Letting My Cynicism Go

[aramisben]

I have a love-hate relationship with politics. I follow it religiously but refuse to trust a word that comes out of any politician's mouth. I am mostly up to speed on who's in charge, who's running, and what they've done. However, since I don't believe them, I rarely dig deep into their promises because I believe them to be empty.

This US election

Comments

[indiglo_i]

True story:

I read this post on my phone via Google Reader Mobile. Since Livejournal doesn't directly publish an RSS feed of Livejournal Friends pages, I'm using a generated feed via Yahoo Pipes. It mostly works well but strips out the identity of the poster. I can usually guess the author of a post quite easily from the style and content.

So there I was (earlier), reading this anonymous post on my phone thinking "Who is this???" I was impressed by both the simple articulate style and the content of the writing, but I maddeningly couldn't match it to anyone in my mind. Finally I got to the last line where the Quebec/Israel references gave away the answer. It's been too long, Ben. It seems a world away from endless kitchen conversations, procrastinating and drifting in and out of satire over Yuxi's water-cooler and your stash of chocolate-chip cookies.

My US election experience was quite dissimilar to yours I think, though I ended up in roughly the same place. As a supporter of moderate-secular conservatism, I was pleased but perhaps not excited with McCain's victory in the primary, though I was DELIGHTED that the socially-conservative Republican base seemed totally disenfranchised. On the democratic side, I liked Obama's style but was skeptical of his substance and I felt indifferent but respectful towards Hillary. That changed sometime after Super Tuesday (before the Texas and Ohio primaries, I think) when she delivered her contrived "Shame on you Barack Obama!" tirade because he supposedly misrepresented her opinion on NAFTA (how dare he say she supported NAFTA, when her husband was the one who pushed for it and signed it into law and she said at-the-time that she supported it). From that point forward, I started to see her as a sort of contrived/nasty harpy who would do or say anything to win. Meanwhile Obama faced the Wright controversy and I was shocked how well (to me) he handled it... He discussed the issue in a cool rational way, not treating people like idiots, and (originally) refusing to toss Wright under the metaphorical bus.

Moving towards the end of the grueling Democratic primary, I found myself looking forward to a campaign between two level-headed candidates who might actually discuss issues in a grown-up fashion. Like you and many others have mentioned: this wasn't the John McCain I was looking for. I should mention that there was one key area where Obama really disappointed me (though I wasn't terribly surprised): renegging or not making a serious attempt to negotiate on public campaign financing. Not terribly surprising given his huge edge in fund-raising but still disappointing. Then there was the Palin pick... Originally I thought it was a stroke of genius for McCain, but after watching her RNC speech (which I know was written by a speech-writer but still!) I immediately turned. She dismissed balancing the federal budget as "not rocket science" (after being VP candidate for all of 5 days) and started her pattern of zero-content colloquial bitchyness. I'll admit that any mention by pundits of her "energizing the Republican base" totally bummed me out. Not a big fan of that republican base.

Meanwhile Obama and his campaign maintained their cool, maintained their discipline, and maintained their organization. I would have preferred to see more vocal leadership from Obama during the bailout negotiations perhaps... but I'd much rather see some tentativeness in making that call than total incoherence. And that *socialism* thing was just maddening! I think there's a fair argument to be made that progressive taxation needs to be implemented with great care but to act like moving the needle in that direction is some sort of radical leftist idea is totally ridiculous. Ultimately McCain did more to lose my imaginary vote than Obama did to win it, but Obama gets big points for: 1) Generally talking to people like they aren't idiots; 2) Running a campaign that was both positive in tone AND highly strategic; 3) having a platform that is (by comparison) more fiscally realistic.

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[indiglo_i]

Of course there's a part of me that is nervous because Bush Jr. always had cool, disciplined, and organized campaigns too (although more negative in tone)... and Obama is similarly inexperienced in many ways. That said I am optimistic, because he does SEEM genuinely smart, and I must admit that (living in a blue area) the increase in positivity today was itself fairly contagious.

Oh, and for the record I also cast an imaginary vote for Harper last month. :) I support competence and coherence on either end of the political spectrum.

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