Waldo Proffitt
September 2007

I have to tell you I have been very worried about this speech for several weeks. For two reasons: One is that we are now at the height of the hurricane season, and if I had been thinking straight at the time I accepted your invitation I would have suggested a different date.

Some of you may recall that I was scheduled to speak to you two years ago and that I had to cancel because my cardiologist told me I had to have a pacemaker put in and do it immediately.

Now, another fact you need to understand is that my hurricane disaster plan is this: When a hurricane moves into the Gulf of Mexico, Anne and I pick up Rosemary, our Boston terrier, and we leave town. I really did not want to have to call up on Wednesday or Thursday and say I could not make this speech because we would be out of town.

In the biography I am asked to furnish every now and then, I usually say that I have never belonged to many organizations, but that I am a member of the Unitarian Church and the Democratic Party----neither of which has very high admission standards.

I was afraid that if I had stood you up for the second time, I might have been told that I would be expelled from the Democratic Party. So, that worry is out of the way. I am here and, unless I say something really outrageous, I will be able to maintain my party membership.

The second reason I was worried about this speech is still relevant. It is that a long-awaited and critical assessment of our situation in Iraq is due almost any day. What that report says and the administration reaction to it may well be important in shaping our view of appropriate policy toward Iraq.

But, with a credit to the remarks of a recent Secretary of Defense, who said you have to go to war with the troops you have, I take the view that you cannot wait until you get all the facts---- you have to go into a speech with the facts you have.

So here we go.

I will begin by telling you it is my opinion that the 2008 election will be a very good one for Democrats. I do not make predictions a few days or weeks prior to an election. But, I think November, 2008, is far enough away that no one will remember what I say here today. So I will predict that the voters will elect a Democrat as the new President and will substantially increase the Democratic majorities in the Senate and House. I think it is even possible, if you work hard and smart, Democrats might gain some seats in the Florida legislature.

Then, I have to tell you that the next few years are going to be exceedingly difficult for both our elected leaders and for those of us who chose them. Hard times are ahead for the whole country.

The incompetence of the present administration and its ideological fixation, bordering on obsession, have dug us into a deep and slippery hole. We are going to have to claw our way out and fill in the hole before we can begin rebuilding the country---rebuilding our physical infrastructure, rebuilding our health care system, rebuilding our confidence in our economy, rebuilding our armed forces, rebuilding our reputation in the world as a beacon to which all the world can look to light the path to freedom, humanity, reason, dignity and hope.

When we talk about what needs to be done, we have to start with Iraq, by which I mean getting Americans out of Iraq. That was the issue which the most important in deciding the 2006 election and it will, unless something unexpected happens, be the decisive issue in 2008.

I am sure you understand that I am not an expert on Iraq. All I know is what I read in newspapers and magazines. I do not mention television, because, although that is where most Americans say they get their news that is a cause for great worry. I think anybody who does not read newspapers is not even reasonably well informed.

But, from what I read, I gather we are well past the point where there will be a happy ending to the Iraq war. We are now facing a choice of the lesser evil.

My personal disposition is to just get out. Load up the trucks and the Jeeps and the tanks and the planes and head out. Everybody----troops, diplomats, contractors, all the Americans in Iraq.

Is this simplistic? Yes. Will it happen? Probably not.

Would Iraq collapse into chaos? No. It is already in chaos, will be for quite a while whether American troops are there or not. As I said, I am not an expert on Iraq, but from what I have been reading in recent weeks, it seems more and more people who might qualify as experts are coming around to the opinion that when the Iraqis are ready to stop fighting, what will emerge is three autonomous regions----roughly Kurdistan, Sunnistan and Shiastan---- maybe with a central government of very limited power, or maybe with no central government at all.

It is looking more and more as if George Bush is going to leave the next President to deal with Iraq. I think no Democrat will win the party primary who is not pretty firmly pledged to ending the war quickly and who is perceived by voters as being really serious about it.

I believe the same situation may well prevail even in the Republican primary. I think Iraq will be a major issue in every Senate and House race and that a majority of the new Congress will be on record as unwilling to support an unending involvement in Iraq.

I suggest to you that President Bush used fear as the most important tool to win support for his invasion of Iraq and that he has used fear to reduce Congressional opposition to funding and fighting the war.

Members of Congress, especially Democrats, fear the administration will portray them as unpatriotic if they fail to support the war. I suggest to you that members of Congress who still have that fear are seriously misreading public sentiment.

What they should fear on the eve of the 2008 election is not that they will be smeared by Republican opponents as being short on patriotism but that they may be creamed by voters for being short on the courage to follow the path to which they have been pointed by both the voters and the facts.

Let me move on to health care. I believe that in the last two years there has been a sharp shift in the attitude of Americans on the issue of health care. I think there is now strong support for a system of universal health care.

Last year, Americans spent more than two trillion dollars on health care----much more, on either a total or a per capita basis, than any other nation, something more than 16 percent of our gross national product.

You might think that would make us the healthiest nation in the world. But, we are not. Measured by the most widely used standards, we are not even in the top 20.

Our infant mortality rate, the number of children who die in the first year after birth, is 6.43 per thousand live births. More than 40 other countries do better. The infant mortality rate in Singapore is 2.24. France is 4.21; Australia, 4.63. Every country in the European Union does better than the U.S. So do Cuba and South Korea.

Another widely used measuring stick of the health of nations is life expectancy. The United States ranks 48th among 226 nations. The average life expectancy for a person born in the United States early in this century is 77.85 years. In Japan it is 81.25; Canada, 80.22; the European Union, 78.30.

There is really no credible doubt about why we spend so much money with such poor results. The reason is our elected officials have been too attentive to the welfare of insurance companies, prescription drug makers and other for-profit components of the health care industry and unresponsive to what is best for the health of their constituents.

We have relied far too heavily on channeling payment for medical services through private insurance companies and been far too protective of the profits of prescription drug companies.

The result is that 15 to 20 percent or so of what we pay in private health insurance premiums goes to the insurance companies for “overhead” while upwards of 47 million Americans in 2006 had no health insurance either because they can’t afford it or they have been turned down as bad risks, and all of us continue to pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs developed and produced in our own country.

The public, I believe hopefully, has figured out we are being scammed, and is ready to move to a universal single-payer health insurance plan---­the single payer being the government, which means eventually the public.

It is highly unlikely we can create a viable health care system except when it is done on a national scale with nationwide rules and benefits.

Fortunately, the model for such a system already exists. It is called Medicare.

Medicare is not perfect, but, all in all, it works pretty well. Its funding system is in place. As is its payment system.

What I believe to be the best way to move toward universal health insurance would be to start a phased program of reducing the age at which older citizens become eligible and immediately start covering children from birth to age five and keep raising that age.

Before too long we would have universal health insurance without any serious inconvenience except to the insurance and drug industries---which could be expected to kick and scream and probably cut back on their budgets for renting compliant state and federal officials.

I do not think we will be able to accomplish this or any other constructive health care changes until 2008.

But we can start making plans. And Democrats can make sure that it is an issue in every race for every political office. I want to stress that this is an issue where what is good for the party and what is good for the public are identical. And, I want to stress that it will take real political courage to change health care in the right way----to put the interests of the patients ahead of the interests of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and their friends.

We should elect people who understand just how hard will be the task but who are willing to take it on.

Moving on. Global warming and energy independence. These two issues are really just different sides of the same coin. Policies and actions which affect one also affect the other.

President Bush says he wants to be judged not by public opinion but by history.

So be it. And, if we avoid a monstrous catastrophe in the Middle East, I suggest to you that history will judge that the worst mistake of the Bush administration was to delay for eight critical years any meaningful action by the United States government either to slow global warming or to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

This administration, upon instructions coming from the top, has refused to deal with global warming. It has disputed and distorted scientific evidence, and with stubbornness reinforced by stupidity has cost humanity precious years in getting to work seriously on the very difficult task of controlling emissions of greenhouse gases.

The margin of error is fast getting thinner. We have all too little time to waste. The public, the scientists, the rest of the world, even business and industry, are way ahead of President Bush and Congressional Republicans in their thinking about global warming, and if Democratic candidates in 2008 do not exert strong leadership in trying to steer the country toward sanity on this issue,---if they do not, then they don’t deserve to win.

Looking at the other side of the coin, energy, the Bush administration has foolishly placed its bets on more frantic drilling for oil at greater depth and distance and subsidizing energy conglomerates. It has had no taste for conservation, for automobile mileage standards or for alternative energy initiatives which have a reasonable chance of paying off in the relatively near future.

We are more dependent now than we have ever been on oil imported from nations which really don’t like us and which are happy to take advantage of our wasteful life style to raise oil prices at every opportunity.

The high prices we are paying for gasoline are evidence of the bankruptcy of the Bush energy policy----or lack of policy, and offer another huge opportunity for Democrats to aggressively push for change.

Let me repeat that last word----Change.

I personally think that is a magic word, not just for a campaign slogan, but as a short and honest definition of what the country desperately needs if we are to pass along to our children and grandchildren a country which offers real hope they may enjoy the blessings of liberty the founding fathers envisaged when they drafted the Constitution.