National Politics of EMS

Fortunately, this is not a political blog, and the last thing I'm going to do is write a politics post. However: with all the presidential nonsuch beginning in just a few short weeks, I thought I would start looking into a few things...

Namely, I was surfing around looking at the different candidate's webpages and came across one that mentioned firefighters. Hmmm, I thought. Interesting. The next logical progression was to start looking for candidates that stated on their website that they were supporting EMTs and Paramedics. Unfortunately, if you were to do the same thing that I did, you'd be quickly disappointed.

So I systematically went through the websites of all the presidential candidates from the two major parties (as listed on washingtonpost.com) and checked to see what the candidates stood for:

The following candidates explicitly mention standing for Firefighters and Police Officers:

Joe Biden (D)
Chris Dodd (D)
Bill Richardson (D)

The following candidates had no mention of firefighters, police officers, or EMS:

Hillary Clinton (D)
John Edwards (D)
Mike Gravel (D)
Dennis Kucinich (D)
Barack Obama (D)
Rudy Guiliani (R)
Mike Huckabee (R)
Duncan Hunter (R)
Alan Keyes (R)
John McCain (R)
Ron Paul (R)
Mitt Romney (R)
Tom Tancredo (R)
Fred Thompson (R)




Now, as a member of the EMS community, the fact that no presidential candidate mentions anything about EMTs or Paramedics explicitly on their website (some say 'other first responders' -- but come on, what does that mean?) is troublesome to me.

This was just an observation I made that I thought I would share with you.

And by the way, if I made a mistake in looking at one of the candidate's websites, tell me about it in a comment or shoot me an email and I'll fix this post.


OK, this will be the last post I make on politics in a long, long time.