August 21st 2008
Candidates gear up for party conventions
After the briefest of summer lulls, the presidential campaigns looked to enter their most intense stretch of politicking before November’s elections, starting with the formal endorsement of both candidates at the party conventions. Barack Obama and the Democrats meet in Denver starting on Aug 25 and John McCain and the Republicans gather in Minneapolis from Sept 1. While recent headlines have focused mostly on speculative chatter about the prospective vice-presidential candidates, health remains high on the campaign and public radar screens.
Some 20 million people are expected to watch television coverage of the Democratic convention, which will feature speeches by “real people” on concerns close to their hearts before a live audience of about 20 000. Pamela Cash-Roper from Pittsboro, NC, will talk about how she and her husband are unemployed because of health problems and often cannot leave the house because fuel is too expensive, reports the Chicago Tribune. Kayla Whitaker, who at 20 is voting for the first time and is a Christian, won an essay contest for her slot at the convention. She would like to discuss health care with Obama. “But I will probably be too star struck to say anything,” she told the Rocky Mountain News. “I appreciate his attitude towards different faiths, his strong belief and being respectful [of different faiths],” she said.
McCain, meanwhile, used a speech before members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Orlando to not only reinforce his message that he would be best-placed to lead foreign policy but also to pledge to improve the veterans health-care system. He pledged to improve access to health care and improve it for the growing number of women veterans, said the Daytona Beach News Journal. Nonetheless, columnist William McKenzie said in the Dallas Morning News that McCain should strive to make health care one of his leading domestic policy issues. He wrote McCain would give tax credits to individuals to buy insurance and free those who stay in jobs mostly because of locked-in health benefits tied to their employer. He would also eliminate the tax advantage workers get because they are not taxed on company health coverage, a situation that benefits higher-income workers. “True, this stuff is complicated, but he’s basically taking an advantage from the wealthy and spreading it around to everyone else,” McKenzie wrote. “He should be shouting this from the airwaves, showing voters he’s the guy taking on the Buffetts on behalf of the average guy.”
As for Obama’s plan to expand employer-based insurance and Medicaid, the health programme for those on low incomes, McKenzie said this would put further pressure on the federal budget. However, a new book by US academic Susan George, “Hijacking America: how the religious and secular right changed what Americans think”, posits it would make little difference who was elected president because the country had become so right-wing. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, The Times reported that George said urgent reform was needed because 45 million Americans could not access health care but the candidates were too scared of being criticised. “If I was a candidate and I said get the private insurance companies out of health care, the right would attack it, so as an issue it has become very hard to discuss,” she said. “Now that you have a debate between the far right and centre right, that means many topics cannot even be talked about.”
Indeed, in recent days Obama came under attack from anti-abortion groups because of his stance when he was an Illinois state senator on fetuses who survive abortion procedures. The New York Times said he led efforts to defeat a bill called the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. In a television interview, Obama said he would have voted for the bill had it been identical to a federal statute. “‘What that bill also was doing was trying to undermine Roe v Wade,” he said. Anti-abortion groups were not swayed by his lawyerly arguments and hope to turn up the pressure on the Democratic candidate in the weeks and months ahead.
Philanthropic and non-profit leaders are also trying to sway the campaigns and are calling for greater co-operation from a new administration on community-based initiatives and to organise a corps of service volunteers, the Washington Post reported. Health care, education, poverty and climate change were all cited as issues too big for government to handle alone.
Sharmila Devi
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