Primary Postmortem

The first time I ever voted was in 1994. That was the year I turned 18.

It was an off-year election and there wasn’t anything memorable going on with the Vermont ballot, for me at least.

What was memorable about that day was the triumphant victory of the Republican Party, which claimed control of the Senate and the House of Representatives with a little help from a thing called the "Contract with America."

I was a sophomore at UVM at the time and had developed a real interest for politics. I was enamored with Newt Gingrich and the emergence of the Republican Revolution. From that point on, I no longer felt like a leper for having a conservative ideology. I was not alone, despite the insistence of most of my university classmates and professors to the contrary. There were many others like me, in fact a majority.

From that day on, I always felt that I had a home in the Republican Party with like-minded thoughtful conservatives.

Today, I mourn the loss of that feeling. This is not just overly dramatic prose brought on by post-primary blues. This is something that has been festering in the deepest recesses of my psyche for some time now, only to be confirmed last night.

I started to feel this way when I was chair of the Burlington GOP. (That was September 2003 – September 2005, in case you were wondering.) My official (and truthful) reason for stepping down from the position at the end of my term was that I had decided to homeschool, but what made it so easy was the feelings I had that the Republican Party in Vermont, as a whole, does not reflect my views. And the fact that the scandal-ridden Republican politicians in Washington had wandered away from their conservative principles did not help things.

In the past, I have often wondered why someone would “waste” their vote by voting for a fringe third party candidate that had no chance of winning. Shouldn’t they at least pick the major party candidate that is the better of the two? Don’t they have at least some interest in whether the Democrats or Republicans have control of congress?

Well, now I finally get it. The current system is corrupt. The Democrats and the Republicans, not to mention certain independent lifetime politicians, are entrenched in out-of-control spending of other people’s money, big-daddy/nanny-state-style government, and the quest for power at any cost.

I am tired of taking the “lesser of two weasels” approach. I am no longer going to sell-out my vote to the candidate that I find less repugnant.

I had a long talk with Bob the Optimizer last night (who many of you She’s Right newcomers might not know because he hardly ever comments anymore ever since they took away blog-surfing “rights” at his work). We both voted for Shepard and Parke. We are both very conservative, though he ever so slightly more than I. We both revile at the thought of supporting Rainville or Tarrant.

Rich Tarrant has already made it clear that he doesn’t need Republicans to win. He categorized Greg Parke, with whom I share many views, as an extremist. He wants to expand Medicare. Expand Medicare! He wants to raise the minimum wage to Vermont’s level. He wants to expand federal education spending. Then, just to remind us of his contempt for the Republican Party, he claims to be shame-filled of the way the Republicans in Washington are spending our tax dollars. Well, shame-filled he should be, if not for the way he proposes to increase that spending exponentially in an attempt to woo voters.

My vote for US Senate? I’ll probably write-in Bob the Optimizer.

And then there is Martha Rainville, the darling of the state GOP. The only difference between her and Democrat Peter Welch is her stance on the war in Iraq and future use of the military. Not being much of a neocon myself, that is not much of a selling point. Oh yeah, the other difference is that Welch can at least articulate some forward thinking ideas, even if I abhor his socialist-leaning ideology.

From a distance, this race looks like the white zebra with black stripes vs. the black zebra with white stripes. SSDC – same stuff different candidate. A closer look reveals a Bernie Sanders wannabe vs. a vapid candidate-in-a-box, pre-packaged by the Moderates R’ Us wing of the Republican Party.

No, thanks.

For a moment, as we were talking last night, I considered voting for Rainville in order to help the GOP keep the majority, or rather to stop the Democrats from having it because heaven knows the GOP has done nothing to deserve to keep it. It’s great having a husband who holds no allegiance to the Republican Party, who can quickly remind me that the GOP has done nothing to earn our support.

I guess I’ll sit this one out, too

So now I get to experience democracy from the same vantage point as people like the Greens and the Libertarians. I get to walk into the voting booth in November knowing that I will not see a candidate on the ballot that I can vote for with at least a minimum level of confidence that he will represent my views and “throw away” my vote in an insignificant attempt to make a statement, hoping that someday soon things will be different.


Afterthought...
On a slightly more positive note, the blog is going to be more issue-oriented from now on instead of so election coverage heavy. I was getting kind of bored with that approach anyway. I’ll leave that up to the unbiased blogs like Politics VT. I am going to try to carve my niche elsewhere. Stay tuned.