Four years ago I could not fathom voting for any ticket containing Governor Sarah Palin, and for the below reasons, I'll likely vote Democratic once again. I don't relish it. In short, the GOP of today has managed to convince the American people that what they see... isn't really what they see... and I can't get past it. They've succeeded remarkably well in:
1) Painting a president who bailed out and saved the American auto and banking industries as anti-business, while openly pillorying him for doing it.
2) Dismissing 47% of Americans as lazy and non-taxpaying when a sizable chunk of that very group actually comprises the conservative base and will, bewilderingly, be voting GOP this fall.
3) Professing to be deficit and spending hawks while having directly helped to create most of the deficits we now face through two wars, tax cuts, and healthcare spending. All unfunded, however justified.
4) Persuading people they're actually worse off now than when the economy was in unrestrained free-fall, credit markets were completely frozen, stocks were half their current value heading downward, home values were collapsing, and we were shedding millions of jobs each month. Few of us seem to remember these events.
5) Establishing the conventional wisdom that while we've been relentlessly cutting taxes, reducing personal and public savings, and deregulating for the past 30 years, that if we just double down on those same policies, a complete turnaround of our economic situation will suddenly spring into being, and the debt to be paid for the excesses of those decades will simply vanish in the span of an election cycle.
6) Construing the GOP as the party of the family, while continually fighting the rights of a minority of loving couples to establish community-building, tax-paying households and families.
7) Presenting the right as champion of children, education, and technological progress, while proclaiming evolution a theory "from the fiery pits of hell", and telling Americans it's "snobbish" for the president to want everyone to have a chance to go to college... and (ironically) accusing the Democrats of class warfare.
8) Convincing Americans that the president is a Kenyan Marxist Muslim Fascist (still trying to wrap my head around this one) who secretly hates America, and that we are only an hour away from jack-booted federally-imposed marshal law. Seriously. There's enough of this travelling around the internet with the help of otherwise level-headed people I know, love, and respect as to beggar belief. I'm not seeing this same level of vitriol from my friends over on the left.
9) Successfully substituting faith & emotions for details and policies. The very campaign slogan of "Believe in America", among too many other statements, slogans, Fox News pieces, and emailed stories and pictures to count, perpetuates the notion that if you don't vote GOP, then you don't believe in America, you hate Jesus, eschew apple pie, and would just as soon sit on your ass and take a government handout. No matter how I choose to vote, I find that patently false, mean-spirited, short-sighted, and divisive.
10) Obscuring the fact that unfunded liabilities - healthcare spending to be precise - is our number one issue and driver of public debt. All of the discussions of Big Bird and eliminating cabinet agencies are minuscule rounding errors on our budget and hardly merit discussion given the enormity and immediacy of this real Medicaid problem. Bringing healthcare under control must be our number one priority - we cannot simply ignore it. As Governor Romney rightly said, "We don't just let people sit in their apartment and have a heart attack and die; we send an ambulance and bring them to the emergency room and give them care regardless of their ability to pay." So, we do in fact have socialized medicine, whether we want to call it that or not, and as long as healthcare spending remains on its present course without management, allowing patients to spiral downward outside the system (creating uncontrolled risk), we will plunge further into debt.
I recognize that this list above is focused on complaints, not solutions - but that's another topic deserving its own space. To be clear, I am far less concerned about Governor Romney becoming president than I am about the shrill extremists that will unfortunately and invariably follow with him. He's an intelligent, good man who would very likely seek to lead us on a prudent course. The GOP as a party, however, has over the last 20 years or so become increasingly beset by fundamentalist, right-wing fringe elements with whom neither reason nor compromise can be achieved, and they wear their obstructionist badge proudly. How can a government run by such people function effectively? All one need do is look at the U.S. House of Representatives today; it is not operating as our founders envisioned, nor is it what created the American prosperity of the twentieth century. By contrast, the real Romney (his record tells us) is much more moderate and pragmatic than he and his campaign staff would have us believe... just as Obama's centrist policies and actions have shown him to be as well, seemingly against all popular recognition. My faith in the American people's ability to grasp a necessary degree of nuance or complexity of issue and argument - both of which color and shape the real world - is greatly shaken by this race.
