I’ve never felt I understood politics enough to vote and feel confident that I was voting correctly. I’m an overthinker and I never felt like the commercials I saw on TV really tells us all we need to know about a candidate. Sure, they give us a quick overview about where they stand on the REALLY REALLY big stuff, but what about the really really tiny stuff that will probably actually have a bigger impact on our day to day lives?
And then you look into that and since it’s politics, every decision, every signature, every speech, every veto, every protest creates this whole chain reaction of other things that almost HAS to take place and again, I never felt like I was educated enough to understand it.
A good point, IMO, was the protests on Madison (the Scott Walker stuff) just recently. All those kids were protesting the union busting and the teachers losing their health insurance (or at least losing part of it or having to pay more for it). I’m curious as to how many of them were aware of the fact that if they ‘won’ thousands of public workers would have been fired about a week later. Scott made that very, very clear. Either he was going to bust the unions and take away health care OR fire a ton of public workers. He chose the former and the protesters showed up. I honestly don’t think most of them heard the second part.
That was always my fear. That I’d vote one way, but not understand everything fully always made me nervous. OTOH, the "my vote doesn’t really count for anything’ is a pretty strong feeling as well.
Also, I’m a (now) 32 year old person which puts me right in with the democrats, age wise. However, my father owns a small business, and while, he’s never once told me of his political leanings, just being very involved in the business growing up makes it very confusing. If I was going to vote, it would be democratic, but there are certain republican ideas I like (mostly when it comes to business stuff). That makes me something, a Libertarian maybe? I don’t remember.
Anyways, this is the first year I ended up (not really on purpose) paying attention. I wanted some of the RNC and the DNC. Again, like I said, if I was going to vote, it would be for Obama. That was a given before the race even started. But watching Clinton speak may have actually motivated me.
Also, lastly, and maybe it’s because I’m only 32, I’ve yet to see anything that a change in presidency, or mayor or senator or whatever has done that’s effected my life. The only thing I can think of is the reduction in the employee portion of the Social Security Tax from Obama. Other then that, off the top of my head, I really can’t think of anything. Maybe for people that aren’t middle class, white, making 30-50k per year 20-40 years old, didn’t get any grants for college, don’t work or own a business run by a minority etc etc etc. My life is ‘easy’. Of course, I worked hard to make easy and my parents worked hard to make sure I could work hard to make it easy (is this making sense). OTOH, Obama’s campaign seems to be about lifting more people into this ‘easy’ area. Hopefully they don’t get lost in it. If they can’t navigate their way around, they’ll fall right back out the bottom.
(Also, the people that are upper class, above all this, probably see more changes from one administration to the next as well, but that’s probably more in the way of changes to the tax code then anything else).
