Monday, November 03, 2008

No One To Vote For


It’s 2008 and there’s still no one for me to vote for. That’s not to say that I won’t have the chance to vote for a presidential candidate this year—there will be seven candidates for president on the ballot in New York State—but that there is not a single candidate I want to be our next president.


Of the two major party candidates, I’ll concede that Obama is preferable to McCain, but that’s like admitting that being hit with a brick is preferable to being hit with a rock. Either way, the next president will pursue major policies that are completely at odds with both the United States’ national interest and the will of the American people. Both candidates have shown allegiance to the same conventional positions that have defined the failures of both major political parties. Each has taken millions of dollars from corporate special interest groups.


I lost a lot of respect for John McCain four years ago when he prostituted himself to the reelection campaign of George W. Bush. When he supported illegal alien amnesty I lost even more respect for him. When he flip flopped on the issue of torture, which was the one issue that made him superior to many of his rivals for the Republican nomination, I lost even more.


Barak Obama is popular more for what he is taken to represent than for what he actually is. He’s an opportunistic politician willing to change his stripes to suit his ambitions and has done so on issues such as domestic spying, offshore oil drilling, the Iraq war and campaign financing. While he is a bright political tactician and an effective public speaker, his platform is basic Democratic Party boilerplate. After eight years of George W. Bush, perhaps we should be forgiving of those so enthrall to someone who can speak in complete sentences, but Obama has without a doubt benefited from a cult of personality that has developed around him.


Even though I’m a registered Democrat, I supported Ron Paul for President. He was the only presidential candidate to consistently oppose the Iraq war, the “Patriot Act,” and illegal alien amnesty. He’s the only candidate (other than Democrat Denis Kucinich) who consistently told the other candidates of his party how full of crap they were.


Ron Paul encouraged his supporters to vote for a third party candidate, singling out and winning pledges from Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin, Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney, independent candidate Ralph Nader and Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr. Paul specifically endorsed Chuck Baldwin a little while later.


While Baldwin’s position on illegal immigration is the best of any candidate, he is a religious fanatic whose platform is laced with promises of enacting a Christian rightist agenda on a host of social issues. Bob Barr’s platform makes him the most logical choice for me, even though his record in Congress is abysmal. So I may end up writing in Ron Paul.

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