I’ve kept my eyes on the 2012 Republican Primaries with some interest, mostly out of the same morbid curiosity that makes you want to stare at a train wreck. I wouldn’t call myself a Republican by any stretch of the word, but I consider myself open enough to the idea of voting Republican if a candidate suits me.
To preface this, I’d call myself moderate. Socially liberal, fiscally conservative. We have a lot of inequalities in our system and problems that need to be fixed (taking care of the poor, the sick, freedom for every race, religion, orientation, etc…), but once we have a solid system in place, I’d like to see the government back off and respect freedom and privacy.
With that in mind, I just find myself saddened that the Republicans can’t put up a decent candidate. Every person who is the least qualified to be President has had their moment in the sun, until the Republican voters realize this person is batcrap crazy, then scramble to find someone who is at least not Romney. He should be the obvious choice, even though I don’t like his policies that much, but somehow the Republicans just can’t stomach the idea of nominating Romney. The entire party has stopped being about things, and instead are all about just making sure Obama isn’t reelected. How is that a useful stance for our country? Republicans go against their OWN IDEAS just because they want Obama to look bad. They want to hold the country hostage, threatening a shutdown, because the Tea Party has boiled down to a huge pile of whiny children who aren’t getting their way. It’s disgusting to see how far to the right the Republicans have run.
Oh, and they keep debating whether or not abortion is OK, when we should really be concerned about…you know…jobs and the economy.
On the Democratic side, we have Obama and…..well…no one’s challenging him to the Democratic nomination. Sure, the incumbent usually WON’T be challenged, but I would argue he really NEEDS a challenger. We supported Obama because he was supposed to change things, point out the problems in the system, and instead we got a lot of the same. A healthcare bill that was more of a sell-out to insurance companies, a President who kowtows to whatever the Republicans want. If anything, we managed to elect a great Republican President. I think the best thing for our country would have been a Democratic challenger. They didn’t have to win, and I’m sure they wouldn’t, but at the very least have someone debate him, on stage, and force the public to consider whether or not Obama has done a good job. Now he’s playing the Populist candidate, when I can’t really expect him to do anything different come January 2013.
I’ve really come to love the stances that Buddy Roemer has taken on the issues. He seems like a candidate that has really put forward a platform of, “The system is wrong, the system isn’t controlled by the people, and nothing else really matters.” As I alluded to earlier, we can have our abortion/health care/gay marriage debates eventually, let’s fix some pretty big issues:
-companies are considered legally people
-campaigns can take untold amounts of anonymous money
-the top wealthiest have more power than others
-Congress is so out of whack with the American public
((if you want to learn more about Roemer, check out his website here: http://www.buddyroemer.com/)
There’s a huge disconnect between Washington and Main Street, but we’re really between a rock and a hard place. Candidates who want to stand up for regular Americans (and really mean it) are given zero air time, while a cavalcade of juggling clowns marches out and tells us the real problems are the other political clowns. Unless a good candidate manages to end up on the ticket as a third party, I will most likely vote for Obama mostly because I don’t like the other options. How sad is that? We vote based on the lesser of two evils, rather than for the greater good of our country. We really need some kind of shift in the public to get good, quality candidates running for office. I guess the good people are too scared to run, so we end up with a pool dumber than a sack of doorknobs instead.
Welcome to America. Land of the special interests, home of the silent citizens.
