I have not posted for quite a while because I have been busy teaching, but I wanted to post my thoughts on the candidates and how they have changed over the past few months.
I have to start out by saying that I have a less favorable view of both of the candidates now than I did several months ago. Unfortunately I have not been that impressed by how either candidate is running their campaign.
I have been dissapointed by how secretive Obama is about some things. He has been willing to be negative and stretch the truth in speeches and ads (although not to the same extent as McCain). I am not really sure what to expect at this point if he is elected. I just read an article today that I thought was the clearest explanation of how I feel about Obama http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/openingargument.php.
Most of what has been written about Obama has been extremely partisan (e.g. saying that he is a socialist or that he is a panacea). This article clearly articulates some of the great things about Obama but also his weaknesses.
I still think that he has the potential to be a great president and a great leader, but I am not totally confident that it will happen. The campaign has left some doubts. If he can be the person who can see and try to understand both sides of an issue and work to a positive outcome, then he could be just what the country needs.
While I am ambivalent about Obama, I am afraid that my former ambivalence about McCain has dissappeared. I don’t think there is any way that I could vote for him right now for a couple of reasons. He bears little resemblence to the very honest maverick that campaigned in 2000. He has a willingness to distort Obama’s record and his response to the financial crisis was clearly a political stunt. Now this is not that unusual for politians (although I had hoped that both McCain and Obama were somewhat different) but it is still disappointing.
The biggest reason that I cannot vote for McCain, however, is Sarah Palin. While she may be a wonderful person, and many people may like her conservative and evangelical positions, she is woefully unprepared to be president of the United States. I am suprised that the McCain campaign can still make the argument with a straight face that Obama does not have enough experience. The difference in experience between Obama and Palin is enormous. When the arguments are made that she has foreign policy experience because Alaska is near Russia, or when she cannot come up with any newpaper or news magazine that she read regularly it is not clear to me how she could be president. She is good at verbally attacking and turning other’s attacks back against them, but I am not sure that those are the only skills necessary to be president.
Now I know that she is not running for president, but her candidacy for vice president makes me unable to vote for McCain for two reasons. First, she could become president. Second, I think that choosing her is a big black mark against his judgement.
At the start of the primary season, if I could have chosen who I would have wanted to be the nominees for the major parties I would have said Obama and McCain. Now that the choice is here, I am not nearly as excited as I thought I would be (although to be fair, I probably would have had a lower opinion of the others if they had made it this far). I still have hope (the audacity of hope?) that Obama will be the great leader that I envisioned a year or more ago, but I am less certain. As for McCain, I think he would at least do a better job than President Bush, so that is something.
I guess we will see what happens.
