2012 Elections - Presidential Edition

My absentee ballot is already in.

I voted for Mitt Romney.  I voted that way for a few good reasons.

I really would have preferred to vote for Gary Johnson.  But due to vagaries in Michigan's election laws, Mr. Johnson's appearance on the Michigan GOP primary ballot made him ineligible to run in the general election as anything other than a write-in candidate.  So the value of voting for Mr. Johnson went way down.

The three issues that matter most to me are fiscal responsibility, the U.S. Supreme Court, and national defense; specifically winning the War on Terror against Al Qa'ida, Ansar al Islam, and their fellow travelers.  While Mr. Romney is not perfect on either of these issues, he is better than the alternatives.

Gary Johnson wants to bring the troops home before the war is won.  That's called surrendering.  It is the wrong course of action.

While I was surprisingly pleased with Mr. Obama's continuing prosecution of the War on Terror during his first couple of years in office, he has continued to demonstrate that he really does not believe that we are in a war.  Either that or, he doesn't believe that winning this war matters.

Mr. Obama's response to the recent, planned terrorist attack against our facilities in Benghazi, Libya seem to represent his distilled perspective.  When he could have responded, he didn't.  Instead, is swallowed the terrorists' propaganda and regurgitated it for American consumption.

That is not the sort of leadership that I can support.

On the economic front, it is crystal clear to me that Mr. Obama does not know how anything about real world economics.  He knows how he wishes economics works, but he knows nothing about how economics actually work.  His continuing threats to increase income taxes have needlessly slowed our recovery.  While some of his stimulus spending was worthwhile, a lot of it was not.  Finally, the significant tax increases that are coming next year due to the ACA will put a further damper on the economy.

I would add that Mr. Obama has been a pretty good "friend" of Wall Street.  He elevated "corporatism" or "corporate-capitalism" far beyond anything Mr. Bush did.

That doesn't make Mr. Bush "good"... just not as bad in that category.  "Too big to fail" is a problem.  We need to stop using privatizing profits while we leave losses to the public budget.

Mr. Obama had an opportunity to do something about the structural problems with our federal budget.  Specifically, Medicare and Social Security (along with other social spending) are crippling the federal government.  They need to be reformed.  Fixing our spending problem would have gone a long way towards creating a strong recovery.

Instead, he created even larger structural problems for the federal budget.

The final issue is the Supreme Court.  As above, I don't think Mr. Romney is going to nominate great Supreme Court justices.  I think Mr. Obama has and will continue to nominate lousy ones.

I believe that the U.S. Constitution is our "social contract".  It empowers the federal government to undertake certain actions.  It leaves any other powers with the states or with the people.  It also guarantees individual liberty.  The entire purpose behind the words in the Constitution was to place limits on the size and scope of the federal government.

As I was reading on a legal blog last week, conservative justices and judges have continually given a comfort and counsel to libertarian leaning law students.  They accept those students as clerks, thereby giving them invaluable experiences.  And while they have not ruled in favor of the Constitution over "precedent", they are not hostile to the concept.

Left wing justices and judges have been continually hostile to libertarian leading law students.  They never accept them as clerks.  They rarely listen to their thoughts.  Left wing justices and judges have a history of ignoring the plain language of our Constitution and instead seeking extra-Constitutional "guidance" when writing their rulings.

So while conservative judges are unlikely to support the plain language of the Ninth Amendment regarding gay marriage, they are equally unlikely to support the next power grab that comes out of Congress and/or the administration when it comes to further nationalizing parts of our economy.

So I voted for Mitt.  Not because he is a great candidate.  Just because he will do less harm than the other options.  Had Gary Johnson been on the Michigan ballot, I might very well have voted for him as he would have been correct on two out of the three issues that I care most about.

Not exactly one of the great electoral moments in my life.

And Your Point Is?

I love this too much not to pump it a little.

Mr. Obama apparently has been making a big deal about Mr. Romney's Swiss bank account.  However, it has been observed that the money in that account was legally obtained and properly reported to the IRS.

So the problem is supposed to be that Mr. Romney has money?  Isn't part of the problem with the lackluster economic recovery the fact that Mr. Obama stokes class/wealth envy by demonizing the wealthy?

How To Make It Big

Via Don Surber:

No matter who you support this year, you have to admit Mitt Romney went about becoming president the wrong way. Instead of wasting his time learning how business works and building a multi-billion-dollar company that really did save or create hundreds of thousands of jobs, Mitt should have lived off his daddy’s fortune like Jack Kennedy. Chasing skirts and molesting teenage virgin is a lot more fun than figuring out how to revive an old business.

Instead, Mitt Romney gave his inheritance to charity. Who does that anymore?

...

Hard work though. Who does that? Small wonder the public is so suspicious.

Mitt isn't my guy this year.  I'll be voting for Gary Johnson in the Michigan primary.

But I do respect Mitt's business experience and his commitment to the real world.