It’s Up To Us
Republican Debate – November 10, 2015

If you turned your head just so and squinted, you could detect two or three near-mentions of disability Tuesday night’s Republican Presidential debate.

There were a few references to wounded veterans, an appeal to distrust of big drug companies, and there was a very brief discussion of entitlements, all of which is partially, very partially a disability issue. Once again, John Kasich touted his cost-cutting with Medicaid in Ohio. There was also a somewhat alarming discussion of the minimum wage, in which the idea of a lower minimum wage for less experienced workers was floated … something that already happens in the disability community that many of us are not happy about at all. Other than that, candidates said even less about disability policy and disabled people than they did last time.

Some kind of shout-out would have been nice … at least a heartwarming story about a disabled child, or even another rant from Trump about “sickos and the mentally ill.” No dice.

That said, the debate was worth watching. Disabled voters who look carefully can find clues to how these candidates might approach disability issues, and whether any of them make an appealing Presidential candidate. It’s just that the candidates left a lot of the work up to us.

Last night’s “main event” debate  included eight candidates for President: Ben Carson,Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, and Rand Paul. Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie were dropped from the main debate down to the “Undercard” event, due to their lower poll numbers.

As in the last debate, which also focused on the economy, the candidates as a group outlined pretty well the broad outlines of the Republican approach to economics, which is: lower taxes + fewer regulations = economic growth and jobs, which will benefit everyone. They never discussed how all this would work out for disabled people, but then they didn’t mention any disadvantaged group or anyone facing unique circumstances of any kind. We are still left to assume that a broadly better economy will have to suffice, and hope that what’s good for America will, by extension, be good for us.

We might dig a little into their tax plans, which the candidates still present as cutting them, and making them simpler. The candidates regard everyone having the same or similar tax rates as fairness, while they don’t really get into how much actual money upper, middle, and lower income people would get in tax cuts. I honestly don’t know if this is a conscious strategy to distract us from heavily weighted tax cuts, or if they really regard equal percentages as actual equality. I’m sure this will be a major theme of debate going forward, and fortunately there still time for us to figure out our own views, and how that might affect us as disabled voters, whatever our income situations might be.

Again the candidates all seemed to agree that “regulations” are responsible for many, if not most of the economic suffering in America today. As disabled people, we probably have mixed feelings about this. We can all relate to the cost and annoyance of endless paperwork, and the frustration of having our lives depend on the technicalities of what often feel like arbitrary and poorly-written rules and regulations. But there’s a difference between wanting better, more sensible, more effective regulations and wanting most regulations removed entirely. As I mentioned after the last debate, we should always remember that laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act and Special Education laws are part of what these candidates mean when they talk about reducing “regulations,” even if they don’t name-check these particular laws.

The debate itself was a bit more organized than the last one. The moderators asked a series of questions, a different one for each candidate in turn, and grouped into broad topic areas, such as taxes, bank regulation, immigration, government spending, and a section on foreign policy and homeland security. The most distinctive ideas came from Rand Paul, who wants to include military spending in his plan to cut government spending across the board, while most of the others hinted, but didn’t make explicit, that they view defense as an exception. John Kasich and, to some extent Jeb Bush, pushed back against Donald Trump’s claim that he would deport all undocumented immigrants, mostly because they views this as impractical, but also somewhat on moral grounds. Carly Fiorina again was the most eloquent candidate on the idea of simplicity, doubling down on the notion that government, regulations, and taxation are all just too messy and complicated. Ted Cruz may have the most genuinely radical ideas of all, like privatizing Social Security, though you have to listen very closely to notice them.

In fact, listening carefully was essential throughout the debate. And thinking carefully afterwards is essential for voters with disabilities, too, because the candidates haven’t offered any specific disability policy ideas, or even said how their broader ideas would affect disabled voters. We will probably have to fill in those blanks ourselves.

We know what our current incomes are. We know which benefits we get. We know where the trouble spots are for us in our everyday lives and in our dealings with employers, schools, businesses, insurance companies, and the government. It’s probably going to be up to us to figure out how all of these factors would play out in each candidate’s vision of America’s future.

It’s also up to us to press them for more specifics on how their plans would work for us. We can send emails, Facebook posts and Tweets to their campaigns. We can use the broadcast networks’ comment lines to ask disability-related policy questions. We can write letters to our local newspapers and participate in candidate discussions in local races. At least in the Republican race, it looks like we will have to do most of the heavy lifting to find out how disabled people would fare in a Republican administration.

The same may be true for the Democrats. We will have to see. Or perhaps we will have different challenges with them. Maybe they will mention us in glowing but non-specific terms. They might have detailed policy proposals that turn out to be little more than 20 year old standbys. The Democratic candidates may parrot lines and slogans we crave to hear, but then fail to explain what they actually mean. There are differences between the major political parties. They have different ideas of how just about everything works and should work. One might even say the two major parties have different personalities.

But neither party has a fully developed policy approach on disability. Neither party has an automatic lock on our vote. That makes things a bit harder for us, but it’s also a huge opportunity for us to have influence, for our benefit, but also for everyone’s benefit.

Forcing candidates to say how their policies would work for disabled people may be a good way for us to test the soundness of their plans. Programs that work for non-disabled people don’t always work for us, but systems that are flexible for us, may be more agile and responsive for everyone else, too. By being aggressive about our own needs, we can do a service for all of our fellow citizens.

Did the candidates in Tuesday’s debate say anything about disability policy or disabled people? No, nothing specific or direct, neither praiseworthy nor insulting.

Did the debate overall provide a useful snapshot of how the candidates policies would affect disabled people? Almost. We got a fair view of their policies, but it’s still left to us to connect the dots to our own lives as disabled people, and the disability issues we care about, like benefits, work incentives, health care, long term care, education, etc.

What could the candidates do, within the parameters of their existing beliefs and philosophies, to appeal to disabled voters? It’s hard to say for sure, but in the Republican field, themes like making government simpler, and the power of broad economic prosperity, have real potential to appeal to disabled voters. The downside for Republican candidates so far is that they don’t seem to recognize disabled voters as a distinct constituency, partly because they don’t like addressing specific constituencies of any kind.

It’s something we understand instinctively but many people miss. We may agree that everyone in America is equal in value, but we are not all equal, and our needs are not all the same. So every once in a while, we will need to hear how the people who want to be President would address our specific, unique needs. We can make educated guesses from what we saw last night, but we really need to hear more directly from the candidates, and soon.

Contact: Andrew Pulrang