As Americans flock to the polls today, many on the Republican side of the political aisle are calling for a wholesale change of scenery on Capitol Hill.

According to The New York Times, many Republicans believe that 2010 will be a rewrite of the 1994 midterm elections. In 1994, after a hardfought and unsuccessful healthcare battle, Republicans swept into both houses of Congress and spent much of the next six years blocking as much of President Clinton’s legislation as possible. After successfully branding the Clinton administration as a failure, Republicans watched George W. Bush take office in 2000 – a move that would essentially alter the entire trajectory of America’s foreign policy, economy, and political landscape.

If the midterm elections are indeed to be “another 1994,” the American voter must understand what that entails for the long term. Democrats campaigned in 2006 and 2008 on drawing down our forces in Iraq, reestablishing the front in Afghanistan, and eventually bringing our troops home from disastrous and expensive foreign wars. The Republican opposition in 2010 is much the opposite. They argued that President Obama’s dedication of nearly 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan was too little, and they pained the withdrawal from Iraq as Democrat weakness on security issues. Many Republican front runners have even gone so far as to call for possible military action in Iran despite the haggard and over-stretched state of our military.

The U.S cannot afford these wars, and it cannot fight them indefinitely, but the outcome of the elections in 2010 could swing the balance as to whether or not we stay or pullback.

The disparity between one side and the other is even more pronounced on strictly economic issues. In Congress today legislation exists that could significantly change America’s long-term future in international commerce. Democrats in Congress have proposed and supported the TRADE Act of 2009, currency manipulation provisions, “buy American” procurement amendments, and market access reforms.

Not every Democrat is on board with economic reform proposals, and there are some Republican signatories to these issues, but for the most part the push for changing the way America does business is coming from the left. We can disagree on the place of government in the classroom, national income tax rates, and general social issues. However, there is virtually no disagreement on the fact that the trajectory we have been on for the past 10 years has been a disaster. The spending increases, coupled with tax cuts, have bankrupted our Treasury. The wars have worn out our military capacity and destroyed our image overseas. Regardless of what you think about social issues, this country still lacks any semblance of a sound economic foundation. Health care, education, and the overall demographics of this nation will be meaningless years down the road if we fail to rebuild our economy in the next few years.

When the election tomorrow, voters must remember the importance of investing in homegrown clean energy instead of petroleum (foreign or domestic).

Voters must remember that financial deregulation led to the greatest economic collapse in nearly a century.

Voters must remember that our dedication to prosecuting wars, at the expense of dedicating ourselves to economic strategies, has left this nation buried in debt and stuck in a quagmire conflicts overseas.

Voters must remember that policies are much more important that party identification.

If you are upset with the Democrats for failing to govern effectively during the past two years, look at the policies of their only major opponents. Republicans favor drilling for oil and pretending it would make a dent in the trade deficit. Yet they are against regulating corporations who outsource facilities and jobs overseas and thereby create the trade deficit. Republicans were against the bailout packages after President Obama put his support behind them, but they were in favor of the deregulation that led to the collapse, that led to the bailouts.

Neither side is perfect, and each has made plenty of mistakes, but America needs to change to recover from this economic pitfall. We cannot change if we simply go back to the way things were four, six, or eight years ago.

Print PDF