When George W. Bush won the presidential election in 2000 and then again in 2004, I swore I would do everything in my power to make sure the Democrats won in 2008 and was pretty ecstatic when Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008. I told myself that I would just take the next four years off- from worrying about the direction of my country-with Obama in office.
To be frank, the older I get the more-moderate- or conservative I get. I went to Oberlin, a very liberal school, but pretty much right after college, I got disillusioned with the far left. In the Fall of 2000, I interned for a liberal political magazine based in New York City, which championed the battle of Gore v. W. Bush as Tweedle-Deed, vs. Tweedle-Dum, and told voters in non-battleground states to vote for Nader. I even went to a Nader rally in New York with my press pass.
As an environmentalist, I never saw Gore as Tweedle-Deed, to Bush’s Tweedle-Dum, and when Gore lost Florida and the 2000 Election to the butterfly ballot, a poor ballot design or Florida seniors having a senior moment by less than 2000 votes with Nader receiving over 2000 votes in Florida, I became a political pragmatist overnight and abandoned a magazine that gave me my first internship.
I wasn’t for the Occupy Movement. Especially Occupy Oakland and I recently discovered, I hate anarchists. Just one death in Berkeley caused because the police needed to supervise the urban camping known as Occupy Oakland and couldn’t be at their full responsiveness and one thrown brick by an anarchist -even though it hit another protester- not to mention broken windows all over the place, made the Tea Party’ers look like, while politically disagreeable, decent people. Although, I’m not a fan of theirs politically either, I rather have a beer with a Tea Party’er, at least they don’t break glass.
The reason a Romney president worries me is because I don’t know what to expect. While Obama sounds pretty negative and Romney sounds good. I really don’t know where Romney stands on abortion, health care, the environment, or even tax cuts. Is he a conservative Republican or a moderate one? I wish I knew who he was before election day. What I do know about Romney, he’ll balance the budget by cutting Sesame Street and not raising taxes and be not that much different than Obama on foreign policy.
