So I voted today, and it was the first primary election of my adult life I chose to participate in. Not so easy a decision as you might think. I gave serious thought to taking the Democrat ballot to cast a vote for Barack Obama. Not, mind you, for the reasons you might expect. I’ve not experienced an Obamagasm. He hasn’t healed my boils and gout. My thinking on that had several factors. First, it’s past time to drive a stake into the heart of Clinton Inc. Second, I wouldn’t vote for John Kerry McCain under threat of being stuck in a Vietnamese POW camp. Third, for everything really horrible on Obama’s platform — his tuition plan guaranteed to raise the cost of college tuition, his health care plan, his opposition to tax cuts — he has something good to offset it — getting out of Iraq ASAP, repealing the worst of the Patriot Act provisions, and so on. Of the three major candidates, he’s poised to do the least damage, and he actually pays lip service if not more to the realities of the marketplace. More, with any luck a good trouncing of the GOP by Obama may get the GOP to dump all that religious pandering and “compassionate conservative” nonsense that lead them to grow government spending by more than FDR in his wildest wheelchair dreams.
Still, so long as there was a candidate on the ballot whose positions most closely approach mine — pro-market, getting out of Iraq, abolishing the Department of Homeland Security, cutting spending, expanding deregulation, decriminalizing drugs, repealing gun control laws — no matter how impossible his chances, I had to raise that middle finger to the big government Republican establishment. And so I voted today for the only candidate my conscience would allow. Come November, I’m likely to choose not to vote. Or, should my primary candidate lose his House seat and run as the nominee of the party of principle, he’ll get my vote again.
Now I throw down the gauntlet to my fellow D Empire bloggers — whip it out. Who you voting for?
