Election 2012

I am not looking forward to voting this year.  Usually, I enjoy voting.  I wish there were actual curtains and a lever to pull like in the old movies, but even though there aren't, I generally like voting.  Not this year.

And it's not the "down races" I am down on.  I've got my preferences on everyone from Senate down to County Commissioner and I will proudly cast those votes.

What I can't get enthused about is my vote for President of the United States.  I don't like either of our top 2 options.  I guess I could vote for one of the lesser known candidates from some obscure party, but I can't decide whether the possibility of casting a protest vote overrules the idea that I'd just be throwing my vote away.  (And then we get into the discussion of whether any vote matters and, well ... for the sake of this blog, let's pretend/assume all votes matter.)  So I'm left to choose between Obama and Romney.

Yuck.

Both men seem to be good husbands and fathers, so I'll give them that.  After that ...

I know we're not electing a Pastor-in-Chief, but we've got Romney coming from a cult and Obama coming from who knows where?  No, I don't think he's a Muslim.  I don't know the man, but my impression is that Obama's only god is Obama.  In a paragraph or two I'm going to describe Obama as a hardened leftist, because that's how he has always governed, but I'm convinced he'd sell out his leftist buddies in a heartbeat if he thought it would help him in some way.

Obama is ardently pro-abortion, voting to refuse protection for babies even after birth, so I hate that aspect of his policies.  Romney gives great speeches about being pro-life and has generally voted that way, but he picked some judges while governor of Massachusetts who were very liberal on this aspect, so I'm not enthused about him on this score, either.

Obama is a hardened leftist whose financial policies I can't stand and have proven themselves to be abject failures every time they've been tried (by him and every other Keynesian idiot of the last 3/4 century).  I like Mitt's stated financial policies, but I don't know that I trust him to carry any of them out.  He looks too much like he'll be of the "McCain School of Let's Give Away the Farm in the Guise of Being Amicable With the Other Side".  I hope he's not, but I'm not holding my breath.

Foreign policy?  Obama has shown himself to be pretty clueless in this area, seeming to think that the force of his personality will solve centuries of rancor.  I don't know that Romney has any foreign policy experience and other than George Schultz, I'm not sure who he's listening to.  So this one's a toss-up between "proven ineptitude" and "ambiguity".

Someone once said you're better off with the devil you know than the devil you don't know, but the devil I've gotten to know for the last 3 1/2 years is pretty awful so I can't bring myself to vote for him to continue his path of destruction.  On the other hand, I'm sure not enthused about Romney, either.  He's saying all the right things now--and if I thought that was the way he'd govern I'd be all over his bandwagon--but ...

I guess I'll walk into the voting booth in November (I don't like early voting just because I like do it on voting day--don't know why), hold my nose, and cast a vote for Romney.  Maybe he'll pick a VP that I can enthuse about (Obama's out on that score, too), but I think my main hope for not leaving the building with a horrible taste in my mouth are those down ballot races.

That's kind of like hoping the complimentary mint is enough to overcome a mediocre-to-bad meal, huh?