REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES

By Wade Wilkinson, San Marcos, Texas

Introduction:

I have been toying with the idea for some time of writing a comprehensive election analysis for this year’s Republican primary presidential election. Ever since the Iraq war began, I’ve been surprised just how inadequate standard media in America is. One would like to think that our CNN, Fox, and MSNBC are better than other TV news agencies in the world. To an extent, they are. Unlike in, say, China, our news agencies can broadcast whatever they like (within the bounds of decency) without government intervention.

But American news corporations suffer from different inadequacies. Most of my life, my family hasn’t had cable TV, so I watched the 30 minute broadcast of NBC many evenings. I realized the sheer insanity of basing political opinions, even asserting political knowledge based on watching a 20-minute (as that is what it truly was, with commercials factored in) nightly broadcast. Even if it wasn’t biased, which it rather obviously was, 20 minutes spread out over all manner of subjects is not very much raw information, especially when much of the time was spent on melodramatic pulp.

After a while, however, my family got cable TV, and we, of course, began to watch Fox news instead. I was satisfied, for a while. Fox leans to the right, of course, but feels less biased than NBC does. At first, I really enjoyed watching The O’Reilly Factor, but eventually, O’Reilly’s obsession with social “outrages” that I cared little to hear about wore on me. Some time later, I began to realize just why Fox was often inadequate as well: only two shows in the whole day’s scheduling were dedicated to politics and/or the war, those being Special Report and Hannity & Colmes (the second of which I automatically throw out of credibility, personally, because I grow tired of hearing three or five people yelling at each other for an hour). The best example of Fox’s lack of serious interest in politics would be when one day, Walt and I were eating lunch and he said, “Hey, turn on the news, I want to hear about the missing little girl.” Walt was being sarcastic, but I turned it on anyway. Sure enough, they were talking about a missing eight-year-old girl in New Jersey.

But even worse about Fox news is that it seemed whenever they finally did get around to talking political issues, or any serious issues that should be the concern of all Americans, they had the awful habit of cutting their visiting analysts off because they “ran out of time.” “Ran out of time” being a synonym for needing to update us on the missing little girl in New Jersey, even though there was no new news regarding her.

Why couldn’t I just watch the other news agencies, then? I tried MSNBC one night, before the President’s 2007 State of the Union address. I might as well have walked into a) a Cindy Sheehan rally, b) a San Francisco gay rights parade, or c) a Bush Haters Anonymous group meeting. It was liberalism’s righteous fury (that has been burning brightly ever since Al Gore lost in 2000) on full parade.

Which brings me to my point: American TV media is generally inadequate either because of its almost-open bias, or because of its lack of calm discussion on issues that affect us all. Sadly, I think many Americans rely on TV for a lot of their information. It is the most-observed, most-uniform kind of media in the country.

I, however, want to change that for you. I want to bring you something the media rarely does: raw, unbiased information that’s not made to be punchy, not made to play on your fears, not made to propagandize you. This information is solely to inform you so that when you go to vote in this year’s Republican primary, you will be educated with many of the facts about the man that will (hopefully) be the next president of this country, and will be making huge, sweeping decisions affecting all of us. Americans have, for the past fifty years, been talking non-stop about civil rights and civil liberties: what this government must do for us, and what this government cannot do to us. In the words of John Kennedy, however, we must “not ask what your country can do for you, but what you can do for you country.” Being an educated participant in government is the least we owe this country that grants us economic freedom to prosper, freedom to control our government our way, protects our property, and gives us the freedom to believe what we please.

My format to help accomplish this goal of becoming an educated participant in government is to present you with a quick summary of each candidate’s life story first, then follow up with their views on abortion, the general War on Terror/national security, Iraq, education, the economy, healthcare, gun control, gay marriage, general government, and perhaps other tidbits of information.

For the record, I think that most educated foreign policy experts make little distinction between the war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, as what American soldiers are doing in Iraq is fighting terrorists, however, my presentation will make this distinction. It is not that I disagree with said foreign policy experts, but that most media and candidates do make a distinction between the two based on the fact that the war in Iraq is such a large part of the War on Terror that it is going to end up taking its own subcategory if you don’t directly divide it from the broader war. So, in the name of clarity, I will relegate them to their own specific sections.

As a final note, I won’t tell you what to think about any of these candidates or these issues. It is your vote to cast, and you should cast it for the candidate you agree most with, regardless of his chance of winning or what I think about him. I simply want you to know what candidate you agree with the most so that your vote can be an educated one. As a matter of fact, my goal is to keep the reader from thinking at any point within the main body of the paper, “I disagree with you.” I fully expect them to disagree with candidates’ positions on certain issues. I expect possible disagreement with statements in my introduction and conclusion as well. But I intend to keep my opinions on the candidates and issues as non-existent in this report.

We'll begin my next blog with the candidates.