Why I voted for Obama

Why I voted for Obama... okay, it was easy to vote for Obama since we agree on most things and I have never voted for a Republican in my life. (Except tactical voting for weak candidates in pug primaries. No party registration in my state so all are free to interfere in the other side's business.)

So let me re-phrase that... Why I would have voted for Obama even if he were pro-censorship or anti-choice or any of my other deal-breakers...

John McCain ran on the destruction of the United States economy, and the global economy.

John McCain ran explicitly on Federal budgetary austerity as the solution to a collapsing global economy.

John McCain was promising a course that would have driven the US and world economy into protracted depression, guaranteed 15% or 20% unemployment for a decade, caused massive federal deficits forever and probably killed twenty or fifty or a hundred million people around the world.

That is why I consider a McCain vote in 2008 to have been on the same level of nihilistic malice as a vote for Bush in 2004.

So I do not think it cute or clever for President Obama to be talking about fiscal austerity. And voicing concern that the deficit--of all things!--is what might threaten another economic leg-down is demented. (Doing so on FOX, no less. Talk about pandering. Yes, FOX viewers believe that shit. But pandering on that point is no more responsible than going on FOX to say Iraq's WMD were moved to Syria, which FOX viewers also believe.)

Obama cannot believe this stuff. He cannot be that stupid. He is a very smart man and he has beaucoup access to good information. So we have to assume any deficit-hawk posing is just politics.

But it isn't even good politics! It encourages an environment where Obama cannot do the things he needs to do to actually help people, which is what really gets votes in the final analysis.

It makes about as much sense as would stating a nuanced pandering view you have reservations about evolution. The people who vote on anti-evolution would never support Obama. The passionate pro-evolution voters would puke and walk away. And the remaining vast majority of the country doesn't care.

The futile search for tea-bagger love is about as useful as all the other bipartisan trappings that have worked so well. Fiscal austerity isn't a fuzzy idea. It is a recipe for disaster and grid-lock and Republican victories.

Don't pander to the stupidest, most destructive themes in contemporary politics. Change minds and do what works best. And barring that, just do what works best.

They have been waging class warfare on the working class through successive Republican and Democratic Administrations alike, and it is time for the working class to strike back!

The easiest way to get Sarah Palin in the white house is to fall for the deficit-concern trap.

If new federal spending actually helps real people in a timely manner then people will be happy.

You have ~30 years of "government is the problem" brainwashing (and republican self fulfilling prophecy) down there. It has become the conventional wisdom. I don't think Obama has any choice but to pander to counter the "radical" meme republicans use against him.

That is the thing I think most of the further left here fail to realize. If Obama was "bold" or "more forceful", Republicans would turn it against him and Dems would lose the middle ushering in another round of Republican rule. Only after Obama prooves himself, and to some extent that government isn't always bad, will he have the room to be more bold.

In the meantime Obama has to reassure the middle and hopefully the dems will play some offense. The republicans are pushing the radical meme hard and getting some traction but if it isn't followed up by any radical Obama action it will not be sustainable.

Invoking "reality" is becoming a serious problem here since that political "reality" that is a constant crutch for terrible path-of-least-resistance politics is generally an antiquated conventional wisdom that was never real in the first place.

Real reality is about real people casting real votes and that's something I know about.

I am not merely saying that Obama needs to do x, y and z because it is moral and virtuous.

I am saying that pandering to the deficit hysterics is practical political suicide. (The fact that it also happens to be immoral and ruinous on a policy level is just the bow on the package.)

They will not vote for you.

They will prevent you from doing things that would cause other people to vote for you.


That is reality.