The Debate - Some Random Thoughts.

Well, everybody got it wrong.

The candidates, the moderators, the invisible man who gave a pathetic talk to a friendly Republican audience at the same time as the debate in a vain effort to try hog the stage. They all missed the point.

And, maybe, the government and, maybe, us.

Bold talk, you say, in an outraged tone. What point? You ask it quizzically.

Well, here it is. We are a democracy, we have a government. We are, at heart, a nation of laws and processes.

Not a nation of kings or despots. At least, not. Yet. But…

Let’s imagine a world where one man, just one man, has the power to decide which laws to pass and which policies to put into effect over things like foreign trade and health care.

(For my readers in other countries, some of which have had women as their chief executive, you can imagine one woman doing that too. Examples upon request. You can start with the original Queen Elizabeth, or better still Catherine the Great.)

Well, we do have just one man in the Senate who has ruled that we shall have no laws to control guns and prevent mass shootings, and we have the same man deciding who will or will not be seated on the Supreme Court. Kinda close.

Then we have a man in the White House deciding, all by himself, how our water and air should be polluted, how our alliances and trade agreements should be kept or broken, and how to respond when he is told Greenland is not for sale.

(I thought he could have just offered a trade. I’ll give you Hawaii for it. After all, they have a lot of bad people from different races living there, and they gave Obama a fake birth certificate, something Greenlanders would never do.)

The theory is that none of those things should be done without the consent of Congress - not just one leader, but the whole body. If the system is so broken that one man can stop the actions of a majority of the nation, then it’s time to take to the streets, or maybe just stop funding government entirely until democracy comes back. No crying about things and saying you can’t do anything. Do something!

Which gets me to the point. Every candidate at the debate, at some point, was asked “what’s your plan” for gun control, or for health care, or for dealing with the national debt. (OK, not really. But they should have been asked.)

The right answer, which no one gave, was “I’d like to do this, but any plan like this has to be approved by Congress, and I expect it will be changed when all of those people in the House and the Senate debate it and find ways to make it better.”

The commentators got it wrong by focusing on the proposed plans and their differences, and ignoring the process that would turn any plan into reality. How about asking “Why do you think this would get through Congress?”

The candidates spent a lot of their time talking about what they would do - which is appropriate, after all - and almost none of it about how their ideas would impact other people. Think about it.

Most of the debate over health care could be eliminated if some candidate would simply say “We will provide health care for everyone, and you are all free to get supplemental policies to cover other things. The cost of that new insurance would be  lot less than it is now, because all the basic care is covered by the government.

Then we could talk about things like preventive health care, dental coverage, drug costs and all the other things that would be good to have.

And, oh yes, when all of the candidates were asked why they were the best person to deal with mass shootings and with foreign trade and with health care and with the ever-growing national debt (I know, not really that one), they might have said “No one on this stage is the best one to do everything, and how I would solve a problem might not be the best for the whole nation. We are a democracy, after all.”

Let’s not forget that. Maybe we could all remember it for the next debate.