insomnomaniac

Could I have picked a horse in this race?

Might have, just might have...

Let me start by saying that despite being a registered Independent, I have voted for the Republican candidate in every election since 1984. Yes, I had the great privilege of voting for Ronald Reagan, in my very FIRST election no less. No, I never voted for Clinton, despite enormous pressure from those around me (my own father included) to do so. So it's only natural that this time around I would cast my gaze first and foremost to the GOP candidates, right? It also fits because, after all, lack of party affiliation aside, I am an avowed conservative, pro-life, libertarian-leaning on tax policy, pro-military, anti-amnesty and illegal immigration, pro-school-choice Christian voter. But (you had to know there was a "but" coming right?), this time I'm not so sure even the "lesser of two evils" argument is going to convince me that any of these guys is worthy of my (albeit probably worthless in a strictly numerical sense, but valuable thing to me personally nonetheless) vote.

Why? Well, let's go down the list, shall we?

McCain
I don't "like" him. What I mean by that is, I don't think I'd want to have a beer with him. I might like to be stranded on a desert island with him because for sure he'd know how to survive and would have some great stories to keep me from being terminally bored--stories of an historical nature in particular--but on the whole? I think he's got a mean streak a mile wide and that concerns me. I also think he's too old, I really do. Not in isolation, but relative to the field on both sides. I think he represents a generation that is on the way out, in many ways, for good reason. He may have been one of the best of that generation, but frankly, it's not a generation that really "gets" where the current one is going, never mind from whence it's coming, mentally that is.

He just strikes me as a step backwards, not just to more of the same, but even perhaps to where we were before the Clintons and Bush the Younger made a mess of the country (and let's face it, one mess led to the current one, without a doubt). As nice a fantasy as it may be that we could "restore" the GOP to it's Reaganesque greatness, and as tempting as it is to see an elder statesman like McCain as the guy to do it for us, it's a pipe dream. He's a RINO at best, and a snarky mean one at that. I have nothing but respect for his abilities and service to his country, but he carries a lot of baggage. I don't see a lot of forward thinking or movement in a McCain Presidency, except in directions I don't want to travel (think Amnesty).

His support of the troop surge is nice, but it does not make up for that baggage, in my opinion. We have more than Iraq to worry about in the coming four years.

Rudy
Loved him as Mayor. I lived in Manhattan during his tenure and he did a bang up job, no question about it, the man gets shit done like no one else...When he's on his own turf that is. I really can't stress this enough, he's NOT "America's Mayor" and the misnomer is almost absurd when you think about it! New York City is no more an example of an "American" city than Los Angeles is! It is located in the US, to be sure, but it is about as far from "Main Street" as you're gonna get! It's more accurate to suggest the man has foreign policy experience because of his time as Mayor than to say he's representative of what "Americans" want. And I'm not just talking about his views on social and cultural issues (most of which I agree with by the way). I'm talking about an attitude that is distinctively "New Yawka." I am one, so I can say that. The way he shunned Iowa, the way he touts his experience in New York as if it's enough, as if making it there means he could make it anywhere--as the song goes--is really grating to the ears of a Midwesterner, for example. It's also not music to the ears of a Southerner. I ought to know, I live in the South now, trust me, they wince when he drops the big apple bomb in every other sentence. All it does is reinforce the stereotype people have of New Yorkers as arrogant people who think the county begins and ends at the Hudson River. He forgets that while 13 Mil. plus people may call the five boroughs "home," most Americans have never even visited. They can't. They can't AFFORD to. That ought to tell him most of what he needs to know.

Finally, he too has a mean streak and a pit-bull personality that I'm not sure I'd trust in the office. I'm sick and tired of partisan bickering and anger-inspired policies. He comes off best when he talks business, but sadly, the Average American isn't well-versed in the vocabulary of CNBC or the Financial Times. When he talks about the economy, I find myself wishing he could package his knowledge in something a little less abrasive, but alas, he cannot. He is who he is, lisp and all, and I just don't see him as our President.

Romney
Oh dear, where do I start? I cannot even stand this man. The idea that he's running as a Republican is laughable to me. I think he chose that party solely because he could be the physical model for the "Republican Man" poster, you know the one with call-out quotes, like they had the "Preppy" poster in the 1980s? The call-outs would point to the perfect hair, with just the right amount of patrician gray around the temples, the perfectly tailored expensive (but not trendy) suit, the pearly white grin of a man with excellent dental care, and the blond wife and gorgeous children to complete the package. He's a movie Republican, not a real one. And I speak from experience on that score. I lived in MA during his (brief) stint as Governor.

First of all, for him to tell the nation that his health plan is different from socialized medicine is a LIE. Oh sure, it's still provided by private insurance companies, but they were chosen through a bidding war decided upon by the state. The mandates are enormous, and include--amongst other things--abortions for $50 on demand, regardless of medical necessity. So when he tells you he's "pro-life" don't you believe it. The plan is terrible, it is enormously expensive and getting moreso by the hour it seems. People in MA have to wait sometimes months to get a doctor's appointment and they will be FINED if they don't buy coverage. Oh sure, employers still provide coverage, but you are required to pay for it, or to buy the state-sponsored kind, which while sometimes cheaper, is usually not as good (although they won't tell you that). And some employers are finding it's just easier and less costly to ditch their coverage benefit altogether and pay the gov't fees, which means even fewer "choices" for the citizens of the commonwealth.

Then there's the Big Dig....Did Romney do squat to reign that boondoggle in? No. Did he--the supposed business magnate, executive uber-manager extroaordinaire step in to make sure the process of spending the COUNTRY's money (because, after all, the project was heavily subsidized by the Fed) was being handled ethically, never mind efficiently? Nah. Not sure what he was busy doing (combing his hair maybe?) but that wasn't on his list.

Shall we move on to the way he allowed the commonwealth to be turned into a colony of Brazil? Or how about the way he cow-towed to Finneran and the Dems in the State House at nearly every turn and then called it "bipartisanship?" Was it a tough place to govern because of the oligarchical nature of the government of that state? Sure. But if he thinks D.C. is going to bend over and do his bidding, he's living in a dream world. Romney has no core, he is merely a smarter (intellectually), slicker, better looking, "nicer" version of Hillary in my view, so what's the upside of voting for him? I can't see one.

Thompson & Hucakbee
I'm lumping these two together because really, in some ways, they are the same person. I'll admit it, I gave money to Thompson early on, and I really had high hopes for him. He talked the talk, but since he's entered the race, he's walked a different walk. Instead of talking turkey in many ways, he's talked LIKE a turkey, putting on his little Gomer-Pyle act as if he is in a race with Hucakbee to be the more "authentic" everyman, folksy down-home goober everyone can relate to. He is like the polar opposite of Rudy, the anti-Cosmopolitan, and to this dweller of "Middle Earth" (the land between the two extremes), it's irritating in the same way. Yes, we get it, you're a Christian. We also get that you're for the war, against abortion and gay marriage, blah blah blah. Are you going for the award for most devoted to those causes, or are you trying to demonstrate your character?

I realize I sound like hypocrite, on the one hand criticizing Romney for being a slick chameleon and then turning around and calling Thompson and Huckabee rubes with tunnel vision, but the fact is, the character of the leader we need is somewhere between those two extremes, it is. A core is nice, but not when it makes you rigid or antagonistic, and certainly not when it makes you seem like a walking cartoon character stereotype from late-night-comedy cartoons. I can see it now "L'il Fred" to follow "L'il Bush." Uh-uh, no thanks. I've had eight years of being one who voted for the village idiot, joke of the world, not up for another four.

And Huckabee? Yeah, I "liked" him too at first, seemed like a real genuine guy, but he went down about a hundred notches in my estimation when he started waving the cross around like a flag. Even I, no fan of Hugo Black's brick wall of separation between church and state, was none too impressed by the way he tried to make faith a deciding factor in choosing him. Uncool. We've had eight years of that, we don't need to give the left MORE reasons to assume every policy decision was made in the pulpit of a church we don't all attend.

I'm not going to talk about Ron Paul because I'm running out of energy to type this post (not to mention time) and what's the point of even talking about someone who has as much chance of winning as I have? I'm glad he's out there on the stump reminding us there is this little document called the "Constitution" and it does matter what it says, but I'm afraid he's only giving me MORE reasons not to support his fellow GOP candidates, not fewer. Maybe that's a good thing in the end, who knows, all I know is, I like the guy, but Presidential he is not.

So that leaves me with Democrats doesn't it? Well, there are only two worth discussing really. Edwards has successfully staked out the socialist side of the Democratic party, and that makes him both unelectable and not worth discussing in this post. So that leaves Hillary and Obama, and rather than expound on what I think of each of them (if you don't know how I feel about the Hildebeast by now, you're obviously not a regular reader of this blog. Suffice it to say, to me, she is the Anti-Christ), I'm going to let David Brooks do the talking:

....the presidency requires a different set of qualities. Presidents are buffeted by sycophancy, criticism and betrayal. They must improvise amid a thousand fluid crises. They’re isolated and also exposed, puffed up on the outside and hollowed out within. With the presidency, character and self-knowledge matter more than even experience. There are reasons to think that, among Democrats, Obama is better prepared for this madness.

Many of the best presidents in U.S. history had their character forged before they entered politics and carried to it a degree of self-possession and tranquillity that was impervious to the Sturm und Drang of White House life.

Obama is an inner-directed man in a profession filled with insecure outer-directed ones. He was forged by the process of discovering his own identity from the scattered facts of his childhood, a process that is described in finely observed detail in “Dreams From My Father.” Once he completed that process, he has been astonishingly constant.

Like most of the rival campaigns, I’ve been poring over press clippings from Obama’s past, looking for inconsistencies and flip-flops. There are virtually none. The unity speech he gives on the stump today is essentially the same speech that he gave at the Democratic convention in 2004, and it’s the same sort of speech he gave to Illinois legislators and Harvard Law students in the decades before that. He has a core, and was able to maintain his equipoise, for example, even as his campaign stagnated through the summer and fall.

Moreover, he has a worldview that precedes political positions. Some Americans (Republican or Democrat) believe that the country’s future can only be shaped through a remorseless civil war between the children of light and the children of darkness. Though Tom DeLay couldn’t deliver much for Republicans and Nancy Pelosi, so far, hasn’t been able to deliver much for Democrats, these warriors believe that what’s needed is more partisanship, more toughness and eventual conquest for their side.

But Obama does not ratchet up hostilities; he restrains them. He does not lash out at perceived enemies, but is aloof from them. In the course of this struggle to discover who he is, Obama clearly learned from the strain of pessimistic optimism that stretches back from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Lincoln. This is a worldview that detests anger as a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual.

Obama did not respond to his fatherlessness or his racial predicament with anger and rage, but as questions for investigation, conversation and synthesis. He approaches politics the same way. In her outstanding New Yorker profile, Larissa MacFarquhar notes that Obama does not perceive politics as a series of battles but as a series of systemic problems to be addressed. He pursues liberal ends in gradualist, temperamentally conservative ways.

Obama also has powers of observation that may mitigate his own inexperience and the isolating pressures of the White House. In his famous essay, “Political Judgment,” Isaiah Berlin writes that wise leaders don’t think abstractly. They use powers of close observation to integrate the vast shifting amalgam of data that constitute their own particular situation — their own and no other.

Obama demonstrated those powers in “Dreams From My Father” and still reveals glimpses of the ability to step outside his own ego and look at reality in uninhibited and honest ways. He still retains the capacity, also rare in presidents, of being able to sympathize with and grasp the motivations of his rivals. Even in his political memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” he astutely observes that candidates are driven less by the desire for victory than by the raw fear of loss and humiliation.

What Bill Clinton said on “The Charlie Rose Show” is right: picking Obama is a roll of the dice. Sometimes he seems more concerned with process than results. But for Democrats, there’s a roll of the dice either way. The presidency is a bacterium. It finds the open wounds in the people who hold it. It infects them, and the resulting scandals infect the presidency and the country. The person with the fewest wounds usually does best in the White House, and is best for the country.

Considering Hillary is like one giant festering boil, never mind "wounded," I think it's safe to say Obama is the guy.

Now why would I support a guy who's not only not a conservative, but who supports policies I don't support? Because he's HONEST about that fact. I know what I'm getting into with him because he has this "core" Brooks talks about, he believes in what he believes in because of something real, not because he stuck his finger in the wind and said "This'll sell!"

Also, I can get behind someone who has a different approach to solving a problem than I would have, I'm not some egomaniac who thinks I have all the answers. Sure, I have a philosophy of what works best (and what doens't), but that doesn't make me *correct.* All I ask is to have my point of view considered, and Obama seems to be the ONLY candidate who will actually do that. The guys who may *seem* to automatically agree with me lack the character of a good President, in my opinion, so their "agreement" or support of positions I care about loses its value. They might agree, but choose a course of action I would find abhorrent. Or they might agree in principle, but lack the inner strength to lead or make that principle stick. I've had eight years now of a guy it became harder and harder to defend because his way of implementing the things I cared about was so deeply flawed, so driven by his own character flaws and personal neuroses (pathological loyalty to the point of self-destructiveness being chief amongst those, along with the typical reformed drunkard's tendency to moralize and preach), I'm soooo over that. I'm ready for someone who may not agree with me going in, but who's mature and thoughtful enough to realize that anger and blame never solved a damn thing, and that dichotomies and bitter partisanship make for punchy headlines, but not for sound (never mind solvent) government.

If you want even more detail about how I arrived at this conclusion, read this piece in the New Yorker. It's long, but well worth a read if you're not solidly behind anyone yet, from either side. It's not a hard-sell by any means, it's just thought-provoking and illuminating, and not just about Obama. Juxtaposing Hillary against him the way the article does makes it as crystal clear that Hillary is driven by anger and uses envy and negativity to drum up support. If you thought the past eight years have been divisive, just wait until she takes office. Bush will seem like a unifier by comparison that's for sure.

Anyway, I know it's odd for me to be casting my lot with a man who is arguably the least "qualified" on paper for the job, but I've come to the conclusion that this time around, we need a certain type of PERSON, not a set of credentials. I can only hope Obama is able to do as good a job of conveying that he is that type as Brooks and MacFarquahar have done. If he does, he just might win because I'm certain I am not alone in feeling as I do about the lack of character amongst the current contenders for the job.

Posted by insomnomaniac at December 19, 2007 2:53 PM | TrackBack