A Return to Sanity

It was another weekend of a dozen or more calls from the Romeny, Obama, Allen, and Kaine campaigns as well as seemingly incessant TV and radio commercials. I cannot wait until this election season is over. After listening to the various pre-recorded messages and actually speaking with a live Obama campaign caller, I wish I could air my own two minute message.


I hate being labeled. I am not a republican or a democrat. I guess that makes me independent by default, but I really don’t like that description either. If I had to fit into a descriptive category, I think I would call myself a pragmatist.

I am interested in results, getting things done, fixing problems. I don’t care which party is in power, I don’t care who gets credit for getting the country on the right track, I just know we need to get there, sooner rather than later, because we are undeniably on a path to financial oblivion.

The great thing about our election process is that we have a range of options and a choice in the direction of the country. I think the choices are as distinct this year as they have been in a while.

Let’s start with the Tea Party right. Here is why I have a hard time embracing their message and why I won’t affix their label to my philosophy. I hear their calls for lower taxes and less intrusive government. So far so good. Let’s spark the economy by keeping capital in the free market and getting overzealous bureaucrats out of our lives. Less government is good. So far I like these folks. Okay, now let’s say that Susan and Jennifer or John and Jake want to get married, legally joined….whatever we want to call it. Wait just a minute! That can’t happen! We want a federal law banning same sex marriage. What? I thought we wanted less obtrusive government and we wanted freedom as granted in the constitution? What about the pursuit of happiness? I can understand and respect someone’s position against gay marriage, but I am not sure that means that the Tea Party gets to tell everyone else what to do. Isn’t that what they say they can’t stand from liberals? Which is it, because to be intellectually honest , righty rights, you can’t have this both ways. Either we want small, less intrusive government or we don’t. We can’t want small freedom producing government some of the time, and big overbearing government mandates when we don’t like what freedom presents. While I support many of the ideas of this group, I can’t accept the inconsistency on this and a host of other issues where the calls for freedom are contradicted by the lens of the Tea Party. I certainly can’t prove this, but if God is Love, then I assume that He loves the gay community just as much as He loves me. If that is true, then why are we spinning our wheels on this issue? I can see why folks get so upset with the Tea Party, they get close to getting things right and then veer off into the ditch on a host of social issues.

When a new president gets elected, whether it is my candidate or not, I wipe the slate clean. I forget all the campaign rhetoric and hyperbole and give him or her (someday I am sure) a chance to prove that they are a leader, that they can get things done, and that they have a vision for our country that will optimize the opportunity for all. When Obama took office, the economy was a mess. The financial markets had collapsed in 2008, the housing market had crashed, and unemployment had spiked to levels not seen in decades. It was a big problem that required insightful direction, executive leadership, and unifying ideas. Right off the bat, in the midst of an economic crisis Obama cashed all of his chips in on health care reform. Really? Healthcare reform? The economic foundation of this nation is crumbling and we have a year-long fight over healthcare reform? Someone should have recommended to Obama that he read “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance” by Lou Gerstner. When Gerstner took the helm at IBM, they were hemorrhaging cash. They were bleeding to death. You know what Gerstner did first? He didn’t overhaul the benefits program to add more costs to the system. He stopped the bleeding, conserved cash and focused on revenue generation. This would have been a better use of the first two years of the Obama administration’s time. So Obama flunked the insightful direction test immediately. I had a great conversation with the Obama campaign when they called. A nice young kid, clearly very committed to his candidate and armed with all the talking points he could remember engaged me in a fun exchange. He asked why I was not supporting Obama. I said that if I boiled it down to one item it was his failure of leadership. The caller tried to bat that back over the net to me stating that congress (really just the house) had stymied the president and made it their sole objective to obstruct his agenda. He stated that not one republican had voted for any of Obama’s key legislative initiatives. He was right, and this is Obama’s biggest failure as a leader. He is the president. The fact that he could not garner a single republican vote for key legislation is a massive failure of leadership. Clinton got republican votes. Reagan, Bush I and Bush II all got opposition party support for key initiatives, but Obama got none. The party out of power is always playing defense. They don’t have the bully pulpit. They are not setting the agenda. Their sole job is to not get steam rolled, to try to stay relevant, to keep a healthy opposition point of view alive. Theirs is a hand of weakness. What did Obama think they would do? It is his job to bring them into the tent, to be the adult in the room, and to extend the olive branch. Obama liked to cite ‘Team of Rivals’ in the early days of his administration. He could have learned a lot from Lincoln, had he bothered to do some homework. After 4 years of war and hundreds of thousands of casualties, Lincoln did not seek revenge on the South. He let them up easy, he was their advocate in an effort reunify the nation. What did Obama do? He called republicans “the enemy”. Last week he said that voting against republicans was the best way to get revenge. Revenge? The president wants to get revenge? On who? I am guessing he probably wants to get revenge against me. This is why I cannot support Barack Obama to lead this nation. He is not a leader he is is a democrat, and a Chicago democrat that. He apparently thinks I am the enemy and he wants to exact revenge against me. That's a shame, I thought we were on the same team, but I guess not.

That leaves me voting for Romney. Is he the perfect candidate? Nope, but the only candidate that would agree 100% with everything I believe is me, and I am not on the ballot. I believe Mitt Romney is a leader. He brings executive experience to the table. He doesn’t need this job, he wants this job. I will hold him as accountable as any other president if he wins. He has a tough job ahead. There is guaranteed good news on the horizon however. After Tuesday, my phone will stop ringing and we can return to sanity.