Six weeks or so from today, we should know how the elections have turned out. If we don’t, it’ll be nobody’s fault but the Democrat election examiners in counties with Democrat majorities for expecting Democrats to know how to vote for the Democrat ticket. Just like eight years ago.
Anyway. I’ve had numerous queries about whom I’m supporting in the upcoming election (yes, zero is a number). So here goes:
President/Vice President:
I’m supporting, endorsing, and voting for the presidential ticket that includes Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska). Palin is the only conservative-like candidate on either of the major parties’ tickets. She is also the only one with executive experience in the public sector. She took on the corrupt GOP establishment in her home state and beat the snot out of it. She took on a complacent incumbent Republican governor in the August 2006 gubernatorial primary, and beat the snot out of him. Then she took on the man who was, at the time, Alaska’s most popular Democrat—and a man who had already served two terms as governor of Alaska—and beat the snot out of him.
She picked up an incomplete and poorly begun project for a pipeline to bring natural gas from the North Slope to market, and came up with a plan that would work—while depriving trough-feeding oil companies of billions in “incentive” subsidies they had claimed were necessary to build the pipeline (those companies then set about planning to build their own pipeline, without subsidies).
In contrast to the empty rhetoric emerging from both men on the Democrat ticket, Palin is a proven achiever and deserves to be brought into the major leagues.
U.S. Senate:
Incumbent Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss flirted with joining a compromise that would have enabled Democrats to keep a moratorium on oil production from the continental shelf, but due in part to overwhelming negative reaction that compromise failed. While troubled by the senator’s minoritarian thinking that led to his erstwhile position on this compromise, I cannot countenance electing Democrat Jim Martin, who would certainly support keeping Harry Reid as majority leader—and who slammed his primary rival for having supported (as a majority of Georgia’s elected Democrats did) George W. Bush’s re-election four years ago.
U.S. House of Representatives:
Rep. Lynn Westmoreland has taken flack over the course of his two terms in Congress for positions he’s taken—and for daring to use the word “uppity” in a public context—but all in all I’ve found that his controversial positions have been (as they were in Georgia’s legislature) in the interest of protecting taxpayers from impulsive spending actions by his fellow politicians. Even when those fellow politicians are Republicans. While everyone else is imagining a Palin-Jindal ticket in 2012, I’m envisioning a Palin-Westmoreland ticket; whereas Jindal appeals to an impulse to counter-program the Democrats’ identity politics, Westmoreland seems to share Palin’s tendency to buck the establishment for the people’s benefit. Substance over symbolism.
I won’t bore people with my arguments on state- or local-level races, since in many cases there aren’t even any Democrats on the ballot for these offices in November.
