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THE NEW YORK TIMES EXCLUSIVE

American voters: still up for grabs

Thomas L. Friedman
A Washington Post-ABC News poll released on Friday found that two-thirds of Americans would consider voting for a third-party presidential candidate, while 48 percent definitely wanted a third party in the race. Now what does that tell you? It tells you that with the campaign about to go into full swing, as the president delivers his State of the Union address next week, voters are still casting about for a leader with a winning message. I can save both parties a lot of money. I am one of those voters, and I can tell you exactly for whom I want to vote and I don't think I'm alone.
I want to vote for a candidate who advocates an immediate investment in infrastructure that will create jobs and upgrade America for the 21st century ultrafast bandwidth, highways, airports, public schools, mass transit and combines that with a long-term plan to fix our fiscal imbalances at the real scale of the problem, a plan that could be phased in as the economy recovers.
On the latter point, I am talking about the Bowles-Simpson bipartisan deficit reduction plan or something equally serious and with a chance of bipartisan support. President Obama has proposed smart infrastructure investments, but he has not paired them with a credible long-term deficit-reduction plan, and the only chance of passage in Congress is to have both. Mitt Romney is not even close.
Christina Romer, the former chairwoman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, put it best when she told this newspaper on Dec. 31 that the U.S. “faces two daunting economic problems: an unsustainable long-run budget deficit and persistent high unemployment.... Over the next 20 to 30 years, rising health care costs and the retirement of the baby boomers are projected to cause deficits that make the current one look puny. At the rate we're going, the United States would almost surely default on its debt one day.... We already have a blueprint for a bipartisan solution. The Bowles-Simpson commission hashed out a sensible plan of spending cuts, entitlement program reforms and revenue increases that would shave $4 trillion off the deficit over the next decade. It shares the pain of needed deficit reduction, while protecting the most vulnerable and maintaining investments in our future productivity.
“But we can't focus on the deficit alone,” added Romer. “Persistent unemployment is destroying the lives and wasting the talents of more than 13 million Americans. Pairing additional strong stimulus with a plan to reduce the deficit would likely
pack a particularly powerful punch for confidence and spending.”
Second, I want to vote for a candidate who is committed to reforming taxes, and cutting spending, in a fair way. The rich must pay more, but everyone has to pay something. We are all in this together.
Third, I want to vote for a candidate who has an inspirational vision, not just a plan to balance the budget. People will sacrifice to make this country great again if they think you have a real plan for American success in the 21st century. And that plan is obvious. We're not going to be about launching one big moon shot anymore. We need to be building a country where everyone in the world wants to come to launch their own moon shot their own company, their own start-up because we have the best immigration policies, regulations, schools and incentives. We can't tax or cut our way to prosperity and jobs. We have to invent our way there. We need both more “Made in America” and “Imagined in America.”
Finally, I want to vote for a candidate who supports a minimum floor of public financing of presidential, Senate and House campaigns. Money in politics is out of control today. Our Congress has become a forum for legalized bribery. Americans are losing faith in the instruments of government because they think the game is rigged by big money and they're right.
Any candidate with that four-part agenda would win and so would the country, because he would win with a mandate to do what needs doing.
“The people are so far ahead of the politicians,” says the Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. His polling, he adds, shows that many Americans today “think that China, Germany and Brazil have strategies for success, and that we don't. But they are looking for that. They are looking for a leader who will be really bold.”
People have been misled by months of crazy G.O.P debates that make the country look so much more divided, small-minded and unwilling to sacrifice to fix our problems than it actually is. That's why I'd bet anything that the first candidate who steps out of the cartoonish politics of destruction "Romney is just a capitalist vulture. Obama is a Kenyan socialist” and shocks the public by going radically responsible, radically honest, radically demanding and radically aspirational, along the lines above, will be our next president.
I hope it is Obama, because I agree with him on so many other issues. But if it's Romney, he'd deserve to win. And, if by some miracle, both run that campaign, and the 2012 contest is about two such competing visions, then put every dollar you own in the U.S. stock market. It will go up a gazillion points.
©The New York Times. Distributed by the New York Times Syndicate.