Voting for GW Bush - Name recognition only?

Nader…Keyes…
The problem with honest candidates is that they are always so moral.

And since we all define moral differently, a huge part of the population is scared sXXXless of them. (maybe rightly so)
Hey Neutron, it is a little different than 5% of the public voting smart.
It is more like 30% will always vote deomcrat nomatter who the candidate is, and a slightly smaller percentage will always vote republican no matter who the candidate is.

That kind of leaves it up to the 40% who are independents.

Only if you are forcing yourself to choose one of these guys. Evil + Evil does not equal OK Candidate. These guys are all crooked.

I think sometime in the next 10 years we will see a strong third party emerge. These two parties have merged a little too much for some people,

The animosity between George W. Bush and John McCain merely proves that, sometimes, the tiniest differences are the hardest to smooth over. Fact is, 18 months ago, if you’d asked me for an opinion on Bush and McCain, I’d have said both were admirably moderate conservatives who’d make strong Presidential candidates, and maybe even a strong ticket (never mind who was on top and who was the Veep).

Odd, isn’t it, how two guys who agreed on virtually every important issue (news flash: campaign finance reform, the only issue on which they had real differences , is NOT an important issue) wound up so far apart. Bush wound up running as the candidate of the far right (which his record clearly shows he is NOT), and McCain became the hero of the far left (though his record clearly shows he isn’t one of them).

A year ago, I’d gladly have voted for McCain, but he lost my respect in a hurry. Like most conservative Republicans, McCain secretly longs to be loved and admired by the press, and was only too eager to kiss media backsides, and cave in on every important Republican issue, in order to win the love of the press boys on the bus.

To those who ask “How could Republicans vote for Bush,” I say WAKE UP! The very things you LIKE about McCain are precisely the reasons he couldn’t possibly win the GOP nomination. There’s ALREADY a party for people who support abortion, high taxes, and the demonization of Christianity: it’s called the Democrats!!! And, not surprisingly, the only people voting for McCain in the primaries WERE Democrats!

McCain completely caved in on every issue that mattered to Republicans. That made him very popular among liberals (who, incidentally, would NEVER have voted for him in November), but it guaranteed he couldn’t appeal to the people he really NEEDED.

I’d have been happy to vote for John McCain a year ago. I’d STILL be happy to vote for him, if I thought I was going to get the man who compiled that admirably conservative record in the Senate. But the guy I saw sucking up to Tim Russert was not for me.

Name recognition only? Are you crazy?

George W. Bush has been the governor of Texas for the last six years. The Lieutenant governor, a Democrat, has called him the greatest governor he had ever worked with. He won re-election in 1998 in a landslide, the first Republican governor in Texas to do so at all. He has shown an ability to attract the votes of Hispanics, a traditionally Democratic demographic, and an ability to work well with a legislature of the opposite party.

Does he have drawbacks? Sure. But is he being elected based on name recognition only? Only someone with his or her head completely in the sand would deny that he has many positives as a politician which have nothing to do with his last name.


Chaim Mattis Keller
ckeller@kozmo.com

“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective

Yeah! And Tori Spelling would have gotten that part in 90210 anyway!!!