Candidate Crisis

This is the first Presidential election cycle in which I have no idea who I will vote for.  In reality, it is of very little consequence.  I can help select the Democratic nominee, but my state of Oklahoma, the reddest state in the union, will go county by county for whomever gets the GOP nomination.  But still, it is important to me.

I’m not exactly sure why I’m in this crisis.  Is it the candidates?  Or have I changed since the last election?

Let’s say it’s the candidates.  The Democrats only have two true candidates at this point.  Maybe Biden will put his hat in the ring in September.  Maybe Gore will jump in.  But at this point it’s Clinton and Sanders.  My far left friends love Sanders.  But if you look at his platform, it’s almost identical to Hillary’s.  She’s just a little more hawkish.

Hillary comes off as glib, sarcastic, and bumbling.  This email thing really bothers me.  I work for the federal government.  I have to take training EVERY YEAR on what I can and cannot do with my email and other federal technology.  It has been made very clear to everyone of us that you don’t use personal email for government work, and vice versa.  There is no excuse.

Now if she had first responded with something like “Bill and I had been under cyber attack many times, and so I thought it would be safer to use a private email server, but in retrospect it was a bad idea. ” Then I think she would be able to weather the  storm.  But now she says in response to her server getting wiped clean,  “What? Like with a cloth or something? (laughing) I don’t know how it works digitally at all.”

So, either Hillary is so out of touch with technology that she doesn’t understand the question or she is incredibly inept in handling this issue.

I’m pretty liberal and I think Sanders is really exciting.  But I don’t believe a good president should be on the far left or far right.  A good president leads from the center.

Bill Clinton is a fine example.  Maybe he alienated the far right and far left, but he accomplished an extraordinary amount, especially in his  second term despite impeachment.  Obama is closer to the center than he gets credit for.  He’s called a liberal, but if you look at his record on oil you’ll see that he has bolstered domestic production tremendously.  Just today, he signed legislation that will allow Shell to drill in the arctic.  The political gains we’ve made because of our domestic production over the course of his presidency cannot be overstated.

I do care about the environment, but the truth is that as long as we are dependent on fossil fuels we may as well be benefiting from it.  Do we care more about the environment if we limit domestic drilling and fracking instead of paying other countries to do it?  I’m sure someone smarter than me will speak up about that.   And perhaps this is my central point.

The issues facing our country are complex.  Economists don’t agree.  Scientists are having a hard time.  Foreign policy experts are saying all sorts of things.  How am I, a software developer with a music degree, supposed to know what is best for the country? I’m not qualified.  Maybe that’s why the electoral college was invented!

Well, I could say, I’m a Democrat and I trust Democrat politicians to do what is right.  I could say, my party’s better because we support citizenship for immigrant workers, programs that help the poor, raising taxes on the rich and lowering them on the rest.  But can I honestly say that those things are good in the long run?  I’m not so sure.  I believe that they are because they match my personal and religious values.  I’ve heard very intelligent foils for all of these positions, and all I can say is that I just care more about people than they do?

Then I find myself saying that Democrats care more than Republicans to someone who secretly spends their time in a soup kitchen on Thursday nights, who is in a prayer group praying for ME, who donates large sums to the Red Cross, but who just happens to think it’s his personal job to care for someone and not the government’s.

I just don’t feel certain anymore. Maybe it’s not the candidates.  Maybe I’ve changed.  And so, if I don’t know exactly what is best, then how do I vote?  Perhaps it comes down to character.  Who’s honest, who’s realistic and yet visionary, who has enough integrity to rise above our political quagmire?   I just don’t know.

Maybe one of these jokers.