Voting Philosophy: Part 2

A New Approach to My Vote

I swore to myself that I would not give my voice to another candidate I could not support. In 2004 I voted not for Bush, because I was already disappointed in his performance. I voted against Kerry.

That was a mistake.

I felt partially responsible for the illegal, unethical, or sometimes just philosophically unwise decisions that Bush made in the next four years. Though intellectually and academically I disagree with the political philosophy that says that elected representatives are the tools of the electorate (because they clearly are their own operatives and have extreme distances between the voters and their actions), I still felt responsible. Because of the way I voted combined the way millions of others voted, Bush believed he had a moral mandate from the people to act in the same way he had been for the previous four years.

I vowed in the next election to vote only for someone I could believe in and throw my true support behind them. I wouldn’t be someone who voted against the other guy or who voted for the lesser evil. I would only give my voice, my support, my piece of power to someone who would exercise it in a way I could condone.

That didn’t mean I expected someone to come along who would never make mistakes. Every candidate becomes someone else when they get into office. They have to make hard decisions and compromise many of their ideals to get the job done.

But I wanted to vote for someone who would put the right ideals forth, who would act in the interest of all instead of in the interest of a few, who would rightly understand the role of government and not overreach into the bedroom, into personal conversations, into the private realms of citizens. I wanted a candidate I could at least believe in and who would respect what our nation was founded on. I wanted a candidate I could vote for and not be ashamed of two years into his or her presidency.

That candidate did not come.

2008 Election

In 2008, the atmosphere around the election was intense and even more partisan than I remember the 2004 election being. People who had never cared about politics before were ready to get involved. Friends volunteered for campaigns, donated their time and money, and got truly involved in political life.

As a graduate student at the University of Virginia studying political theory and focusing, in part, on the isolation of modern America and the increasing effects of individualism on political involvement, I was ecstatic! As a member of the voting public, I was disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong, I got swept up a bit in the fervor of Obama’s presidency. He held such promise, and he supported overturning many of the policies I hated from the Bush presidency. He swore to increase transparency in the federal government, opening up the secrecy and rooting out corruption with just the light of exposure. He said that there would be no more “no-bid” contracts for federal projects, ensuring that spending would come down and flunkies would stop being rewarded. He was going to shut down Guantanamo bay and end the detainment of anyone without habeas corpus. He was going to expand the role of science and diminish the role of favors in government decision making, address global warming, clear red tape for small business owners, and use independent watchdog groups to address political corruption!

Yet still Obama’s campaign, though dazzling in its enthusiasm and its historic significance for race relations, fell flat for me in a number of ways. There was so much talk of Hope and Change, talk of moving forward in such a momentous way, and the idea of a fresh new day for our country, that I grew nervous. Obama had no experience on the national stage, and was certainly unprepared for international relations. We had already seen what a candidate with no world experience could do in the aftermath of 9-11, that I was worried someone who ran on a purely reactionary foreign policy platform would do to already unstable relations around the world.

On top of that, the economy was already in the worst downturn most people alive had ever seen. Several industries were hemorrhaging jobs at a terrifying rate, and Congress had decided earlier that year that the best decision was to bail out every business that was “too big to fail.” My free market economic background and my (admittedly limited) understanding of the limitations of fiscal stimulus and government spending made me question a candidate who could base so much of his response to this crisis on more bailouts, stimulus, and government spending. I didn’t believe that Obama would do what was right for our country when it came to either our foreign or our domestic policy.

Granted, McCain would probably do no better. He had experience, sure, but my God did he run a terrible campaign. Sarah Palin was a mistake. Posturing over how concerned he was for our economy and then failing to show up for key votes in the senate was a mistake. His statements on immigration reform were mistakes. His inability to stay consistent with his message was a huge mistake.

Sure, he had the experience, and his foreign policy credentials were among the best of any potential candidates. Yet, the issues of the day were the economy, jobs, and the bailouts. He couldn’t stay on message and assure the people that he would be a strong leader, and he didn’t give much hope to voters desperate for just that.

The fact that Sarah Palin overshadowed him at every turn made it even worse.

I couldn’t vote for McCain, and I couldn’t vote for Obama. Whoever won I knew that I would be burned again. Neither of these men would represent me the way I wanted to be represented. They both would act in ways that I would be ashamed to admit that I had voted for them.

So I abstained.

I filled out my ballot for every other office on the ticket, but I left the office of president blank.

((But what about Bob Barr? I hear you ask. He’s libertarian and surely would give you at least someone to vote for.

I’ve met Bob Barr. Bob Barr has eaten at a restaurant I worked at as a teenager and failed to leave any tip, even after he was rude and demanding and a real ass to eighteen-year-old me. That alone would convince me not to vote for him.

However, he’s also an insufferable ass as a politician. Though he recognized what the Republican Party had become back in about 2003 and became a vocal critic of policies like the PATRIOT Act and the dangerous and politically backward policies in the Drug War, he approached them in a way I found ideologically appealing but interpersonally erratic. He relied on a number of attacks and contrary approaches to politics and has behaved in a number of political arenas as one of those crazy libertarians. I do not believe he has the temperament or composure to represent our country as President.

That and he stiffed my table 11 years ago.))