There's a lot to like about Paul Hackett -- his liberal social views, his excellent positioning on the Iraq War, his wonderful biography, and his status as the ultimate Fighting Dem (by which I do not mean an Ultimate Fighting Dem, though he'd probably be pretty good at that too.) But lately I've been trying in vain to figure out what his views on important economic issues are, and I'm getting a little worried. Can any of you guys help me?
This is especially important to me because Sherrod Brown has been an awesome defender of progressive economic positions during his tenure in Congress. (His voting record is here.) While I really like the idea of having a fiesty Iraq War veteran in the Senate to slap Bush around, it's more important to have somebody who will be a reliable progressive vote on economic issues.
Senators tend to stick around for decades. What matters more to me than effective short-term Bushwhacking is that we get somebody who can be counted on to help the poor and the middle class for the next 18 or 24 years. While I haven't got a clear enough picture of his media persona to know if he's the guy I want on all the Sunday morning talk shows, I'm sure that Sherrod Brown will accomplish that.
Health care is an absolutely enormous issue for me (and it should be for you). We're spending 14% of our GDP on health care -- $5000+ per capita, which is way more than any other country in the world. And despite this massive spending, we have 37 million uninsured people, a system where you usually can't take your insurance from job to job, weird insurance company restrictions on which doctors you can see, ridiculous disincentives for spending on preventative care, and less health care resources overall. Part of the problem is that hundreds of billions of dollars that are spent on paperwork. According to studies by Harvard Medical School and Public Citizen, $286 billion in paperwork costs each year could be saved by shifting to a government-run single-payer health insurance system.
I've had the good fortune to be healthy for all of my 25 years, so this isn't really an issue that directly affects me. But it's hell for people who are living paycheck to paycheck and have some chronic condition, or whose child does. Sherrod Brown knows about the problems people are facing here -- he even turned down his Congressional health care package for many years as a symbolic move to draw attention to the problem:
[Sherrod Brown] also made a series of promises, including a pledge to pay for his own health care out-of-pocket until Congress passed universal coverage. For the past 13 years, he's kept that pledge, turning down the insurance offered to members and purchasing his own, until recently, when at the cajoling of his wife, he joined her plan.
Let me tell you why I'm worried that Hackett might not be my guy. A lot of his social-policy rhetoric has a strongly libertarian tinge -- particularly when he talks about abortion and gun control. So suppose he's going to vote on a health care plan that will give us a great system like France has (way more choice for the patient, less bureaucracy, more hospital beds per person, better preventative care, universal coverage, and all for about half the per capita price we pay). What's he going to do? Is he going to make noises about "socialized medicine" and vote against it? Or is he going to cast his vote to solve one of our country's biggest current economic problems?
I wish I could go to Hackett's issue page and find this stuff out. But he doesn't have one. I'm not asking for him to put forward a plan or anything. I just want some sign from him that he'll vote the right way when the time comes. So can somebody here give me a sign? Info about his positions on other economic issues -- the minimum wage, reforming farm subsidies, CAFTA, and Social Security, for example -- are welcome too.
[Hmm... have I satisfied all of AnnArborBlue's guidelines for OH-Sen diaries? Well, I don't really have a candidate, and I haven't smeared anybody, so that pretty much does it for the first few guidelines... oh! Mike DeWine sucks. Either of these guys would be way better than him and his 0% voting the right way on health care record. And voting the right way on abortion 0% of the time. Rat bastard.]