What is important to Americans?

Certainly homeland security is very important. So is economic security to allow opportunity for raising families. So is benefit's security for all those millions of Americans who receive some kind of payments from the government. And so is immigration control that benefits the Country, and not the immigrants.

What is not very important to Americans says much, also. Iraq and the middle east is not important, unless one counts in the unwillingness to lose the war there, and unless one worries about we and mostly our allies being held hostage to some future middle eastern oil embargo. Since we Americans get very little oil on a percentage basis from the middle east, the problem is more about our allies. Even the Iranian overt and out in the open regional aggression is not important to Americans, though it should be.

One could generalize that the most important things to Americans are domestic in nature, and the least important things to Americans are foreign in nature. That there are crossovers is obvious when one looks at homeland security and taking the fight and war to the religious zealots that wish to kill us and take over here in America. The benefits and detriments to the pacts about globalization and free trade, as negotiated, also appear as hot button crossover issues.

What is important to Americans and their politicians can be different, the most recent examples being the two different tries by the Senate to force an immigration bill; and the repeated tries to legislate an Iraqi withdrawal in the face of obvious vetoes and liberal use of pork to buy votes. This suggests we have the bad luck as a Nation to presently have poor leaders in the Congress or their staffs that think less in National Interest terms and more in political advantage terms. Either they don’t listen or they don’t care what the citizens think. The time for Congressional term limits has come to help turn this listening problem around.

It is depressing that most of the national media, the D.C politicians, their hired D.C. staff minions, and the D.C. pundits also ignore or tune out any divergent thoughts. This is dangerous to our Country’s future since so many decisions and strategies do have impacts and outcomes. The so-called defeatist types come to mind. This small sub-group of Americans do not represent what is important to Americans, yet they dictate all that is happening these days as if there are no consequences to their precipitous actions, to include future votes and their diminishing salaries. These people have had their run, and are failing in their ideas and methods to dominate America to their way of thinking.

The federal elections of 2008 will be very important to our Country’s future. The two main parties are both suffering from too obvious focuses on political power just for the sake of political power. The Democrats seem especially dominated by the most extreme anti-war types whose policies, if implimented, never discuss consequences. And most polls show most Americans say they are independents vice one of the two main parties. And most will probably vote what is important as an American. The results should be seismic.