Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Why I Do Not Support Obama For President of the United States in 2008

[After writing this post, I realized that its not written to convince anybody to vote for McCain. This post is a reflective exercise, and maybe even perhaps a veiled call to fellow McCain supporters to stop resorting to desperate measures. Maybe its even a veiled plea to Obama supporters to not judge me for supporting McCain.]

I have gotten far more into news and politics recently than I ever thought I could. I will spare you a superfluous description of the breadth and depth of my research concerning the major attacks on Obama that his opponents have launched. I will simply say that I have tried extremely hard to examine each claim with vigor, skepticism, integrity, and intellectual honesty.

I have found just about every major attack on Obama to be far-fetched, based on language and events ripped out of context, and insensitive to nuances, subtleties, and the various moving parts to issues and circumstances.

I do not identify with the culture among McCain/Palin supporters (I here curb my desire to rant extensively in this direction).

I do however, identify much more with Obama's approach to various methods of thought and speech. He trends toward lengthy, nuanced, or intellectual answers to questions, and this sometimes hurts him. He is slow to form opinions, and I think that's a good thing. He is often misunderstood or misinterpreted, and this happens to me a lot too. I exhibit many of his verbal habits and conventions myself, and this makes me like his personality.

I like a lot of his desires - to help the poor, downtrodden, and hungry at home and abroad, to be a good steward of Creation, to get as far as possible by verbal and other nonviolent means, to be at peace with as many people and countries as possible insofar as it depends on us, etc. etc.

I so badly long to laugh at all the SNL skits that are dominated by attacks against McCain and Palin. But I find most of them to be based on straw-man fallacies and suspect assumptions.

When it comes down to it, I just simply find myself in disagreement with Obama's proposals. I just. dis. agree. with him.

*shrugs*

That's it. That's all.

7 comments:

  1. You better copy this text into a .doc file just in case it mysteriously disappears.

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  2. When it comes down to it, I just simply find myself in disagreement with Obama's proposals. I just. dis. agree. with him.

    Very nice. But perhaps you might indulge our curiosity a bit and let us know why you disagree with him? Presumably you disagree with most of his proposals- at least more so than you disagree with McCain’s proposals (that is- if you’re voting!). So assuming you’re voting for McCain and not Obama because you are in agreement with McCain’s proposals, could you let us

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  3. Yes, I support McCain in this election.

    To pre-empt online debate let me first say that while I've discussed the details of what I'm about to say with people verbally recently, I am sort of tired of talking about them.

    However since you asked, for you, because I am a nice guy, I will say I just generally favor relatively smaller gov't, less taxes, pro-life etc. type policies and Barack basically doesn't (but McCain basically does, and I haven't found any of the major attacks against him to be well-founded, well-formulated, or just deal-breaking in nature).

    But the point of the post is that I don't find any of the major silver-bullet wannabe type allegations against Barack particularly well-founded or well-formulated (stuff about Ayers, ACORN, his birth certificate, his supposed view that the Constitution is fundamentally flawed, etc. ad nauseam).

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  4. Thanks. I’ve been avoiding any political discussion recently (hard to do in a department filled with Chomskyite students- but in a way easy to do.) So I wasn’t looking to spark debate or anything. I was just curious because it seems that your post was an expression of a resolution to a pressing crisis- as if you weren’t sure if “relatively smaller gov't, less taxes, pro-life etc.” were good ideas, and now you’re relatively sure they are.

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  5. mainly I am jaded by desperate and far-fetched or ill-conceived attempts by fellow McCain supporters to find a secret weapon attack against Obama that will stop anyone from even considering voting for him. i think its ok to have simple disagreements.

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