With the conventions now behind us, election coverage for the next two months will move into overdrive, and probably overkill. From the outset, I thought the President would be re-elected, and nothing about the past two weeks has changed that position.
I grew up a Republican, in the midst of as blue a state as you can find – partly because of my grandmother, partly because I always had the contrarian gene. But about 3.5 years ago, I decided to lose any affiliation, not seeing either party as representative of my evolving views of the world. Socially, I think the Democrats get some of it right, with respect to abortion and gay rights and the notion that no one should die because they can’t afford to see a doctor. On the other hand, they live in a fantasyland with respect to paying for their vision, and do default to more government programs whenever at a loss for how to solve a problem. The Republicans, by contrast, carry a social platform that is cringe-worthy, and in no shape or form stand for the fiscal conservatism that used to define them (and always carried a lot of weight for me). Both sides, in my opinion, have a set of special interests that co-opt them, and both ultimately kowtow to Wall Street. Doug Casey frames it well – there is the evil party and the stupid party.
Which leaves me in a bind. I don’t feel any great compulsion to vote. Even from a greed perspective, I think my investments stand to do well regardless of the winner. My wife asked me the other day who she should vote for, feeling like it would be a choice between bad and worse. There are too many issues to expect to be wholly satisfied, so you must end up prioritizing. For her, that probably means Obama. For me, it probably means sitting this one out.
