Obama’s Austin town hall meeting: A summary

At yesterday morning’s town hall meeting at the Austin Convention Center, Obama focused heavily on economics and education, handing out Keeping America’s Promise, a 46-page pamphlet subtitled “Strengthening the middle class.” The pamphlet breaks down Obama’s positions on various issues such as jump-starting the economy, restoring tax fairness, homeownership and the subprime mortgage crisis, strengthening workers’ rights, fair trade, creating jobs, providing a world class education to America’s youth, bolstering the middle class, and combating poverty. He addressed these subjects likewise in his speech.

Entering through a side door from the gusty day outside, Obama was greeted enthusiastically by spectators reluctant to take their seats once he was on stage — “If you have a seat, you should go ahead and take it,” Obama laughed, “I don’t want anyone getting tired, because we still have a lot of work to do.” Throughout the event Obama exhibited his typical logical oratory.

Obama said that in his travels across the country over the past year, he’s heard the same story everywhere: People are struggling, working harder than ever just to make ends meet. At every turn they have to pay more and more money — at the gas pump, college, health-care; to compound the problem jobs are being shipped elsewhere and education is failing due to underfunding.

“We can’t afford to wait,” said Obama, “We can’t afford to wait to fix our health care system; we can’t wait to fix our schools; we can’t wait to invest in making America more competitive; we can’t wait to solve our energy crisis; and we cannot wait to bring the war in Iraq to an end.”

Obama pointed out that the common American was anxious about the economy long before the players on Wall Street — and that we aren’t in this situation because of forces out of our control. “This is not an inevitable part of the business cycle — it was a failure of leadership in Washington.”

Obama denounced the special interests and lobbyists who create and exploit loopholes in the tax code to the advantage of corporations, use money to kill health care reform, and make it harder for the common American to get out of debt. Obama: “I do not believe these lobbyists represent ordinary Americans. That is why they have no place in my campaign, and will not run my White House.”

Going on to address the disparity of wealth — such disparities were greater only before the Great Depression — Obama cited that some CEOs make in a day what a worker will make in a year. That average Americans are spending more than ever on basic needs for their families and are saving less. Most, in fact, are in debt. The only way to solve this, Obama believes, is to truly change the way Washington runs — close divisions, stop talking and start solving problems, and bring the people into the process.

Moving on to solutions

Obama first talked of a tax cut for the middle class. A tax cut made possible in part by closing corporate tax loopholes. He wants to raise the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation immediately.

In terms of health care, Obama says he’ll provide health care plans equal to the plan he enjoys as a member of Congress to people without health care while saving the average family up to $2,500 a year, and make it so that we pay the cheapest possible prices for drugs — like Canada — and focus on preventative health care, “…so we aren’t running a disease care system, but a health care system.”

He wants to provide $4,000 a year to college students to help pay for tuition in exchange for national service: working in homeless shelters, in hospitals and other similar institutions.

To help people from spiraling into debt Obama will instate a five-star rating system to alert consumers to the risk involved in each credit card, and install a credit card bill of rights. Bankruptcy will be overhauled to give relief to people who can prove they went bankrupt because of medical expenses.

Obama plans to do away with tax breaks for companies that send work overseas, and provide tax breaks to companies that keep workers here. He wants to create jobs in America by restoring roads and bridges, and creating green jobs — creating an entire green force in the economy over the next ten years.

But, Obama points out, we have to do all this responsibly. “We cannot build our future on a credit card issued by the bank of China.” All the job creation will be funded by: ending the war in Iraq, closing corporate tax loopholes, putting a price on carbon pollution, and ending George Bush’s tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.

In his conclusion Obama stated, “But enacting this agenda will not just require investment. It will require a spirit of cooperation, innovation, and shared sacrifice. We must remind ourselves we rise and fall as one nation. And that a nation in which only a few prosper is antithetical to our ideals and to our democracy. Those of us who have felt the great blessings of this country have a solemn obligation to open the doors of opportunity not just to our children, but to all children. And that’s the vision I hope to make a reality as the President of the United States of America.”

At that point the floor was opened up to questions. Volunteers with microphones were stationed in various segments of the audience. People would raise their hands to ask a question and Obama would call on one of them, the volunteer approaching them with a mic. He answered each question directly and thoroughly.

Questions and answers

Corey Kory Strickland, a computer science major at UT, asked: “One thing that has been hampering the software industry are the activities of the US patent office. They’ve been issuing bad patents in software. Do you have any plans to reform what’s been going on with software patents?”

Obama agreed that the patent office was not working the way it should — it’s issuing patents that allow people to extort money and stall innovation. First and foremost he would review the patent process — the current policies and procedures by which patents are issued. But he also pointed out that patent officers are underpaid which results in a huge turnover in the patent office which in turn creates delays and inconsistencies. If you value the patent officer more, you can begin to address backlogs and make sure that the patents issued will not block innovation or result in the hijacking of an idea that’s already out there.

Obama went on to say that he intends to create, for the first time in history, a Chief Information Officer in the White House — someone from the tech sector. The Chief Information officer would assure that the Government is as wired as possible and as up to date as possible so that the government can interact better with citizens. Basically he plans to use technology to make government easier, more interactive, more transparent.

A young woman named Andrea asked: “My question is about the welfare system — and I’m not talking about the disabled or the elderly, but people who abuse the system to the point where a single mother like me can’t get help. I do work, and I’m trying to get my education while I raise a kid. I work at Embassy Suites, but with the cost of school and everything else I can’t make ends meet. And just because I make 25 cents above the poverty line, I can’t get food in my groceries. And I have friends who don’t do anything all day — don’t work and just have kid after kid and the system supports them. While next door someone is getting foreclosed on for being five dollars short on rent and I think it’s ridiculous.”

Obama gave a brief tutorial on the welfare system in which he complimented one of Bill Clinton’s reforms to welfare — that able bodied people should work. He explained that a person can only be on welfare for a total of 60 months (five years) in your lifetime. You can’t be on welfare your whole life. Most people on welfare, he explained, are not just kicking back — they are actually victims of circumstance. They lose a job, they have kids — so they get on welfare for a couple of months until they find another job. The big problem, Obama pointed out, is that everyone in America is supposed to be working, but America has not seen an increase in wages, income, or opportunity. This stagnation results in the “working poor” — people who are in the workforce but have minimal skills, and often have to support children; they make too much money to qualify for medicare, not enough for childcare. If they get sick or their child gets sick they end up taking unpaid time off. Now they can’t pay their rent. They resort to credit cards, car title loans: debt.

The solution, Obama thinks, is to make sure those on welfare are working, but that they have more access to health care so they can stay stable, take advantage of his $4000 tuition credit, go to community college, acquire more skills, get better jobs. He wants to alleviate immediate stresses and allow people the opportunity to prove themselves and move up in the world. But, Obama acknowledged, you can extend opportunities — it’s up to individuals to take those opportunities.

A man stood up and began: “I benefited from the Bush tax cuts, but I don’t care — we love you anyway.”

“So did I,” Obama pointed out with a smile.

The man continued: “So since I’m about to start paying more taxes — and I feel that’s fair — I would like to see a return to fiscal responsibility in the federal government. How important is it to you to balance the budget? How do you want to do that, and how long do you think it will take?”

Obama explained it was very important. If we can’t do it now, he said, it will only get worse — the pressure will become enormous. Obama’s stance is to institute some basic principles that will move us in the direction of fiscal responsibility “without making a fetish of perfectly balancing the budget.” If you are losing revenue, you have to pick it up somewhere else, said Obama, you can’t keep running up the credit card under the names of our children. He would closely examine our spending of federal dollars — an audit to make sure that the money is being spent efficiently: There may be programs that look good on paper that just don’t work or are not of the highest priority, and he says such programs need to be cut.

He will take the tax situation back to how it was in the ’90s — taxing the wealthy. He will end the war in Iraq; $12 billion a month is not sustainable. Some of that money will have to go into the war hangover — like mental health help for veterans. But much of that money can go into schools and help to balance the budget. The real nightmare, said Obama, is the health care system. The population is getting older and inflation is too high. The key is preventative care — so people aren’t going to the emergency room once a problem gets too bad — and so that people don’t become chronically ill.

An unnamed woman asked: “What do you plan to do about No Child Left Behind — to move it from learning standardized tests to actually learning?”

First of all, Obama stated, if you are going to tell states how to educate you have to give them the resources to do so, a major failure of No Child Left Behind. He stressed that we must maintain high standards so that they can compete with India and China. He feels those standards, however, can’t be measured with a single high-stakes test. Not that Obama feels tests are bad. “It’s good to put a little pressure on a kid. Tell him to hit the books.” He said the problem with testing right now is that it’s a randomly situated test set four months into the school year. Obama wants to change how they assess and use tests in schools. He wants to give a test at the first of the year and at the end of the year. That way teachers can actually use the tests to see if the kids are learning — and what they need to learn. It’s not something that has to happen every year.

Obama thinks it’s integral to keep the arts and physical education and programs like debate — extracurricular activities that are being cut in many schools — because those things make for healthier, better learners.

He thinks it’s stupid to punish schools that are getting kids that are already two grades behind. Rather we should give those schools the resources to catch those kids up and use other ways to assess the effectiveness of the school like having teacher peer reviews. He thinks it would be good to have master teachers teach fresh teachers how to teach more effectively.

Improving the education system, Obama stresses, is not simply a matter of more funding. You have to change attitudes toward school. Parents must parent their children. Students must be instilled with a sense of excellence and accomplishment when it comes to school. Expectations must be raised so that we can compete with the rest of the world. Turn off the TV.

Over the course of the final two questions that followed, people were getting up and moving around and it seemed as if they might be leaving — but that was not the case. Rather, they were lining up — piling in — around the door from which Obama would take his exit. Obama didn’t leave straight away but stayed and talked, signing a few books and even paging an audience member’s lost friend.