Last spring, as the presidential campaign began, there were 10 Republican candidates on the debate stage and eight Democratic ones, each explaining in some detail what he or she would do for America if elected.
The Op-Ed page asked those who have since left the race to describe one issue that is not getting as much attention as it would if they were still out on the trail talking about it. These are responses from eight of them.
1) Afghanistan. Pakistan. Forgotten.
By Joe Biden, a Democratic senator from Delaware
The next president will have to rally America and the world to “fight them over there unless we want to fight them over here.” The “over there” is not, as President Bush has claimed, Iraq, but rather the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
That is where those who attacked us on 9/11 came from, where the attacks in Europe since originated and where Al Qaeda is regrouping. It is the real central front in the war on terrorism.
Afghanistan is slipping toward failure. The Taliban is back, violence is up, drug production is booming and the Afghans are losing faith in their government. All the legs of our strategy — security, counternarcotics efforts, reconstruction and governance — have gone wobbly.
If we should have had a surge anywhere, it is Afghanistan. And instead of eradicating poppy crops, which forces many farmers to turn to the Taliban, we should go after drug kingpins.
We also need to make good on President Bush’s pledge for a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan. In six years, we have spent on Afghanistan’s reconstruction only what we spend every three weeks on military operations in Iraq.
Afghanistan’s fate is directly tied to Pakistan’s future and America’s security. When President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan concluded that we were not serious about finishing the job in Afghanistan, he began to cut deals with extremists in his own country.
As a result, the border area remains a freeway of fundamentalism: the Taliban and Al Qaeda find sanctuary in Pakistan, while Pakistani suicide bombers wreak havoc in Afghanistan.
The recent Pakistani elections gave the moderate majority its voice back and gives the United States an opportunity to move from a Musharraf policy to a Pakistan policy. To demonstrate to its people that we care about their needs, not just our own, we must triple assistance for schools, roads and clinics, sustain it for a decade, and demand accountability for the military aid we provide.
If Afghanistan fails or Pakistan falls to fundamentalism, America will suffer a terrible setback. The candidates should tell Americans how they will handle what may be the next president’s most difficult challenge.
2) A Family Crisis
By Sam Brownback, a Republican senator from Kansas
This was the central idea I tried to bring to the presidential race: we need to rebuild the family and renew the culture in America.
Marriage is in crisis. Divorce and adultery, cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births, and a mentality that views children as a burden are all part of the problem.
Over the past five decades in the United States, the marriage rate has gone down and the divorce rate has gone up. In 1960, the out-of-wedlock birth rate was 5 percent. Now it is 37 percent. While you can valiantly raise a good child in another setting and we ought to celebrate it when it happens, the best way to rear a child is between a mom and dad bonded together for life.
Children brought up with a mom and dad bonded in marriage are, on average, far more likely to succeed in school, avoid crime and live happier and healthier lives. The best way to reduce poverty, fight crime and improve education is to rebuild the family.
Families should be able to keep more of what they earn and have more options in terms of education. We need to enact common sense measures to restrict abortion, encourage adoption and promote abstinence. We need to encourage broadcast decency and to address the effects of violence and pornography on our culture.
We need a culture that knows right from wrong, encourages virtue and discourages vice.
While I realize these topics can be very personal and difficult to talk about, that does not mean we can ignore them. The future of our land depends in large part upon the strength of our families and our culture.
3) As the Nation Crumbles
By Christopher J. Dodd, a Democratic senator from Connecticut
The most pressing problems can sometimes be the dullest — until they force their way into our attention in an instant.
On Aug. 1, the bridge carrying Interstate 35W over the Mississippi River buckled and broke. Thirteen people were killed. More than 100 were injured.
Afterward, we learned the frightening facts: 160,570 of our bridges are in just as dangerous a shape; a third of our roads are in poor or mediocre condition; some of our biggest cities depend on water and sewage systems over a century old.
With every bursting pipe, potholed road and derailed train, the conclusion became inescapable: America’s backbone is decaying.
It wasn’t always this way. Year by year and ton by ton — from the great railroads to tens of thousands of miles of Interstate — great American engineers built the foundations of our prosperity.
Why are we leaving so little for our future? Reliable infrastructure keeps economies growing and the entrepreneurial spirit vibrant.
Last summer, Senator Chuck Hagel and I proposed a National Infrastructure Bank. I hope it gets the attention it deserves on the campaign trail. It’s encouraging that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both co-sponsors. John McCain should be, too.
The Infrastructure Bank would unite the public and private sectors to complete large-scale works. Funds would go to the most qualified projects, not those with the most political clout. Every $1 billion spent on highways and transit projects would create about 47,500 jobs.
This issue may never bring an audience to its feet, but it shouldn’t have to.
On Jan. 21, the 44th president will face volumes of pressing challenges. Reinventing our infrastructure ought to be on Page 1.
4) Cure More, Spend Less
By Tommy G. Thompson, a former Republican governor of Wisconsin and secretary of health and human services
The presidential candidates are not focusing enough on how government can be administered more efficiently and successfully, especially in the health care arena. The Republicans held four debates before even one question was asked about health care. Our party has definite positions on this issue, but it would seem that the news media have assumed Republicans are not focused on it. Nor is anyone asking how the Republicans would make Medicare and Medicaid more efficient.
We should also focus on problems with the Food and Drug Administration, not only in food safety but in many other areas as well. How would Republicans make this agency more efficient and effective?
The candidates should address the importance of setting goals for finding cures for breast cancer, prostate cancer and colon cancer. Just as we have marshaled forces to put a man on the moon and to stop the growth of communism in the world, we should make it a priority to find cures for these devastating diseases.
The campaigns should also look at the possibility of creating a flat tax to replace our progressive income tax, which is counterproductive. And finally, we need to look at how we can incorporate medical diplomacy into our foreign policy and thus enhance respect for America around the world.
5) Bring It Back to the Home
By Bill Richardson, the Democratic governor of New Mexico
The mortgage crisis has paralyzed the nation’s economy and threatens to force millions of Americans from homes they can no longer afford.
In New Mexico in 2003, I signed into law strict regulations on the use of high-cost, subprime loans. As a result, many of the subprime lenders either cleaned up their practices or pulled out of New Mexico altogether.
It’s true that some people do not have the income it takes to purchase and maintain a home. But with conventional fixed-rate mortgages, low-income buyers repay their loans nearly as well as higher-income buyers. The mortgage crisis was not caused by the people who purchased homes but by how homes were financed.
Congress should pass comprehensive reform of the mortgage industry. We should outlaw loans that don’t require borrowers to document their income.
We need a national campaign to promote financial education. Poor credit histories are the result of poor financial behavior, not income or ethnicity, and they can be changed by good financial behavior. A 2001 study showed that buyers who received individual financial counseling were 34 percent less likely to become delinquent on their mortgage.
With leadership from Washington, a dose of reform in the mortgage industry and a national initiative that educates homebuyers and rewards them for being prudent, homeownership can once again be the bedrock of financial security for America’s middle class.
6) We Can Make It
By Duncan Hunter, a Republican representative from California
During this campaign season, one issue has often been left out of the national discussion: the deterioration of our industrial base. More than three million manufacturing jobs have been lost over the last eight years alone and, for the first time since 1950, fewer than 14 million Americans are employed by domestic manufacturers.
Consider these figures alongside our annual global trade deficit of $815.6 billion, and it is clear that today’s workers are losing to foreign competitors. The rapid decline of our industrial strength, once called the “arsenal of democracy,” can be attributed to bad trade policies that severely disadvantage our workers.
The arsenal of democracy that carried Eisenhower’s forces to Berlin and ended the cold war is now found in other countries across the world. The few remaining textile, machine tool and steel companies in the United States must weigh whether to shift production overseas or risk having to close their doors altogether.
Free trade agreements should promote collective economic interests, but the policies of recent administrations have only made it more difficult for our workers to compete in the global market. China enjoys a $256 billion annual trade surplus with the United States, and thanks to subsidies and currency manipulation, Chinese products cost less here than our manufacturers have to pay just to procure raw materials.
We must eliminate this disparity. I have introduced legislation to declare currency manipulation an illegal export subsidy, and we should also have zero federal taxes on domestic manufacturing.
The presidential candidates must give serious attention to our declining industrial competitiveness. This debate is desperately needed if we are to reverse this damaging course and rebuild our manufacturing base.
7) Forsaking Foreclosures
By Dennis J. Kucinich, a Democratic representative from Ohio
We need a plan that is big enough, bold enough and fair enough to deal with the nation’s foreclosure crisis.
For starters, federal aid should be directed toward those communities with the heaviest concentrations of foreclosures and homeowners at risk. Aid should help cover public safety costs imposed by vacant homes. It should help defray budgetary shortfalls for public schools that lose property tax revenue.
Second, a federal loan modification program for struggling homeowners should prohibit the replacement loan’s principal balance from exceeding the property’s appraised value. It should convert the terms to a long-term, fixed-rate and fully amortizing loan. It should limit monthly mortgage payments, including taxes and insurance, to an amount based on the homeowner’s ability to repay.
Third, for those homeowners who do not have the income to qualify for new financing, a federally financed land bank should buy the property from the lender at a steep discount and rent it to the former homeowner.
And most important, the cost of the loan modifications must be borne by the lenders or, if the loans have been packaged into securities, the investors, who were in the best position to profit from and prevent the crisis. This would provide marketplace stability and be preferable to the loss incurred by the lender at foreclosure.
The foreclosure crisis is a calamity for individual homeowners and a worry to financial markets. And what’s worse, if lenders and investors are allowed to profit from their predatory lending without bearing the full costs, they’ll do it again.
8) Bordering on Disaster
By Tom Tancredo, a Republican representative from Colorado
The near universal acknowledgment in 2008 that we need border security is an important achievement, but campaign rhetoric is not enough to secure the border. We need a plan.
John McCain has promised to postpone immigration reform until there is a “widespread consensus” that border security has been attained. I welcome such commitments, but Mr. McCain needs to acknowledge that border security means more than fences and increased manpower for the beleaguered Border Patrol.
As for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, neither will venture beyond the vaguest platitudes on border security. To do so would risk offending those who think real borders are archaic and racist.
What is also missing is a recognition that our borders include our international airports, where tens of millions of tourists and other visitors enter our country on various types of temporary visas — or without any visas if they come from one of 27 “visa-waiver countries.”
If our would-be presidents are not overly worried about our 2,000-mile border with Mexico or our 5,500-mile Canadian border, maybe they can be motivated to worry about our internal borders — places with names like Kennedy Airport, O’Hare, Los Angeles International, Dallas-Fort Worth, Logan and Phoenix’s Sky Harbor.
We continue to put out the welcome mat for the homegrown citizen-terrorists in Britain and other visa-waiver countries, all in the name of expedited commerce. Lenin reputedly said the capitalists would sell the rope for their own hanging. He must have had our hotel and restaurant industry in mind.
Joe Biden, Sam Brownback, Christopher J. Dodd, Tommy G. Thompson, Bill Richardson, Duncan Hunter, Dennis J. Kucinich and Tom Tancredo.