Kevin Tracy

From the Desk of

Kevin Tracy

2010-01-26

Reflecting On My Vote For Barack Obama

My apologies, this is going to be a record breaking post in length and I'm making it boring by not using any pictures. Deal with it.

It's no secret that I voted for President Barack Obama against my party's lousy McCain-Palin ticket back in November of 2008. It's 2010 now and I thought it would be fun to look back at my decision and share with you my analysis of what has transpired in relation to my expectations when I placed my vote against my political party. But first, a look back.

THE CONTEXT:

On Election Day in 2006, Republicans suffered horrific losses across the country. It was perhaps the worst Election Day in Republican Party history. I was in South Bend with the St. Joseph County Republican Party for their ironically named "Victory Party" as the results came in. Then-Lt. Governor Michael Steele had just lost a close election in Maryland and the donated televisions (all tuned to Fox News) were showing loss, after loss, after loss, after loss. In Indiana's 2nd Congressional District, which covers South Bend and the rest of North-Central Indiana, then-Congressman Chris Chocola (who won the seat in 2002 after Gerrymandering took it from Mike Pence) lost his seat to Joe Donnelly. I had seen Chocola in Spring of 2004 during a campaign rally with President Bush and I had been very impressed with his character and politics. Needless to say, a lot of people were very upset with Chocola lost that night. He gave a very gracious concession speech and just about everyone lined up to shake his hand and wish him well. Not being from the district, I figured I should probably wait towards the end of the line. I was shocked when he got there... he was anxious to get the heck out of the room. Yeah, I towered over him, but that's not what it was... his family was absolutely devastated, some of his staff was in tears, and the sooner he could get this over with, the quicker the healing process for them could begin.

I quickly congratulated him on a great campaign (it was darn near perfect except the end) and let him get through with the line before disappearing for the night.

A lot of my friends will tell you that I never let politics become personal. I can get along with a committed member of the Communist Party of the United States just as well as I can get along with my Republican friends. However, after seeing the events of the nights transpire as Fox News reported on polls closing across the country with Republicans losing seat after seat, office after office, for the first time... politics got personal. I was going to blame somebody for this disaster and one person and one person alone kept coming to mind.

John McCain.

John McCain had completely and utterly thrown conservative values under the bus in 2005 and 2006 with his never-ceasing campaign for amnesty in the US Senate. Sometime before the election, Sean Hannity, in all his majestic idiocy, invited McCain onto his radio program where McCain declared his program to give illegal aliens citizenship wasn't amnesty and Hannity believed his lying ass enough to give him a free pass for a few months. (This is when I first began calling Sean Hannity an idiot, if you were wondering)

Anyway, exit polls showed that voters overwhelmingly rejected the Iraq War and that was cited as the reason for the Republican Party's downfall that year and Republicans never rejected that idea. In fact, it was so overwhelming that I had a hard time believing it. Indeed, the Iraq War was a catapult used by Democrats in the 2006 campaign season and it got large numbers of left-leaning moderates and unusually large numbers of committed Democrats to the polls. The problem I have with this is that voter turnout wasn't really any higher than your average mid-term election (which Republicans usually do pretty well in). What does this mean? To put it simply, Democrats turned out to vote and Republicans didn't. In 2005 and 2006, the Republican Party with President George W. Bush under the helm, spent virtually all of its time trying to approve amnesty for illegal aliens. It went on for so long that conservatives simply gave up on the Republican Party because they literally no longer cared to represent their interests.

As we stood in morbid silence in South Bend that night, I said to myself, "I will NEVER support John McCain for President."

THE JUSTIFICATION IN 2008:

My disdain for John McCain had managed to find its way onto a back burner in 2007 when his campaign was proving to be an utter-disaster. His place was filled by Mitt Romney for the barrage of lies he peddled about his time as Governor of Massachusetts and the cheap shots he was taking at my candidate. My ideal situation in 2008 was that John McCain would knock off Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee would knock off John McCain. However, Fred Thompson waited much longer than I expected before he dropped out and he made certain that he would take out Huckabee in the process. John McCain took out Mitt Romney pretty easily, but when it came time for Huckabee to take out John McCain in South Carolina, Thompson scared just enough people away from Huckabee to secure an unusual southern victory for McCain. Huckabee wouldn't be able to take out John McCain, after all.

When Huckabee conceded after an ill-advised appearance on SNL before the Texas and Ohio primaries, I was in a weird position. John McCain, the man I vowed never to support, was now my party's candidate. I decided I needed to re-evaluate the situation.

Barack Obama was as liberal as a politician as anyone could have possibly imagined or feared. He would have raised taxes, supported amnesty, battled phantom global warming, bailed out incompetent and irresponsibly financial companies and industries, and found new ways to limit our freedom of speech. But here's the thing... John McCain in the Senate supported amnesty, anti-global warming legislation, corporate welfare, and limits to our freedom of speech. Although it wasn't as bad as Obama on abortion, he had openly supported it as a "necessity" in the past." In truth, John McCain really wasn't that much better on domestic issues than Barack Obama. In hind-sight, most everyone is willing to agree with that statement today. When I made it a year and a half ago, just about everyone was ready to do to me what the British did to William Wallace at the end of Braveheart.

The greatest contrast between the two was on Network Neutrality and matters of Foreign Policy.

I'm in favor of network neutrality, Barack Obama is in favor of network neutrality, Mike Huckabee was in favor of network neutrality, John McCain got millions of dollars of donations from the telecom industry and was one of the key people fighting network neutrality. Point for Obama.

On matters of foreign policy, I tend to tick just about everyone off. I still support the decision to go to War in Iraq, I disagree with how the war was justified (claiming WMDs was a mistake) and how the war was handled politically (de-Baathification was a mistake). However, we should have every right to launch a preemptive war against a country that is violating treaties, killing innocent civilians, and shooting at US aircraft. Our ability to wage preemptive war is an important part of keeping dictatorships in the world wary of messing with the international interests of the United States of America.

HOWEVER, using the ability to wage a preemptive war without soundly justifying the war is what leads to good people mistaking our country as the friendly big kid on the playground to the bully and tyrant of the playground. Seriously, think of it as a playground. If there's a big kid who hangs around with some smaller kids and who has, on occasion, beat up a bully who tried to pick on him or his smaller friends... people generally like that kid for knowing when it's okay to get in a fight. On the other hand, if that bigger kid were to just walk over to a bully one day and begin beating the snot out of him in the sand box without explaining to anybody why he did it, odds are people will think the big kid is uncontrollable and a nuisance (someone who the smaller kids can't trust), and thus making the bully the victim.

I was 5'5" in 3rd Grade, so I speak from experience when I say Teddy Roosevelt's "Speak Quietly and Carry a Big Stick" police is quite functional and works amazingly well.

Well, President Bush was a God-awful communicator to begin with. Mixed with his "You're either with us or against us" policy, it should have come as no surprise that America's image was now that of the uncontrollable bully on the international stage rather than the protector of the smaller, weaker nations. The world already knew we were capable of waging a preemptive war and they have seen clearly (perhaps too clearly) the scope of the capabilities of the US Military. The next years needed to be spent convincing the people of the world that we honestly do know how to exert self control.

John McCain was running the around the country calling democratically elected world leaders "dictators" while defending a country with an incompetent leader who resorted to the murder its own citizens with artillery and other weapons sold to them by the United States. Barack Obama, meanwhile, took time off the campaign trail to visit US Troops and tell the world that he envisioned a more prosperous, cooperative future without ever directly insulting President Bush (a tough act for a Democrat). I knew Obama wouldn't have the nerve to pull troops out of Iraq or Afghanistan prematurely, so there was no fear of major damage to US Foreign Policy. In particular, I was worried about the track US-Russo relations were going down and John McCain would have added fuel to that fire (no pun intended). Point to Obama.

I still wasn't comfortable voting for Obama, but Bob Barr was running a joke of a campaign using Ron Paul's incompetent staff while he was too arrogant to kiss Ron Paul's bottom for an endorsement. He was too proud to be a Libertarian that he wanted nothing from a libertarian with an (R) after his name. He quickly proved that he wasn't a person I wanted to vote for.

So given the democratic option between Barack Obama and John McCain, it made more sense to vote for Barack Obama.

FORESEEN FALLOUT:

I knew this was going to be used against me for years to come, but I had my reasons.

An important part of my decision was the "long-term health of the Republican Party and the country." I stated time and again that if John McCain were elected, the horribly low conservative voter turnout that killed us in 2006 and was looking to hurt us again in 2008 was going to continue until at least 2014 and possibly to 2018 if he were re-elected. Simply put, the United States of America could NOT tolerate a decade of moderate, media-whore leadership in the White House while Democrats continued to expand on their majorities in Congress. In addition to the legislative and Constitutional damage that could do, we'd lose virtually every case in the Supreme Court for 20 or more years.

I believe it's a lot easier for conservatives to defeat an incumbent liberal Democrat in a General Election than an incumbent liberal Republican in a primary. Sometimes, you have to lose a battle to win the war.

If Obama were elected, I knew early on that his liberal policies in office mixed with the over-aggressive tendencies of Nancy Pelosi would slap a lot of grassroots conservatives who had become apathetic in 2006 in the face, wake them up, and get them to the polls in 2010 and, ideally, 2012 if we get the right candidate. Ideally, I had hoped this would put us in position to win back the Congress and keep Obama in check. I didn't think the Democrats would be able to do that much damage in just two years.

WHERE I WAS RIGHT AND WRONG:

Most importantly, foreign policy. I was right when I said I expected Barack Obama to begin repairing our image in the world. In fact, he's been so successful that President Medvedev is actually allowing US Troops to travel on Russian soil in order to reach Central Asia (you know, where Afghanistan is?). I was also pleasantly surprised to see Obama announce he was going to keep troops in Afghanistan and Iraq for at least a couple more years and that he was going to increase troop levels in Afghanistan in order to speed up the training of the Afghan National Guard and police forces. I was disappointed that these commitments came with a specific timetable that was released to the public (I don't mind private timetables so much). As a pleasant surprise, Obama has also agreed to expand the size of the US Army and Marine Corps, rebuking the failed Rumsfeld strategy of the "smaller, lighter footprint." In other words, "Speak kindly and carry a big stick."

Regarding network neutrality, I know that's a hotly debated issue - especially for those readers who share the same IP address and took money from the now defunct issue advocacy group that wanted to censor blogs like mine that didn't pay internet service providers (like Comcast) thousands of dollars in order to give people fair access to my website. However, since it was our tax dollars that paid for the lines that make the internet, I like to think that there's a responsibility these ISPs have to the people to allow them to post content to the web without being extorted by every internet company on the face of the planet to give everyone access. Although network neutrality legislation has taken a backseat to Healthcare Reform, I'm still confident it can get passed before Democrats get kicked out of office and telecoms begin funneling money to John McCain to destroy the potential of the internet.

Regarding the Congress, I was absolutely wrong. I did not, under any circumstances, expect the Republican Party to fall to 40 votes in the Senate, giving the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority. I thought we would be around 42, but we lost Minnesota to a crackpot comedian and Elizabeth Dole lost in North Carolina, which I honestly didn't expect. That allowed for the Democrat-controlled US Senate to be a LOT more dangerous than I ever would have predicted. That's why Socialized Healthcare has gotten so frighteningly close to passing. Thankfully, Senator Scott Brown from Massachusetts will provide the GOP with the ability to filibuster assuming Senators McCain and Collins don't throw us under the bus again.

I was also wrong about the Republican Party learning its lesson. The RNC nearly elected a racist to be their new chairman and instead they nominated an incompetent moderate who has spent more time attacking Rush Limbaugh and Republican Congressmen than he has the Democrats (not to mention the financial disaster the RNC is steamrolling towards at record speed). Blackwell and Saltsman were by far the best candidates for the job. Meanwhile, the NRSC has been endorsing liberal Republicans more than a year before their primaries for no reason other than the money they've donated in the past. We have Senator Cornyn of Texas to thank for the ongoing corruption there.

As a result of this, I no longer think we'll be able to win back the Senate completely. In fact, our brave leader in the RNC says that we won't be able to win back either the House or the Senate and that Republicans aren't ready to lead, anyway. Well, I disagree. I think we'll win back the House of Representatives. The damage in the US Senate is too great to overcome in just one election cycle, however. Still, controlling one House of Congress will work almost as well as controlling both Houses. Hopefully no Supreme Court Justices will retire or have any unfortunate accidents between now and 2012.

Where the Republican Party has fallen short, however, grassroots conservatives have picked up the slack. I was right when I predicted that the Obama agenda would be a slap in the face to conservatives who had turned apathetic in 2006 and, Holy Cow, have they ever responded. The TEA Party movement has been exceptional across most of the country. I certainly don't agree with everything they've done, but for a grassroots movement, it's nothing shy of incredible. Better than I could have ever expected when I voted for Obama in November of 2008.

SCORECARD:

So was it a net positive or net negative decision for me to support Barack Obama in 2008 based on my predictions? I get one point if I was right, one point knocked off if I was wrong or if I predicted it would be bad, and no points at all if it's too soon to tell or if my prediction was wrong but the end result will be the same.

+1 Renewed sense of energy in the grassroots
-1 National GOP Will Give a Crap About Grassroots Conservatives
-1 Two Years of Trying to Block a Far-Left Agenda
+0 GOP Winning Back the Congress in 2010
+0 42 Senators Would Provide Filibuster Option to Stop Socialized Healthcare
+1 US Will Speak Softly
+1 US Will Still Carry a Big Stick
+1 Improvement in US-Russo Relations
+1 Improvement in World Image
- 1People Will Use This Against Me
+0 Network Neutrality Will Be Protected
+1 Get Sweet Revenge on John McCain for 2006