The Bauer Confidential

I’m ready to have this election over with. It has gone on way too long (almost 2 years!), and you know that as soon as the next president is sworn in, we’ll have at least one person starting their 2012 campaign.  It’s crazy, but at least the signs will come down and I’ll stop getting 4-5 robocalls a day about every measure and every person.  By the way, I’m not going to vote a certain way because of a Martin Sheen voiced robocall.

I am going to vote tomorrow, and I encourage all of you to go vote.  I haven’t hidden the fact I’m voting for Obama, but even if you are not, go and vote anyway.  It’ll make you feel better.  Oh, and don’t be like this lady!

I wanted to write a post on why I’m voting for Barack Obama.  Mainly because I’ve haven’t written much on this site as of late, and this is the big event of the day.  So unless you want to read an overly biased post, you may stop now, if not please continue.

O.K., I’m voting for Barack Obama, because between him and McCain, I think he has shown to be more collected, calm, intelligent, and has made better judgments during the campaign.  The first time that I thought this was how he handled the non-issue Wright flare-up.  Granted, Wright is a person that I kind of despise, but Barack Obama remained calm, and gave a speech that not only answered many of my questions on why, but showed that he had a deep understanding of the many nuances of a complicated issue like race relations in America.  The second incident that reaffirmed my belief that he had the intelligence to be President was when he accepted his party’s nomination.  That speech showed me that he had the ability to grasp and understand the minute details of complicated topics, and he has the ability to communicate his ideas with the American people in an extremly effective manner.  He showed he had some steak with his sizzle (as my P.I. would say).  I urge you all to read that speech to get a better idea of his political philosophy and what he means by “change.”

I also like his choice of Joe Biden as V.P.  I thought that to win the election, the safe bet would have been to choose Hilary Clinton because of the strong support she has in both her party and independents (more so with the indies).  Instead, Obama understood that the weakest part of his resume was foreign policy, in which Biden is considered by many people to be one of the foremost foreign policy experts in D.C.  This indicated to me that he is a man that is willing to seek advice from many sources, and recognizes his own weaknesses.

One reason why I can’t vote for McCain is that he showed terrible judgment in picking Palin as his running mate.  Most reports I’ve read mentioned that McCain’s first choice was Joe Liberman, but his advisers talked him out of it for reasons I can’t remember (lack of leadership on McCain’s part?).  McCain chose someone of the mold similar to our current president to energize his base, which may have been a good political move.   I’ve listened to her interviews and listened to some of her speeches and to me she comes across as someone who is very divisive, closed-minded, not intelligent enough, and a reactionist.  That is, someone who reacts before all information is gathered and is unwilling to listen to other people’s advice when it comes to making a decision.  Reacts to a situation instead of trying to fix the problem: kind of like treating a symptom, but not trying to cure the disease.  Seems eerily similar to our current president and how McCain reacted to the economic collapse.  In addition, if by some miracle McCain wins, this sets Palin up to run and become president.  I really would like to keep Palin as far from any leadership position over this country as possible.

Speaking of divisive politics, the republicans have made it into an art form.  The democrats have languished for a while, lacking any coherent voice, then Obama arrived.  Obama has set a tone of hope for a better tomorrow, a recognition that things in America can be better but only if all of us are willing to work together.  This tone of hope and bipartisanship was strongly influenced, by his own admission, by that of Reagan (a.k. the great communicator).  The republicans have set a tone of fear for a long time, and McCain has strongly followed suit.  That we should be scared for our lives, and the only hope for freedom is to elect republicans, forgo civil liberties (see patriot act), and to build up our military industrial complex (see Iraq War).  Peace through force or something like that.  The campaign McCain has been about 80%* a character assassination of Obama, and most of of the campaign centers on lies or extreme exaggerations, i.e. making mountain out of a molehill.  Now, Obama has followed suit, but almost all of Obama’s exaggerations have come at the expense of McCain’s proposals, and not of the man.  Obama has run a much cleaner, organized, and clearly focused campaign…something McCain has not done.

Now I understand that many of you are nervous and have bought into a lot of the republican arguments against him.  The most recent accusation is that he’s a socialist, and this is a fear tactic being played by McCain because no one has explained to me on what grounds those accusations are based (mostly because they are baseless).  Obama believes that government can play an important role in people lives, and McCain wants to leave more of that role up to the States.  Our redistribution tax system will remain the same who ever is elected.  Besides, it takes a lot more than one person to dramatically change our system from a restricted capitalism to socialism.  That funny thing called checks and balances gets in the way.  The only real argument that McCain had, which he lost with the pick of Palin, is that Obama does lack experience (7 years IL state Senator, 2 years US Senator), as people probably argued with JFK, Lincoln, and even to some extent Reagan.  Just like past presidents with little experience, Obama has a ton of promise.  Even if he doesn’t live up to that promise, he will at worst have a presidency similar to Bill Clinton’s, and if I remember correctly the economy was doing pretty well back then.  In fact, the economy is almost always better under democrats, studies have found.  McCain has the ability to be a good president, but at worst he’ll be a president more like G.W. Bush, and he’ll will set Palin up to take a shot at the top job.  Both scenarios are things that I just can’t take a chance on.

Now and go out and vote!

P.S. – some of you may be thinking about policy, and my lack of any discussions of it.  That is because 1) democrats are going to have huge majority, enough to prevent filibusters and to overturn most vetoes, so they’ll be setting the domestic agenda and not the president and 2) Any candidate’s policy is hardly ever enacted into law because it has to go through the legislative branch (those gotcha checks and balances again), but I do hope that whoever is elected will follow Clinton’s example and balances the budget.  I think it is a top priority for both guys, but it is the one thing I worry about under Obama.  I’m obviously betting that he will, but probably not in his first year.  In addition, We’ll have a better chance of getting basic science research funded (one of our pistons in our economic engine) under an Obama presidency, because I don’t think either Palin or McCain takes it serious enough.

* I made that statistic up, but I betcha it’s pretty close!