For whatever it’s worth: I’m voting for Libertarian candidate for President, Michael Badnarik, today.
This isn’t just a vote of conscience; yesterday, the Massachusetts Secretary of State Francis Galvin predicted that the Libertarian party (as well as the Greens) will lose its status as an official political party in Massachusetts. We need 3% of the votes cast to maintain this status, without which candidates will have a harder time being listed on ballots in the future.
While this may not be significant at the national level, it would certainly be a loss at the state and local level. For example, a ballot initiative sponsored by the Libertarian party a couple of years ago almost received enough votes to do away with the Massachusetts state income tax.
Meanwhile, over the last 24 hours, I’ve received a flood of e-mails about so-called voter suppression by the Republicans.
I have no doubt that there are hundreds of Lee Atwater-type dirty tricks being pulled by partisan officials in the swing states.
Still, one looks with dismay at the type of people Democrats are most concerned about:
– people who don’t know where to vote because they haven’t bothered to figure it out;
– former felons, most of whom presumably have been in jail because they’ve hurt someone else;
– people who didn’t re-register to vote after they moved;
– people who need hand-holding to fill out a ballot.
I’m sorry, but this is lousy PR for the Dems, who seem to be investing a lot of last-minute energy into exactly the kind of constituency that makes the soccer/security Moms and Dads wince.
Versus the vision of clean-cut, All-American sports hero Curt Schilling of Kerry’s hometown Boston Red Sox, limping his way to the podium to endorse George Bush.
Lookit, I won’t pretend to know what it’s like to be a racial minority in the United States. No doubt, I’ve received a lot of benefits by being white, benefits that good people of color deserved as much or more than I.
Still, there is something that makes my skin crawl about the last-minute raising of “progressive” hackles about “protecting” the voting rights of the lazy and the stupid – regardless of their racial or ethnic background.
To me, it has the nasty odor of welfare stateism and – paired with the endless entreaties to harass swing state residents by phone – carpetbagger-ism.
I was going to go to NH today to help out the anti-Bushes. Luckily, my car kept me honest by blowing out its muffler, and the earliest appointment I could get at the shop was 9:30 this morning.
That, and a headcold, mean I’ll be staying on Cape today, with plans to hold a sign for my State rep, a Conservative Republican.
And regardless of what happens today and over the next two weeks, let’s hope for a REAL match-up in 2008: say, McCain versus Gephardt.
Well, you can’t fault me for dreaming.