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August 17, 2004

Full Disclosure

It appears that the time is once again upon us to select the so-called ‘leader of the free world.’ Personally, I don’t think the election is nearly as important as many people would prefer we believe, but I will still take the time to cast my vote in November. If for no other reason than that it gives me cover when I complain about the result.

This leads to the obvious question (and one that, if reports are to believed, remains for only a small fraction of the population already): who to vote for? This is a pretty easy question for me to answer this year, but only because the candidates are all bad and there’s a war on. Without the war, I might have a difficult time determining where to cast my vote. There is a war, however, and it is one that, poorly managed, could lead to billions of deaths. (Mostly Muslim deaths, but the fact I probably won’t know the dead people doesn’t make it any easier for me to contemplate.) Therefore, each candidate’s stance on the war will be vital in helping me to decide who to vote for.

Unfortunately, that eliminates my sentimental favorite candidate out of the box. Libertarian Michael Badnarik doesn’t strike me as someone who would make a particularly good president, but neither do any of my other options, so that’s not a disqualifier. And while he has no hope of winning, I would have no qualms about voting for him to try and throw Colorado to the Democrats. Just as Nader’s candidacy has pulled the Democrats to the left, a Libertarian who cost a Republican an election or two might just pull the Republican party in my direction. Badnarik’s stance on the war, however, is a deal-breaker. Badnarik wants to pull all U.S. troops back to the United States and use them for ‘defensive purposes only.’ Longtime readers know that I support our intervention in Iraq, and that I believe that reforming the Middle East is the only way to finally end the threat of radical Islam. I won’t support a candidate who is going to throw that process off the rails. I am also not going to support a candidate who blames America for the September 11 attacks, so Badnarik is quickly eliminated.

In case I get any new readers looking at this post, I’ll cover Ralph Nader briefly. I believe that the income tax is immoral and that the government has no right to redistribute income based on its own beliefs about who needs things more than other people. I am therefore disinclined to vote for a man who believes that I don’t own anything, and that he should be empowered to distribute private property however he believes best. Next.

This leaves us with the big two: George W. Bush and John Kerry. I voted for Bush in 2000, a vote Al Gore has given me every reason to applaud since. That’s because Gore lost his mind sometime over the past few years; I don’t have any real love for President Bush. He has presided over a disturbing expansion of federal power with his Medicare drug plan, the Leave No Child Behind act, and his signing McCain-Feingold. He never met a spending bill he didn’t like. Even the things he’s done that I support, he has done in what almost seems a deliberate strategy to anger opponents and create the impression of incompetence. The only thing President Bush has going for him is that he seems to have the right idea about the war. Beyond that, I would be quite pleased to see another occupant of the White House in 2005.

But John Kerry is not the man for this job. As I have noted before, I’m not particularly interested in what Kerry has done or said over the past few years; he was in pre-campaign mode, and his actions were measured as much by how they might affect his electability as what he really believes. If you look at Kerry’s history before 2000, he is actually remarkably consistent: he opposes the use of American power overseas. He worked very hard to pull the United States out of Vietnam and prevent any support to the South Vietnamese government. He opposed every major weapons program that our military currently uses. The only foreign wars he supported were those initiated by fellow Democrat Bill Clinton. Based on this, I believe Kerry will almost certainly try to pull us out of Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly as he can, regardless of the affect these moves will have on those countries. He is therefore not a viable alternative to President Bush.

This conclusion does not thrill me. I think we have four very bad candidates running for office right now, and I have no doubt all we can do is choose the best of some very bad options. Because of the war, I think President Bush is that, and nothing more. So, while I will be holding my nose, I will cast a vote in favor of reelecting President Bush on November 2d. The one silver lining to this vote is that the 22d Amendment will at least ensure us a clean slate in 2008.