Election-Related Observations

1.  I think it's funny (in a morbid, ironic sort of way) how a big campaign point for both presidential candidates is the need to unify the country, achieve bipartisanism in Congress and so on, since the country has been divided and fractured for so long, thanks to the Iraq war, post-9/11-ism, and the Bush administration in general.  Yet, I dare say, given all the grassroots campaigning and in-your-face rhetoric I'm getting, the likes of which I have never seen on such a widespread scale, this election has only served to deepen the ideological faultlines that each candidate says they can fix.  I suppose you can't blame them personally for this; in an event as important and polemic as a presidential election, it's probably a foregone conclusion that the race will be deeply divisive.  That said, I still think it's ironic, and I have a hard time seeing, given the extreme divisiveness all around, how either candidate will be able to reach out to those who didn't vote for him during the next 4 years and actually achieve bipartisanism.  I originally decided to base my vote on who I thought was most capable of that.  Sadly, I'm starting to think it's impossible.

2.  Dear President Obama,

In your law professor days, you criticized the Supreme Court in decisions such as Dandridge v. Williams and San Antonio School Board v. Rodriguez, in which the court declined to extend strict scrutiny review along economic lines, and established a textualist mode of determining what qualified as a "fundamental right."  Your comments, if I remember correctly, were to the effect that the Supreme Court unforunately failed to consider a paradigm which would mandate a redistribution of wealth.  For example, if Rodriguez had established a fundamental right to education, the law in question would have been a violation of equal protection and Texas would be forced to raise taxes or redistribute wealth from richer school districts to poorer ones to achieve economic equality between school districts.  This concievably opens the door for the christening of other "fundamental rights" such as food, shelter, etc. which would need to be provided for by the state.  I fail to see how this is not a completely socialist argument.  Is a vote for you, then, a vote for a socialist approach?  Or can I rest easy knowing that President Obama is more practical than, and not as extreme as, Law Professor Obama?

Regards,

Todd

3.  It's been almost a year, three prime-time debates, and countless news stories, but I still don't know where John McCain stands on any issue besides gay marriage and abortion.  What's his energy plan?  What's that, reduce our dependence on foreign oil?  Well how? Give me some sticking points, man!  Don't douse me with campaign trail rhetoric and expect me to eat the lines you're feeding me blindly.  At least Obama was a little more specific!  Does McCain even have an energy plan?  When are we getting out of Iraq?  Did you choose Sarah Palin as your VP just to take the spotlight off yourself and your vague campaign promises?  

4.  Speaking of abortion and gay marriage, I don't know why anybody cares about how a candidate feels about those issues.  Marisa (my fiancee) says it's a good indicator of a candidate's moral compass, how he feels about the sanctity of life, his conception of family, etc.  That's true, and I know a lot of people base their voting decisions on who they're morally aligned with.  So I can see the value in addressing it.  That said, a president is effectively powerless to stop gay marriage (or legalize it) because at this point it's a matter of state marriage law, and each state is left to decide the question.  From there it goes to the judiciary branch, if it reaches anywhere into the federal realm.  It's not like the president can wave a wand and *poof* gay marriage is legal or illegal.  As far as abortion goes, the same idea applies.  Roe v. Wade merely set restrictions on when a state may impose restrictions on abortion (during the third trimester only, for those of you keeping score at home).  A president cannot legalize abortion (or criminalize it) and even if he could lobby the legislature to pass such a law, it would almost surely be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional on substantive due process grounds.  

5.  Is it bad that I don't want to vote because I have serious reservations about each candidate?  If you offered me a three-course meal at some ritzy restaurant, and the choices came down to snail excrement in a white wine sauce or mad cow cutlets and asparagus, could you blame me for just walking out of the restaurant to go to McDonalds?  I have a civic duty to vote, I suppose, so maybe the analogy is inapposite in that sense, but how can I endorse either candidate at this point?  I don't feel like I can in good faith.  Maybe I'll just write in Ron Paul or something, get out of it that way.  

Voting for Race--Just an Issue for Obama?

The beauty (or danger) of Facebook is that your opinions tend to come out to everybody who can see your profile, even those you don't hardly know. For example, I knew a kid back in high school named Callum, who recently posted a link on his page that took me to this segment of the Howard Stern Show that suggests that many black voters support Barack Obama simply because he's black. From this I can make the inference that Callum supports John McCain, even though I've talked to Callum maybe once in the past six years.

In my mind, it warrants contemplation that nowadays you can find out somebody's opinions and persuasions without really talking to them, where before you would probably have to have some sort of extended interaction or correspondence with the person to figure that stuff out. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing, but it's just food for thought.

But back to the clip from Stern. I'd suggest listening to it because I can't accurately describe how very ironic it really is, but basically one of Stern's correspondents goes into Harlem and asks people (presumably black) who they support, and invariably they all support Obama. The correspondent asks if they support him because of his position on a given issue, but they ascribe John McCain's stance on the issue to Obama. For example, they ask people if they support Obama's pro-life stance (when he's actually pro-abortion) and they all say they agree wholeheartedly. Shockingly, when asked if they thought Obama made a good choice selecting Sarah Palin as his VP (which McCain actually did, obviously), they said they thought it was just fine and she'd be a great VP.

The inference Stern wants to illustrate, of course, is that many black people support Obama simply because he's black, not because of his stance on the issues. I think the clip is hilarious and a particularly biting indictment of the role race is apparently playing playing in the election. Although I would propose a counter-example. Let's say we take a trip down to the deep South, say Alabama, Mississippi, or wherever. Go to some typical white-bread town that could be described as Harlem, only for white people instead of Afro-Americans. Swap the experiment so as to attribute Obama's policies to McCain and ask the white folk if they support McCain on those issues. I'd bet dollars to door nails that the results would be fairly similar to Stern's social experiment.

My point is, despite the fact that most Americans say they would vote for a candidate without considering race, I think it's fair to say that in communities where race is closely identified with the community identity (like Harlem), voters are nevertheless likely to vote along racial lines rather than ideological, and that applies not only to minority groups, but to whites as well. I don't know if Stern brought that up or not, but I think it warrants mentioning to prevent any idea that it's just blacks who do this. If you live or grew up in a community whose identity is based heavily on race, I think it's entirely possible that you'll vote for a candidate based on his race without even bothering to find out about his politics, no matter if you're black, white, brown or purple.

And quite frankly, that's a very unfortunate conclusion.

Voter education would go a long way in eliminating this phenomenon, in my opinion. People should step past broad generalizations about a candidate based on appearance or party support and vote based on issues and, to a lesser extent, character. I invite all who read this to really examine their candidates principles and ideas if you haven't done so already, and see if you still come out on their side.

Those Nutty Leftists

If you've read the stuff in the news today about allegations of voter registration fraud, you probably already realize that this post title is a pun. For those of you who don't know, allow me to explain.

The Association of Communities for Reform Now, or ACORN, as it's more commonly known, is under investigation in Missouri, Connecticut, and Ohio for alleged voter registration fraud.

Go ahead, Google "Acorn voter fraud." I'll wait...

*Toe-tapping*

*Stretching*

*Looking at my watch*

Ok, are we good? Great.

Did you catch the one in the NY Post about the guy in Cleveland who was paid in cigarettes and petty change to register 72 times? Really? How does this happen, especially so close to an election? The guy's name is Freddie Johnson, a 19-year-old kiosk worker in a mall. According to him, he told ACORN activists that he was already registered to vote, to which they simply replied, "Oh, well, can you sign up again?" The article also mentions ACORN is under investigation in Connecticut for registering a 7-year-old to vote, according to the State Elections Enforcement Commission.

CNN (they of the left-leaning reporting ilk) reports that ACORN, while officially non-partisan, puts particular emphasis on registering low-income voters who tend to vote Democrat. The same report says that in one county alone (I don't know where) out of 5,000 ACORN voter registrations, a little less than half appeared to have been falsified. Bad addresses, names of deceased persons, registrations and signatures written in the same handwriting.

This, of course, comes on the heels of reports that the Obama campaign recently swept through Missouri towns (I think it was Missouri although I could be mistaken) scooping up scores of homeless people and taking them to registration stations to register to vote. While that may not be illegal, it's definitely shady to me, something I hope Obama personally wouldn't stand for. Vote-mongering is pathetic and especially damaging to a candidate who maintains he's not like other politicians.

I had a very interesting conversation with a staunch Obama supporter the other day. I told him this vote-mongering, coupled with the Obama truth squad I mentioned in earlier posts, and cries I've heard from Obama supporters for communist principles has made me very skeptical where I once was clearly in the Obama camp. I realized, though, in speaking to him, that my problem is not with Obama himself, but with his supporters. I still want to believe that Barack Obama is a principled, measured man who will work in a compromising, bipartisan position to unify the country across party lines and dissolve the acrimony that prevents our country from making progress. He's a unifier, a great speaker, and I think that's a desirable quality for a president, especially now when the country is so fracture along political fissures.

But I don't know if I can, in good conscience, vote for a man who is supposed to uphold American ideals when his campaign and his party sympathizers are engaging in behavior like this, trampling the 1st Amendment in Missouri with "truth squads" and abusing one of the most fundamental rights of American citizenry (the right to vote), engaging in a Machiavellian abrogation of Constitutional rights and principles in the name of getting their candidate into office. It's an affront to American dignity that reeks of hypocrisy when a group is willing to ignore and abuse the rights and privileges of its fellow-citizens to get a candidate into an office that is ultimately charged with protecting those same guarantees. The fact that they often display such religious zeal in doing so only adds to my concern.

The question I would ask is essentially this: is it worth it to disregard constitutional freedoms in the name of getting your candidate into office? If so, how is that in any way justifiable? And if not, even if Obama himself didn't approve or participate in these tactics, how can you substantively separate Barack Obama from the actions of his campaign or those who support his party?

The reason I don't post any articles I've mentioned in this post is that I understand that my last few posts may be seen as, if not merely skeptical, outright anti-Obama and Republican. I take great pride in maintaining my distance from either party's ideology, so I'm merely going to repeat what I've heard and read, ask you, dear reader, to look it up yourself, and tell me if you can find anything to the contrary or anything that might ease my concerns.