I've been wanting to put my two cents in about the upcoming election, but I can't come up with anything that can be distilled down to a couple of paragraphs. Arguing about politics is only slightly more productive than arguing about religion, and at least the perceived closeness of this year's race is going to get more people out to the polls who sat on their collective hands last time thinking their votes didn't count (turns out, of course, that in some cases they didn't!). So whoever wins we can consider the vote to be at least a little more of a representative sample of the will of the people.



I've said all year that if Bush gets re-elected I'll have lost any remaining faith I have in the human race. To think after the pudding he's made of Iraq, his inability and unwillingness to work with other countries on anything such that most have united against us, record-high prices for oil, record deficits after taking office with a surplus, a brazen disinterest in the environment, a fear of scientific advancements that could save millions of lives, allowing the assault weapons ban to expire, millions of jobs going overseas, and his insistence that pigheadedness and refusing to acknowledge the existence of more than one side to complex issues are in fact virtues, that people will still turn out in droves to vote for him on Tuesday is unfathomable.



Is Kerry the answer to all our problems? Of course not, no presidential candidate ever is, but I'm inclined to think he has a greater potential for making things better, not just for us in the here and now, but for future generations. Beth's brother, a political agnostic if there ever was one, said to me a few months ago that he felt it doesn't really matter who is in charge because it doesn't have any direct effect on him personally. I couldn't respond immediately because my breath was taken away by the utter shortsightedness of that statement. Of course it has an effect on you, in how much money you take home, in what you have to spend it on, on whether you feel safe travelling abroad, on how long you'll live because of new medical advances. And even if it didn't, what about our kids, who'll have to live with our environmental mistakes longer than we will, who can take advantage of education programs as long as they aren't sacrificed to grandiose tax cuts, who'll have less money to spend because of the debts we accumulate, thereby decreasing their standard of living in relation to our own?



A lot of people like to make the presidential race a one-issue decision, like "well, I'm voting for Bush because Kerry will raise taxes", but you can't simplify it like that. There are a lot of variables, and they each deserve consideration, other than the "Which candidate would you rather have a beer with?" question, which should just be ignored (and is moot, since Bush doesn't drink any more). The country should not be run by the guy who is the most folksy, it should be run by the guy with the more compelling and all-encompassing vision. He may not be right on every count, he may not be able to succeed on everything he wants to do even given the chance. The senior Bush got booted out because his mantra was "stay the course", keep everything the way it is. The junior one doesn't seem to be straying from that line very much, and I personally just don't see that the course we're on is one worth preserving, and not only that, it is inherently dangerous on a number of fronts to continue to do so.



To be honest, it was kind of a disappointment when Kerry became the presumptive nominee, I didn't think he had the populist appeal that seems to be necessary these days to win, the way the Dean or Clarke had. But the Dems picked him more on substance than style, so if he's going to win, he's going to do it because what he says makes sense, not because he's a good ol' boy. God help us.