He wants to finally get rid of the horrible legal 'innovation' of treating corporations as people. There is a long list of things that I agree with Ralph Nader on. Given his health that alone would be enough to ensure I won't vote for him. And that was before he made the decision to put a corruption riddled governor of a welfare state as his running mate. John McCain/Sarah Palinįrom abortion to Iraq to embracing the most extreme wing of the Christian right there is simply no possible way I could vote for John McCain. We need real change, real reform and I don't believe Obama will provide even the shadow of reform. But even there the very fact that the Congress has ceded some much of its power that the Supreme Court has become a defacto legislature demonstrates just how damaged our political system is.
In the end I don't think there will be any substantive difference between a McCain or Obama presidency other than in the crucial area of Supreme Court justices. Obama leads me to believe that he is just another political operator who will be mindlessly driven by the polls and so in the end will be just as much a tool of the existing power structure as McCain. This was a massive failure of leadership. Instead he became a knee jerk apologist for the massive bail out without bothering to give any decent explanations for why it was necessary and instead just larding it with more pork to make sure it went down Congress's gullet. Here was a chance for Obama to really show leadership. Obama's attempts to invoke national security as a basis for voting for this bill only further demonstrated how either calculating or clueless (I don't claim to know which) he is.īut finally there is the mortgage disaster and the damage this has done to our economy. And what makes it all worse is that Obama himself had said that immunity was such a big deal that he was willing to filibuster attempts to provide it. I am convinced that Obama knew when he voted to support the bill that he was approving immunity and the amendment was nothing more than political theater. Voting positions in the Senate are no secret and lopsided votes like this one are easily predictable. Obama spoke in support of the FISA bill but then made what I feel was a futile political gesture by voting for an amendment to the FISA bill that would remove the immunity. Then, just to prove that the law really is meaningless, the FISA "reform" bill put to Congress gave teleco's retroactive immunity for their illegal actions. The government broke the law and the telcos helped them do it by illegally wiretapping American's phones. Next up on my list was the telecom immunity fiasco.
Obama has repeatedly come out publicly in support of government financing for campaigns (something I'm not a big fan of, but that's a separate issue), to have him then reject that funding and come up with less than reasonable excuses is, in my opinion, at best a failure of leadership and at worst a failure of character. His excuses for doing so were less than convincing. My first disappointment with Obama was when he opted out of federal campaign financing.
Rather it is his numerous failures to show strength of character and leadership during the time he has been campaigning. It's not just his lack of anything that I would think of as being substantive enough, especially in the way of executive experience, to justify him running for president. By rights I should be a reflexive Obama voter but to be blunt I just don't believe that Barack Obama will make a good president. The question of who to vote for is tearing me apart. I am confident that neither Obama nor McCain will make any substantive changes to what ails this country so I feel duty bound to vote for someone who I think will make a real difference. My response to these accusations is that my vote is about indicating where I want this country to go and I don't want it to go to the same corporate owned, poll driven, pork barrel politics we have had to date. Either they said I was throwing away my vote or they said that I was helping McCain to win.
Nader have generally had one of two reactions. Those I have told my intention to vote for Mr.