The Quiet Road

I just posted this to an internet forum I occasionally use. It’s a classic hastily-scrawled five minute post, so don’t treat it like some kind of reasoned political treatise. All the same, it needs saying…

Before the Vice-Presidential announcements were made I was not willing to call on Americans to vote for Barack Obama. For lots of reasons, which I don’t need to go into, I didn’t think it would be a good idea to vote for him. That was not an endorsement of McCain of course. I just don’t believe in voting for the lesser of two evils unless there’s a massive gap between them.

Certainly Obama’s performance in the debate — endorsing biofuels and name-checking Henry “war criminal” Kissinger for any reason other than to demand he should be handed over to The Hague for trial — made me very uneasy. I see in Obama no more than a continuation of the corporate empire.

And in McCain I see roughly the same thing. He’s not a neocon like Bush, and the genuine differences between Obama and McCain have more to do with persona than politics. Yes Obama is the lesser of those two evils, but not by much. In those circumstances I’ve always believed in voting for a radical outsider even if they have no realistic chance of winning. Casting a vote shouldn’t be like placing a bet on a horse-race, it should be about stating one’s personal beliefs and nominating someone to speak in your stead. That it almost never works out that way is not a reason (in my idealistic eyes) to allow yourself to get tainted by a corrupt system.

HOWEVER, during the Bush Vs Kerry campaign, I suggested that a Kerry vote would be the best idea. Because although Kerry was indeed just another corporate puppet, he was up against the neoconservative tendency which needed to be opposed.

I saw McCain as being evidence that the Republican Party had ditched that ultra-right bible-thumping stance and returned to being merely the right-of-centre corporate party. Because whatever else you may say about him (and there’s lots to say) McCain isn’t in Dubya’s born-again camp.

But the more I see of Palin, the more I realise that electing McCain will put America within a statistically likely heart-attack of having an even dumber, even more vindictive and virulent religious neocon as president. That woman is incredibly dangerous and McCain is in his 70s. Not a good combination.

So don’t vote Obama because you think he’ll bring hope and change and apple-pie back to the American dream. He won’t.

But do vote Obama to make sure Palin never gets anywhere near the reins of power. She’s a menace and needs to be opposed.