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National Politics

How the party platforms differ






Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, N.J., a platform committee chairman, emphasized its call for a “balanced approach” to deficit reduction, including raising taxes on the wealthy. “When your country is in a costly war, with our soldiers sacrificing abroad, and our nation is facing a debt crisis at home, being asked to pay your fair share isn’t class warfare,” he said in his speech to delegates Tuesday. “It’s patriotism.”

The Democratic platform sometimes reads more like a look back than a road map of what the party would do over the next four years. Many paragraphs are devoted to putting President Barack Obama’s record in the most flattering light possible. The platform mentions that 4.5 million private-sector jobs have been created in the United States since “early 2010” — a time period that ignores the steep job losses of 2009. If the platform had started counting in January 2009, the month Obama took office, it would have found that 332,000 private-sector jobs had been created.

Some of this year’s planks serve as reminders of the unfulfilled pledges from the Democratic Party’s 2008 platform.

That platform, echoing a promise Obama had made as a candidate, said, “We will close the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, the location of so many of the worst constitutional abuses in recent years.” As president, though, Obama has failed to deliver on that promise, so the 2012 platform says “we are substantially reducing the population at Guantanamo Bay without adding to it.”


But any tension between the party’s last platform and its current platform pales in comparison to the differences between the Democratic and Republican party platforms this year.


This year’s Republican platform dropped the 2008 section on “addressing climate change responsibly.” The new platform states that it opposes “any and all cap-and-trade legislation,” and criticizes the president’s national security strategy, saying that it “subordinates our national security interests to environmental, energy and international health issues, and elevates ‘climate change’ to the level of a ‘severe threat’ equivalent to foreign aggression.”

The new Democratic platform states that “President Obama and the Democratic Party maintain an unshakable commitment to Israel’s security,” but dropped language from the 2008 platform that stated that “Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel.” Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, criticized the omission in a statement Tuesday as “shameful.”

On unions, the Democratic platform states that “the right to organize and collectively bargain is a fundamental American value” and opposes “the attacks on collective bargaining that Republican governors and state legislatures are mounting in states around the country.” The Republican platform supports right-to-work laws, which weaken unions, and salutes “the Republican governors and state legislators who have saved their states from fiscal disaster by reforming their laws governing public employee unions.”

On taxes, the Democratic platform says that Obama will fight to extend tax cuts for the middle class while “asking the wealthiest and corporations to pay their fair share.” The Republican platform calls for extending the Bush-era tax cuts.


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