How to Vote (pt. 2)

I want an elitist to be President. And if you're smart, so do you.

And if you're not smart, you're probably part of the reason we have our current President. You might've thought, “Here's a cool, down-to-earth guy, the kind of guy who speaks to me on my level, the kind of guy I'd like to sit down with and have a burger and a beer.” I don't drink beer – just never acquired a taste – but I have had a lot of burgers in my day with a lot of people. And a lot of them were nice people. Good people. Smart people. People with good ideas and valuable insights. But I can't say I'd ever want to see any of them elected president (or, alternatively, see them in a position to steal a presidential election from the person the voters elected).

And now, for seven years, five months, we've had a president who isn't an intellectual or academic elitist. Who isn't an ivory tower snob. Who isn't even that smart.

I guess it's good to have a leader who doesn't make you feel inferior, who gives you the chance to say to yourself, “I may screw things up a lot, but he's the leader of the free world, and he and his administration screw things up a lot worse and a lot more often, so I can feel better about myself.”

I'm kidding. It's not good. Frankly, it sucks. I want a president who's smarter than I am. A lot smarter. Someone who can take on problems I can't even conceive of and either solve them or at least treat the symptoms to an effective degree long before they have any adverse effects on my insignificant little life.

I know Hillary – sorry, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY – is out of the running (for now), but she’s largely to blame for the professed (disingenuously, from most circles) desire for a leader as poorly read, poorly informed, self-centered, ethnocentric and alcoholic as the rest of us.

Should Barack Obama have called rural small-town denizens “bitter” for their ionic bonds with guns and religion? Probably not. It was condescending and demeaning, and it pigeonholed a diverse populace by defining it exclusively by the stereotypes with which it’s most typically associated. And exceptions noted, that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Should we all try to deny that the fear of the unknown engendered by such an enormous segment of the voting public at large is pretty much the reason we got four more years of the worst leader in modern history? (Some still insist on saying President Bush was “re-elected” in 2004, but I maintain it’s impossible to be re-elected to a position when you were never elected to it in the first place.)

True, the current administration also pandered endlessly to that segment’s love of large phallic symbols that can inflict great damage (also not an unreasonable explanation for the explosion in sales of Hummers outside of the military, which is pretty much the only environment in which such vehicles are justified), as well as its need to have all of us believe the myths its members have had ingrained into them almost since birth and to further insist, the flood of evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that it’s what the founders wanted.

But cynical, weathered pols have pandered to these interests since some guy named “John Smith” took a room with a dark-skinned native teenager in pre-colonial Virginia half a millennium ago (and even with that black mark on his record he still got elected and never faced impeachment, although one wonders if that would’ve been the case had the Jamestown Post run headlines like “SMITH FACES POKEY FOR POKING POCA”). It still doesn’t account for the Republicans’ entire margin of victory in 2004.

No, by all accounts (i.e., polls of questionable accuracy), in spite of President Bush's already plummeting ratings 20 months into the War on Common Sen….uh, Terrorism, Karl Rove’s scorched-earth strategy of “Scare the facts right outta them hicks!” was what did it. Groups with names like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, launched by fatuous chickenhawks who never served a day, propagating a series of disgusting lies about a brave veteran candidate daring to run against our chickenhawk sitting president and VP, made it seem as though opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion meant a person was in favor of terrorists torturing and murdering our children in the village square. Their barrage of TV ads was meant not only to make us all forget the way the administration lied its way into a war with a country it just really had a hard-on to invade, but to make us believe that now that we were there, we were suicidal anti-Americans if we were foolish enough to elect a candidate who didn't want to stay there until the entire countryside was littered with the corpses of three generations of insurgents and their offspring (a strategy, by the way, that John McCain also seems eager to pursue).

And so, not too surprisingly, we got four more years of a leadership that never heard the expression, “When you're already in a hole, quit digging.” Or they've heard it but, much like news from the real world that doesn't jibe with their own masturbatory fantasy about how great a job they're doing, chose to pretend it didn't exist.

Fact is, if you're not in denial so deep you'll probably implode soon, you have to allow that things are pretty bad now. I won't belabor the discreet details, but the economy, the environment, foreign affairs, even the general public mood are all in bad shape. Maybe you voted for Bush in '04 because you genuinely believed he'd keep us safer. Maybe you learned something. But Bush and Cheney and their minions haven't. They never learn anything. Why? Because they know better. Or because they were right all along, and we mere voters just don't see it yet. Or because the President never, ever reads a newspaper or other current news publication, and all his briefings are filtered and censored to ensure he has no earthly idea how bad things are.

In other words, a completely different, but far more insidious, form of elitism. The elitism that says, “I don't have to face the harsh realities that have resulted from my endless flights of ego and other fancy.” The elitism that at one time denigrated opposing viewpoints and now just discounts them completely. The elitism that replaces “....of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this Earth” with “I'm the decider.” The elitism that by default grants “decider” power to the person with whom more people wanted to have a beer and a burger.

And all this elitism comes courtesy of a leader who would never, because he could never, aspire to intellectual elitist. Because he's simply not that smart.

Barack Obama worked hard throughout school and eventually earned a J.D. From Harvard Law School without having a well-connected family to pull any strings. He's worked in Chicago's inner city and studied the problems faced by the working class, and he's studied and appears eager to continue studying the economic and social problems facing all Americans (save for those whose biggest problems is getting those evil labor unions and commie tax legislators off their backs long enough to pick out a new yacht). And he was elected to the U.S. Senate.

John McCain was admitted to, and graduated from, the U.S. Naval Academy, feats that demonstrate exceptional academic, athletic and leadership prowess. He fought in a war and endured five years in a Vietnamese POW camp. He adhered to his principles in crafting legislation and fighting for support, even when it meant taking on his own party's very powerful interests. And he was elected four times to the U.S. Senate.

I support Obama over McCain for the presidency because I think he has better ideas on how to improve the economic and social problems facing the nation. Because he supports a woman's right to choose while McCain opposes it. Because he believes in equal rights for all Americans, regardless of sexual orientation, while McCain favors some limits on those rights based upon one's sexual orientation. And because I think Obama will make a better leader in the current national and global environments.

I don't want to have a beer and a burger with either man. Nor with the current occupant of the White House. And neither should any voter. We should want whoever becomes President to have his beers and burgers and cocktails and state dinners with domestic and foreign leaders and people with good, workable ideas on how to tackle and possibly even solve our macro problems, which in turn should lead to a better climate for most of us to tackle our individual problems. We should want the candidate who doesn't become President to go back to the senate and work just as hard and harder to legislate and implement the aforementioned ideas. And while I won't speak for anyone else, I want the current occupant of the White House and all his cronies to stand up in front of Congress and answer for all the lies they've told and all the abuses of power they've committed, to serve time in federal prison, and then to go back home and live out the rest of their years before they head for an eternity in the deepest level of hell.

Let's review what we have so far:

From part 1, think for yourself when you make your voting decisions.

From part 2, we'll likely survive the most egregious electoral mistake we as a nation have ever made, but let's learn from the mistake and never make it again.

And stay tuned for part 3.