Why I'm voting against Romney/Ryan

[jslove]

I'm afraid I snapped, and in so doing, I wrote this essay on Facebook. It seems to have been rather well-received by my small readership, so I am boosting my signal here and on @jspencerlove(I hardly ever post here any more, though I still read my friends list, occasionally comment, and am paying for a bunch of user pics I hardly ever use, and to

Comments

[phillip2637]

As an outside observer, it's hard to understand how this race could even be close based on the pro-Obama and pro-Romney comments I see. I imagine that the reason for my lop-sided view is that the people in the U.S. that I communicate with are almost entirely computer users, which imparts a bias by itself.

The title of your post probably gives some explanation of the closeness: everyone is voting *against* somebody. Our morning paper contained a photograph of a person holding a sign that said "Defend Freedom - Defeat Obama". (I consider it notable that it *didn't* say, "Defend Freedom - Elect Romney".) When people adopt slogans evoking visceral fears, logical analysis of policy doesn't have much impact on them.

[jslove]

Personally, I am a big fan of Barack Obama. I think he's done a pretty good job as PotUS. Obviously, better would be nicer, but considering what he had to work with, I'm impressed. I'm not happy with everything, of course

[achinhibitor]

There are a couple of factors which make the situation rather opaque. One is the concept of "freedom". There really are a substantial number of Americans with a rather libertarian point of view who want to maximize the scope of their personal choices even if the results for them are objectively worse than collective constraint. Think of Scottish Highlanders, Kurds, Afghans, and other peoples who live in the ungoverned backcountry hills.

Another is that the canonical Democrat (as the parties are now aligned) is a fairly-well-paid professional worker, where the canonical Republican is the owner of a small-ish business (a few dozen to a few hundred employees). Though both of these are in the upper half of the middle class, the education, life trajectories, and the skills needed for success for the two groups are entirely different. So the policies they favor are dramatically different, and they do not deal with each other socially.

[vettecat]

Nicely said.

[otherdeb]

Another thing I'm seeing is something that fringefan and I predicted when Obama got elected.

Various supporters of the Romney-Ryan campaign are running ads that basically say, "I voted for Obama and he didn't deliver, so now I'm voting for Romney."

Back when Obama was running in 2008, Marc and I both noted that if Obama won, when his followers found out he wasn't Superman, a bunch of them would turn on him. And it was certain to happen, because the problems he was inheriting would take more than one term to sort out, let alone solve.