I will vote for Obama because I wouldn't be able to figure out which Pretend-Romney to vote for.
Which will people vote for when the vote for Romney? The Romney that pretended to be a Tea Party Right Wing extremist when he was campaigning to win the nomination? Or for the the Romney who is pretending to be a Massachusetts Moderate?
I don't say these things with venom or disdain for Romney, in fact, I can admire his guile to some degree. Once the debates started he did a better job of running as Obama than Obama did running as himself. But why vote for the empty suit whose top qualification is that he knows how to pretend to be whatever his research tells him voters want him to be?
The key question is how he would govern. I expect he would be the pawn of his fears, that is, he would be a tool of the extremes of the Republican Party, and I do fear the extremes of the Republican Party - Bush's domineering foreign policy, Ryan's libertarian domestic agenda, the Social Conservative's social agenda. All of which I do regard with venom and disdain.
Voting against Romney is the only way I can vote against the Tea Party, the Evangelicals, and the Libertarians.
I wish I were more enthused about Obama, but I think he has been a pretty good president overall. I think his foreign policy has been quite good: Osama is dead, the country has not had a major attack, the status of the country has improved, our defenses are good, our diplomacy is doing OK, the Arab Awakening has not drawn us into yet another misguided fruitless civil war, we are approaching the world in a cautious, thoughtful, principled way. It seems good enough to me.
I think he did an adequate job of keeping the country from plunging into a second Great Depression, and the problem with the economy is a structural one, not a government one, as far as I can tell.
Obamacare was pretty disgusting to witness being formed, but in the end, I think it is good that health care has expanded dramatically to cover most people, that people cannot be dumped by their insurance companies for pre-existing conditions or because they become too expensive to cover, and the only way that can be accomplished and still keep health care in the private sector is to put everyone in the pool of the insured, i.e.the individual mandate.
I have always been a liberal on social issues and fully support a woman's right to choose whether to have a child, and don't see where it is the government's business whether or not same sex people want to marry, think that women should have the government keep its nose out of their reproductive health and issues, and think that racism still needs some prodding from both law and societal change to continue to die its long awaited death.
My hope is that Obama is re-elected. But what I really care about is that the Tea Party, Libertarian, and Evangelical extremes of the Republican Party lose resoundingly during this election cycle. It is time for the Rigid Right to shatter on the rocks of the reality of public opinion and election failures.
It is time for the Republican Party to be free of the death grip of their extremists. It would be so nice to get a reasonable Republican Party back which is more interested in governing the country rather than converting it to their fanatical vision of utopia.
