Monday, October 08, 2012

Voted. Easy choices. Again.

I'll be traveling Nov 6th, so tonight was voting night for me. If you've read this blog at all you can guess that that the top of the ballot was pretty simple. We have a great slate of Democrats from the Presidency to our State Rep and I'd vote No on constitutional amendments even if I thought they were a good idea. Which they aren't.

The bottom half gets tricky - judges, soil and water commissioner and so on. Voting by mail used to have a big advantage -- but now any Minnesotan can see the ballot in advance and vote intelligently. A quick visit to judicial web sites made it easy to vote for the incumbents. County offices were covered by a Minnesota DFL page.

It's traditional in this sort of post to say something about why I voted for Obama/Biden. It's not hard. I can't think of any policy domain where I think Romney would make good choices. He'd be a disaster in international affairs. I think he'd neglect and even actively hurt the non-powerful He's terrible on science, horrible on the environment, and a disaster on climate change.

Meanwhile, Obama's choices make sense to me within the scope of his constraints. I don't agree with all his choices. He's too involved in choosing drone strike targets, his school reform programs are misguided, and his health care reform initiative is far too friendly to corporate solutions. Unfortunately, even in the cases where Obama is weak, Romney would be far worse.

I'm not happy that my voting choices are so easy. America needs a sane alternative to the Democrats. If Romney loses maybe we'll get one. If he wins, we won't.

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