On what everyone used to think was the big issue of the election, Iraq, Obama was never impressive. He’s courted the anti-war vote and talked withdrawal, but also says he wants to keep troops there to “fight terrorism.” On an issue that’s personally important to me, the progressive bankruptcy of the U.S. government, Obama has a disastrous combination: he both feels the need to portray himself as a tax cutter and regularly talks of nice-sounding spending proposals as if they were necessities. He talks about having the government stop doing favors for big corporations, a smart proposal that makes me sympathize with the smart liberals who’ve endorsed him, but some of his spending proposals could turn into more of that. Worse, Obama doesn’t even seem to like the idea of big corporations when they stand on their own, free of government assistance. When he applies his anti-free market rhetoric to foreign affairs, the result often borders on xenophobic.
Character-wise, we have the grand joke of his supporters complaining (rightly, in my view) about Palin’s inexperience, but passing over Obama’s own relative inexperience. While, pace Palin, there’s nothing wrong with a presidential candidate thinking he’s especially qualified for the job, Obama’s self-comparison to everyone from the Founding Fathers to civil rights leaders suggests a wildly distorted self-concept. He’s also a little too good at flattering his followers and selling his self-image: I still maintain there are some things we don’t want our leaders to be good at.
In toto, I’m convinced that Obama not only isn’t the best the democrats could do, he’s not even close to the best the democrats could do. I say this without denying for a second that McCain is a much worse candidate, at least when you view him in a vacuum. A McCain presidency would be a disaster, but remember: it would be a disaster contained by a hostile Congress and hostile press. Obama would face no such constraints. In the end, I’ll say it’s a toss-up which election result would be better for the country. We’ll see what happens with Obama as president–the people who expect him to govern from the center, rather than use a friendly Congress to do whatever he wants, may turn out to be right in the end. The only thing I’m confident of is that it will help us get over racism a little, not because Obama supporters are transcending race the way they think they are, but because an Obama presidency will mean that the next time a black man makes a serious run on the presidency, it won’t be interesting for that reason alone.
For these reasons, I’m following John Loftus and Lester Hunt in voting third-party. This isn’t mainly because of my thinking that it’s a toss up what reult we’d be better off with. Mainly, I’m hoping that if enough people vote for neither party, it would provide motivation to give us better candidates next time around.
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