the enemies of conservativism.   Whereas conservatism has always been a philosophy that “tends to argue that less equals more, that restraint is sometimes more powerful than action, that delay is often wiser than headlong revolution” and that reality is more important than ideology, the contemporary GOP holds that 97% consenses on climate science aren’t to be trusted, that the deficit can be closed without increasing taxes, that the Constitution should be swiftly amended to criminalize abortion, that new preemptive wars in the Middle East should be on the table, that the President should be openly accused of having “Kenyan, anti-colonial values”, and that a sitting Congressmen should be able to accuse 70-80 of his fellow members of being Communists without recourse.  As Republican Dick Lugar put it, upon losing his primary to a Tea Party challenger who had accused Lugar of working too much with Obama: “Republicans cannot admit to any nuance in policy on climate change. Republican members are now expected to take pledges against any tax increases. For two consecutive presidential nomination cycles, GOP candidates competed with one another to express the most strident anti-immigration view, even at the risk of alienating a huge voting bloc.”

Romney fails to provide a compelling case that he will stem this radicalization and has yet to demonstrate courage in combatting it.

Part 4: Vision

4a. An era in need of a vision

 Two decades-old coalitions are reaching the ends of their arcs:

The 20th century conservative movement that started with Goldwater, ascended with Reagan and expanded with Bush Jr. is fracturing and greying.  If Romney loses tonight, Republicans will have lost the popular vote in five of the last six Presidential elections.  Party leaders know that they are failing to inspire young people, Black people, Hispanic people, gay people and single women.  As Senator Lindsey Graham has said: “if we lose this election, there is only one explanation – demographics.”  As a Bush official echoed: “We’re in a demographic boa constrictor and it gets tighter every single election.”

The late-20th century Democratic party coalition that re-emerged with Clinton and peaked with Obama in 2008 has also failed to inspire a lasting majority.  When the Republican Party becomes more inclusive of minorities, gay people, and pro-choice women, the Democratic Party’s majority coalition will fracture.  Soon enough, they will no longer be able coast on being “the party that does not have Michele Bachmann in it.”

Meanwhile, dissatisfaction with American political life increases with each news cycle and calls for fundamental reform grow louder with each election.

Times like these provide an opening for a strong, passionate vision for our new century; one that can jump-start our 21st century movement.

4b. The proceduralists

And yet, Mitt Romney’s political personality seems defined by his lack of vision.  When asked about his ideology by the Wall Street Journal in 2007, Romney responded, “Obviously, I have — just like in the consulting world — I have ‘concepts’ that I believe.”  “What Romney values most,” Ezra Klein writes, “is Management.  A lifetime of data has proven to him that he’s extraordinarily, even uniquely, good at managing and leading organizations, projects and people.  It’s those skills, rather than specific policy ideas, that he sees as his unique contribution.The irony here is that the other major politician of our time defined by his lack of ideological vision is Barack Obama.  What Obama values most is Facilitation.  He ascended in politics as a post-ideological politician, skilled in the procedures of pragmatic deliberation.  “He revels in the back and forth,” Lawrence Kudlow writes, “and he wants to keep the dialogue going with conservatives.”  He was elected President of the Harvard Law Review not due to a vision for the Review, but rather due to his ability to be trusted by both the conservative and the liberal blocs of the editorial staff.  In 1998, after helping to pass a campaign-finance bill in the Illinois Senate, he boasted in his community paper less about the merits of the bill and more that “the process was truly bipartisan from the start.”  The Audacity of Hope was filled less with a vision for the future, but rather a description of how our politics can transcend partisan and ideological strategy.  “If there was a single unifying argument that defined Obamaism from his earliest days in politics to his Presidential campaign,” Ryan Lizza write, “it was the idea of post-partisanship.  He was proposing himself as a transformative figure, the man who would spring the lock.”

Both men, at their core, are Proceduralists: they believe that any given cause matters less than the procedure by which you make decisions while executing on that cause.  Mitt’s style of procedure is management consulting: “Let me see the data,” Mitt told the Wall Street Journal in 2007. “I want to see the client’s data, the competitors’ data.  I want to see all the data.”  Barack’s style of procedure is community deliberation: “Let’s get everyone in the room,” Barack probably said at some point. “I want to hear our views, I want to hear our opponent’s views. I want to talk to everyone.”  

The thing about proceduralists is they are really good at being in charge once the creative challenge of setting a vision has already been met.  They’re much better long-term executors than the visionaries are.  But in an era in need of a vision, proceduralists don’t have much to offer.    They might very well end up doing “more good than bad,” making a rusty era slightly more efficient.  But they’re not the Teddy Roosevelt our time calls for.

4c.  Who is the alternative?

I’m probably going to end up voting for the proceduralist I trust over the proceduralist I don’t, but I shouldn’t fool myself: Second-term Barack Obama is not the alternative to first-term Barack Obama that we desparately need.

Who is it then?  Who is to provide a vision for the next American century?  Who is going to seriously address the crises facing Our Economy, Our Democracy, and Our Earth?  Who are we waiting for?

You.

‘The system’ has not produced major candidates who have the vision to build the next great American century.  Fortunately, this is America, so we don’t have to wait for ‘the system’ to make something happen.  Our generation has the tools and the passion to build it ourselves.

So let’s not make the same mistakes we did last time:

• treating Election Day as the end of our involvement in American democratic life;
• believing that all we need to do is watch powerful people make change for us;
• treating the political areas outside of federal government policy — like our local communities — as not worthy of time and intelligence;
• ignoring the great change we can make outside of law and statecraft, with the tools of business, social enterprise, media, education, community initiatives, and the internet.
• forgetting that, as Howard Zinn wrote, “historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action;”
• and failing to grasp, as Dr. King reminded, “that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.”

An insightful 2008 Presidential Candidate once said: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. You are the ones you’ve been waiting for. You are the change that you seek.”

I think it’s time we start to take him at his word.