I have recently heard more than one conservative say something along the lines of, "I'm going to hold my nose, and vote for McCain."
I'm seriously wondering about the reasoning. John McCain strongly supported the $700 billion bailout, which includes the government literally buying out and taking over banks. If this isn't a step on the road to socialism, I don't know what is.
Now, it certainly is not socialism - our free enterprise system is in no danger - and neither McCain nor Barack Obama, who also supported the bailout, are even remotely socialists. And I can well understand why a conservative would have problems with Obama's progressive view that the government should be a source of improvement in our society - a view I share, as a progressive libertarian -
But I don't see how any true, thoughtful, principled conservative could bring him or herself to vote for McCain. There were people in Congress, Republican as well as Democratic, who voted against the bailout - who held to their conservative or other principles. But not John McCain.
I'm enthusiastically voting for Obama. But I believe that, were I conservative, I would vote either for the Libertarian or the Constitution Party, or sit this one out.
3 comments:
I agree. I'm a conservative and I am deciding between the three options that you mentioned. I can't vote for somebody who wants to nationalize our banking system or send more troops to die in the Afghanistan quagmire among many other reasons (mcbama).
I think it's because they are voting "against Obama". Some are voting against him because of stupid reasons (they think he's a secret terrorist), while others fear that he will hurt us more than mccain economically. While I agree with the latter statement, I will not vote for mccain just to "stop obama". Instead, I will be voting 3rd party.
Just like all parties, we conservatives have an agenda. Your goal is to get a strong Democrat elected into office. Our goal is to get a strong Republican into office. You have an overly zealous Democrat to vote for, and we, well, we have a mediocre half competent candidate to vote for.
There are two key factors to who we vote for. The first is apparently what the candidate stands for. McCain is very questionable, but maintains a few things that are important to our beliefs. He is for small government and big people and military(supposedly). Granted, he did vote for bailout plan. I think perhaps this was just a move to attract more Democrats to vote for him. A typical Republican would have nothing to do with this as the gov't has no business with managing the American people's money. Laissez fare approach. So, obviously there are more issues with McCain, and he's not necessarily the candidate we wanted, but it's who we have. He has faults. In our eyes, Obama has more faults. For one, he's a Democrat. So, vote for the lesser of two evils.
Key 2: Location, location, location. I live in Ohio. Ohio is a key state. If Ohio was not such an important swing state in the election I would be voting libertarian probably. (Afterall, if the 3rd party receives 5% of the national vote, all the same rules and restrictions, air time, and funding benefits will be applied to them in the '12 elections.)Since the state is so important, I(we) cannot risk taking away the vote from the Republican party and giving it to a 3rd party. That screams just let blue win. The same applies to a few other areas. This is how Bush won. He got swing states b/c he attracted them last minute and a lot of 3rd party voters gave him their vote. Quite unfortunately, he was bought out and screwed our country. But all, including Obama, are capable of suffering the same corruption.
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