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Why I’m Voting for Barack Obama Tomorrow
By Bill | November 3, 2008 | Email This Post
I hate to type the words, but you lost me John. I was a fan of yours going into the primaries, and whenever anyone couldn’t figure out what I saw in you, I kept telling them to wait until the real McCain showed up. But it’s now the night before the general election and you still haven’t made an appearance. You come across as a party marionette, a once-proud politician who sold his soul to garner the nomination he couldn’t win by being himself. If you had accepted that bargain and won the Presidency, you might have at least claimed some redemption by courageous leadership thereafter. As it is, you’re ending the race as an also-ran who may not even have the chance to regain the respect many of us had for you. I don’t know if Mephistopheles gives refunds, but be sure to check your suit pockets for the receipt, just in case.
Sarah Palin? I mean, really? My initial reaction was delight that you’d thrown a wild card on the table, and I couldn’t wait to see what her secret was. But it turns out there was no secret. Maybe it was a misguided attempt around to try to win the hearts of… someone. Women, the religious right, a Republican base that’s become irrelevant in the last four years, who knows. Or maybe you did it in a fit of pique. Word has it that you had a couple others in mind for VP but the your campaign managers convinced you otherwise. The old John McCain would have told the Republican machine to go fuck itself. What were they going to do, publicly un-nominate you? Instead, you’ve offered us the most polarizing, the least knowledgeable, the most unimpressive VP choice in recent memory.
I do have to give Palin credit for one thing, however: she’s succeeded in doing the impossible. She may be even more unlikeable than Hillary Clinton. So conservatives will have carried the day in at least one area this election season. But really, I’d have been happy to cede the title.
And these halfhearted attempts to paint Obama as an elitist or a terrorist or socialist or whatever the throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks innuendo of the day is… you’re not even selling the accusations well. For you to convince anyone, the audience has to think YOU believe it. And you clearly don’t, which leads us all to believe that you’re just saying anything to get elected, a trait which is always met with universal distaste from voters. Oh, sure, we expect it, but we also expect you to at least pretend you’re not doing it.
In your defense, you did have the bad luck to go up against the sort of politician that comes along once in a generation, but those are just the breaks, and you made your choices long before he became the official opposition. Even after he was nominated the election was still winnable, but you blew your chance. You make a great deal of noise about Obama’s lack of executive leadership experience, but who did a better job of managing his campaign? Yours looked like amateur hour compared to his.
I’m going to cast my vote tomorrow, and it’s going to be for Barack Obama. I disagree with him on a number of issues, but the one thing I think the United States can’t stand right now is to have a weak President (yes, it’s even more important than Iraq or the economy or energy policy or health care - all that desperately needs fixing, but to have any chance of success Washington needs leadership rather than blind flailing around - which is what we’ve seen from the McCain camp over the last year) and that’s what you would be. To be a strong leader, the next President can come at it from one of two directions: one would be to forge popular support into an overriding mandate to put the country on a new track; Obama will have that support, and you will not. The other approach would be to take the Reagan approach, to offer a vision of the future so strong that it electrifies the country and allows the President to lead from the top. Again, Obama offers that, while your bag of tricks seems to consist of a patchwork of unconnected sound bytes.
I voted for George W. Bush in the last election. Tomorrow I’ll vote for Barack Obama.
Topics: Politics |
November 4th, 2008 at 10:23 am
Well said only a Bill…if more 04 Bush voters feel your way Obama’s in for a landslide…..watching and waiting.
June 11th, 2009 at 6:22 am
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