Voting Time

 For a good while this year I thought that Trump, bad as he was, should be reelected as the lesser evil. I have changed my mind for several reasons and now think the country will be better off with Trump gone.  (I still think he was less bad four years ago than Hillary Clinton.) The main reason is Trump himself.  He has been an arrogant, ignorant,  bullying, deeply un-presidential, bombastic,  jackass all along.  People hoped he would learn to behave decently  over  time. That has not happened, and he has continued to show he lacks the level of character, temperament, dignity, and knowledge minimally required for his office.  Now at a  time when political advisors surely are telling  to clean up his act and behave more nearly as an American president should if he wants to be reelected, he is getting worse.  He has refused to commit to an peaceful transition if he loses the election, tweeted that Osama is still alive, and President Obama had members of Seal Team Six murdered to cover that fact up, joked publicly about wanting a third or fourth term, told people who might want to dispute the results of the election in the streets to stand by, and at least sort of endorsed QAnon’s malicious nonsense.  It enough to make one wonder about the firmness of his grip on reality.

His proponents argue that one should overlook his character and personality because of his policies and actions. That can be reasonable  in judging among the usually sorry lot of politicians, but it goes only so far and for me not far enough to excuse Trump. Besides the policies and actions have not been consistently good.  Some  have been beneficial – lowering taxes, reducing or eliminating some harmful regulations, defeating ISIS, appointing better judges than Hillary would have, and favoring school choice, among others.  But he has been wrong on spending and deficits, wrong on international trade, wrong on NATO, wrong on freedom of the press, wrong on the value of immigrants, and troubling wrong in his disdain for limits on presidential power and his penchant for ruling by executive order and decree. To put it mildly, he is no principled friend of limited government. He has shown little evidence of principles of any sort, and there is no reason to believe his good actions in a second term would have to outweigh his bad.

Also the Democrats look less threatening than they did at the start of the year. The candidates of the  hard, authoritarian left did not win the party’s  nomination.  This does not mean that electing Biden will be a good thing apart from getting rid of Trump.  Biden is a dishonest, wrongheaded, big government Democrat who will do some bad and unpleasant things if he can, but he is not an America hating leftist.  He appears to have lost a step or two mentally but does not seem far enough gone that he will be the left’s puppet or that  Harris will  remove him using the 25^th Amendment.  The Dems are due for a turn in the White House soon anyway. It might make sense strategically for them to have it now when the Republican alternative is so poor,  the Democrat candidate is a likely one termer, and whoever wins in November probably will be bogged down for a year or two dealing with the epidemic and its consequences.  

I voted early, and I voted for Jo Jorgensen. 

Clinton and Her Akin

A few years ago Democrats in Missouri were facing a dilemma. An election for a seat in the U.S. senate was coming up, and their candidate was an unusually unpleasant and unpopular woman who seemed likely to lose.  According to reports at the time, the Democrats hit on the strategy of promoting a particularly unacceptable Republican candidate in the Republican primary – a yahoo named Todd Akin who did become the nominee and  then  lost in the general election in a landslide.  Some analysts think Akin may have been a measurable drag on Mitt  Romney’s campaign  for president.  Of course whether or not the Democrats conspired to help Akin get nominated, the main fault was with Republican voters. They had the  opportunity to select someone better than Akin and failed to do so.

Now in 2016 one can wonder if  the strategy has been applied again, this time in the race for the White House.  The Democrats in 2016 were stuck with Hillary Clinton once Biden declined to run.  She was and is an extremely unpopular, mistrusted, and generally disliked politician with numerous vulnerabilities and several scandals or worse hanging over her head who would  likely  lose to a strong Republican candidate.  Instead she has been handed her own Todd Akin.

 There were fifteen other candidates besides Donald Trump running for president in the  Republican party.  Every one of them was more qualified to be president than Trump. The man’s candidacy was absurd on the face of it.  Yet the almost always pro-Democrat people in the traditional media went easy on Trump and  gave  him far more publicity than any two or three of the others combined before he won the nomination.  After he did so, the same media people quickly changed tones and began emphasizing his  many mistakes and disqualifying faults.  So some might suggest  that there may have been a plan at work here.

Regardless, it appears that what once looked like a big opportunity for the Republicans has been reduced to a scramble to hold the senate and save vulnerable members in the house  and in  state governments while Hillary Clinton becomes the next president.  This could change. There is so much wrong with her, after all, but that is how it looks now.  If things do end that way, it mainly will be  the Republicans’ own  fault – with blame going to  the fratricidal Bush bunch, the weak and ineffective leaders of both houses of congress, the officials of the party,  and especially the voters who  thoughtlessly supported a blustering, ignorant demagogue who seemed  to share their anger but had little or nothing else to recommend him.   

I now plan to vote for Gary Johnson.  I do not agree with all of his policies, but his are  far superior to those of  Trump and Clinton. He favors individual rights, tolerance, freer trade and markets,  acceptance of immigrants, and lower government spending and opposes recent needless wars, higher taxation, trying to reshape the Middle East,  increasing stifling regulation, mass deportations,  and government spying on citizens.  Both he and his running mate are former governors with successful experience in the administration of government.  Also, unlike either Clinton or Trump, he seems to be a decent human being.   I know he cannot win, and so in some ways a vote for him would be wasted, but I cannot see voting for either of the other two.

It's not easy to decide which of  them is worse.  I think it’s Hillary Clinton, but  I see merit in the  counterarguments.  The question to ponder now is what sort of contingency planning  people need to make  to weather four years of either of them.  That will take some thought.