If you read my blog with any regularity (and lately by the lack of comments I’ve begun to wonder if anyone does any more, but I digress) then you may have noticed I haven’t said much about the presidential race. Almost a year ago, I was worn out by the early start to the campaign season and frankly I have deliberately paid only a little attention.
It isn’t that I don’t care about politics or that I don’t recognize the importance of picking the next president. You’re looking at a guy who this year marks 30 years as a registered voter. The number of times I have not cast a vote in an election is in the single digits.
No, I’ve said little because I have already made up my mind. I’m voting for a Democrat, and it really doesn’t matter who it is.
Eight years of the most corrupt, inept, stupid and misguided presidency in the history of the planet Earth-Bush’s deficiencies far eclipse those of any other world leader except Hitler-has made it an absolute certainty I would never, ever consider a Republican candidate even if I weren’t a lifelong Democrat.
With Bush unable to run again and Cheney uninterested in officially seeking the position he’s secretly held for the past two terms, the end of this dark period in world history will come to an end and it can’t happen soon enough. Speaking for myself, but noting what I observe around me, I have a sense the entire country has been in a state of depression since the re-election four years ago. Resigned to the fact that this shit storm requires hip boots and a great deal of patience, we’ve all just waded it out, knowing there is nothing we can do until November.
Unlike the people in Kenya who rioted when an unpopular incumbent president apparently stole his re-election victory, we supposedly more civilized first world people have just tolerated this illegal occupation since the Supreme Court put him in office in 2000. We’ve sat by while the balanced federal budget Dubya inherited from Bill Clinton was turned into the largest deficit the nation has seen since Daddy Bush was president, in just a year. We protested but ultimately acquiesced to the unnecessary invasion of Iraq, even at a cost of $9 billion a month, the lack of any weapons of mass destruction and the absence of any connection between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist attack on 9/11.
Personally, I don’t need to get worked up over whether it will be Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards or Dennis Kucinich for that matter. Their differences are marginal, none of them are perfect, but all of them are a vast improvement over Bush and the entire field of GOP candidates. It doesn’t matter to me who represents us.
What does matter is that we not weaken the party with a fractious campaign. Whoever comes out on top needs everyone behind him/her so that we win the White House. What does matter is that the next president articulates a vision to get us out of this mess and reinforces the basic constitutional provisions that will guarantee we never again experience the coup d’etat we’ve been living under. The next president must repair the damage done to our national reputation overseas and never again make a unilateral decision to make us the aggressor in an international conflict.
When the primary is held in New York, I’ll vote for one of them, but beyond that I don’t feel any read any polls or watch any interviews. There is nothing more I need to know. My mind is already made up.
