Representatives from Cal Berkeley Democrats and the Berkeley College Republicans met at the “Great Debate” Thursday to make their cases for the relative merits of President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney for the presidency.
Two representatives from each campus organization took their candidate’s side on topics ranging from the national economy to foreign policy, health care and education.
About 80 students attended the event, held in 10 Evans and put on and moderated by students from the Undergraduate Political Science Association. The debate isn’t usually about a presidential election, but the proximity to Tuesday’s election made it an inevitable subject.
Like the national election race, the Great Debate came down to an essential difference between the candidates — the difference between Obama’s support for a strong federal government and Romney’s focus on the private sector and free market competition.
CalDems Sofie Karasek and Simon Rhee focused on the president’s accomplishments, like passing the The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, bailing out the auto industry and staving off economic depression, while BCR’s Shawn Lewis and Alexis Boyd critiqued persistently high unemployment during Obama’s first term and touted Romney’s business experience.
A shift in unemployment from “8.2 percent to 7.8 percent is not an achievement — it’s not something to be proud of,” Lewis said. “Gov. Romney has a record of creating jobs. We need to get out of the way of businesses hiring and expanding — not federal programs.”
Rhee, a campus junior and rhetoric major, charged Romney and the Republican Party with minimizing the importance of government and relying on the private sector as the solution to all difficulties.
“The private sector appeals to the public’s wants, not their needs,” Rhee argued. “It’s like unprotected sex — it feels great, but there are lots of long-term negative impacts.”
BCR’s debaters hammered their opponents on the president’s record of government spending and the level of the national debt.
“There’s a lack of understanding of private sector and where money comes from,” Lewis said. “Jobs don’t exist without the private sector … Government does not create anything on its own.”
The debate closed with questions taken from the audience, one of which asked about the candidates’ positions on abortion, including in cases of rape or incest.
Representing BCR, Boyd called the issue a distraction. Though Romney has expressed support for abortion in cases of rape, incest or those in which the life of the mother is in danger, Boyd said the issue of economic independence is the most important in this election.
“Women are mainly concerned with economic independence and concerned with getting a job,” Boyd said.
Though both sides mentioned the importance of education — Cal Berkeley Democrats in terms of increased spending and BCR by touting the role of free-market solutions like school voucher systems — Lewis pointed out that neither side had really discussed the election’s effect on college students.
As the debate closed, most students gravitated to the left and right sides of the auditorium to discuss the debaters’ performance, leaving only a few still sitting in the middle.
Contact Gautham Thomas at [email protected]
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An issue that concerns a great proportion of Americans cannot be considered a distraction to an election of the person who will govern those Americans. Such a belief is preposterous. When the President appoints members of a court that will in turns change the laws that law-abiding citizens must follow, this issue is incredibly important. The cyclical nature of the economy speaks to its nature – it will change and we must have a good leader to guide and steer the government’s role in it. However, some new court appointees will create a new generation of decimating legislation that attempts to create gender equality. Boyd is wrong.
Government is one of the greatest sources of creating private sector jobs because of its loan programs. Limiting government programs such as job training will no longer help to bolster CVs for individuals who, even after their work in the public sector, can still be equipped for private sector jobs. The greatest ‘hindrance’ to job growth in America, as touted by the Republican party, is government interference in the form of regulation. In expecting corporations, especially transnational ones, to self-regulate we have companies like Apple who increase the hiring of children in the same year that they claim they will tackle the issue of child labor in their factories. Romney’s plan for regulation is a zero-sum model that will roll back every regulation Obama has created, while allowing a repeal of any regulation (in dollar amount) equal to new regulations that are created, regardless of what the environmental benefits are. If it costs a company 1million to prevent 100million in environmental and health damage, and another 1million regulation is passed, companies can choose to undo the first regulation which is a direct subsidization of negative externalities. Romney will create jobs for those who are already equipped for them at the expense of the livelihoods of those whose historical circumstances are such that they are not.
President Obama is not some puppet master of big government planning on eating away at the grounds for private enterprise. The President is of the belief that in times of economic desperation, such as the economic situation he inherited from the massively deregulated economy of the past administration, that the government has a role to play in preventing economic collapse. Indeed, ideally we would hope that business owners can take it upon themselves to prevent such problems, but in the deeply interconnected economy, conservative ideologies that promote rampant individualism and little to no government (ie, the expression of a collective will) involvement in the economy (the source of labor, and essentially food) are bunk. We need a new ideology that seeks compromise between individual freedom and government involvement that is heavily affixed to an international as well as national and local scale – a new economic enlightenment that can imbue a positive note on the movement of capital between nations.
So boo BCR you’re all doped up on BS from the 80s get a grip on today foolz.
“Women are mainly concerned with economic independence and concerned with getting a job”
What about getting paid the same as a man for the same job? Or will the “free market” take care of that?
If women got paid less then why don’t greedy corporations only hire women???
Likewise, these people always piss and moan that minorities make less than white folks. If those same minorities performed on average the same quality or quantity of work as your average white mail but were paid less, then why is black and hispanic unemployment at the highest level in nearly 50 years?
Idiots like anti-racist do, of course! I whine whine whine about made up racial grievances I learned in ethnic studies class and need to be forcibly admitted into a mental institution. If I was a female, I would be an anti-sexist and would complain complain complain about being paid too little and whatever radical feminists complain about. lol
what’s “average white mail”