My Vote

By this point, I'm sure you've all assumed that I'll be casting my vote for John McCain on November 4. I'm sorry to disappoint all of you who thought you had me figured out. I in fact will not be casting my vote for John McCain come November 4. It is true that for the past few months I have been planning on voting for McCain. However, over the past few weeks John has done just enough to make me second guess myself. Of course I will definitely not be voting for Barack Obama, either, as his socialist policies of income redistribution and universal health care, along with his weak stance on foreign policy and complete lack of experience in everything besides campaigning are pretty good reasons to withhold a vote. That being said, I've got some thinking to do over the next 11 days about who I will cast my vote for, whereas I do have my mind made up about the rest of the ballot.

One of the largest factors that drove me away from McCain was simply his negative campaigning. Running for President is like interviewing for the most important job in the world. The potential employer that you're interviewing with is the American people, as it is us who will decide who to employ as the next President of the United States. In any other job interview anywhere in the world, a person with the interview skills of John McCain (or Obama for that matter) would be laughed out of the office. Interviewing 101: When interviewing, you want to describe for your potential employer what benefits you can bring to the company and how you will make the company more successful, both financially and socially. You don't go in there, sit down in front of the desk, and try describing why the other individuals applying for the same job shouldn't be hired. You don't point out their deficiencies, and you certainly don't point out what you believe to be their weaknesses. You leave figuring that out to the employer. All you do is lay out the facts about yourself, answer any questions the employer has, and go on your way. In this case, the call-back is the election. The results of the election reveal who the American people have hired as the next President of the United States. We should hire someone for proving their worth, not for proving the lack of worth of their opponent. Both candidates are guilty of this throughout the election, which is one reason why I will vote for neither of them. When I run for public office someday, I hope someone digs this writing up and calls me out on it if I go back on my values and resort to mud-slinging. It's killing what very little dignity our political process has left, and it disgusts me.

Along with the above reason, McCain's support for the ridiculousness that is the progressive income tax, along with his proposal that the government buy up mortgages from anyone who is struggling to make payments, coupled with the fact that he voted in favor of basically nationalizing our country's banking industry has proven to me that John McCain is no conservative (nice run-on sentence, eh?). Anyway, it's not that I think John McCain would necessarily drive our country in the wrong direction, but I definitely don't think that he would do much to take it in the right direction either. It's basically the stance that Jennifer Granholm has taken over the last 6 years...the idea that if I don't do anything at all, I really can't do anything wrong.

As for why I'm not voting for Obama, it should be fairly obvious at this point. Anyone who can think for themselves and do some simple math will see that Obama's policies don't add up. He's waffled on gun rights, he supports infanticide, shows weakness in foreign policy, wants to increase taxes on small business, redistribute wealth, socialize health care, and the list goes on. Both candidates are completely ridiculous, and I refuse to vote for either of them. I need a shirt that has portraits of each, with the words "dumb and dumber" stamped across their foreheads. I'll leave it up to you to decide which individual deserves each of the two fore mentioned adjectives.