Election Season Begins

A democracy is a place where numerous elections are held, at great cost, without issues, and with interchangeable candidates. – Gore Vidal

Popular suffrage is in itself no guarantee of freedom. People can vote themselves into slavery. – Frank Chodorov

An election is nothing more than an advance auction of stolen goods. - Ambrose Bierce

I thought I would take more interest in the election by this time, it being now one year from the 2008 presidential election. Generating enthusiasm is difficult when all the leading candidates have voiced their continuing support for "the error of big government". At this point, the choice now has to be made among those who have already declared to run. So let's see where we are with that:

On the Republican side, the two most presidential candidates (Huckabee and Hunter) act like they are running for vice-president, which leaves the field of true aspirants to Giuliani, Romney, Thompson, Paul, and McCain. Of them, only Paul supports the constitution, but in such a way to make people tired of hearing about it. McCain waffles on the most important issues, and takes strong stands on the least of them. Thompson took extra time to plan his entry, and then tired of the race almost immediately. Who does that leave? Rudy and Mitt. Mitt probably is more qualified, but could easily disappear in his own photo op. This leaves Rudy, who has quite a few eliminating attributes himself.

Fortunately, they only have to beat the Democrats. We have Barack Obama whose best hope is to become the next Dan Quayle. We have John Edwards who comes across as the ambulance chasing con-artist he is. Finally, there's Hillary. A recent poll showed that there were 56% of likely votors who would never vote for her. I'll leave the math to you, but in a two party election, that would have to be a concern.

With this field of candidates, I would suppose that a large number of likely voters would start to become less likely to vote as November approaches. I think at this point we have to give everybody a do-over. I'll resolve to do my part. I intend to watch and listen carefully to the candidates, and if they say something that fits in the top 10% of profundity or in the bottom 10%. We can keep a running score on who would be the best candidates.

If there are few postings here, that would signal that nobody has earned your vote, and neither has anybody disearned it. The fun starts tomorrow, so be sure and check with us often.