For the most part-allowing for occasional lapses of taste-I
don't write about politics, at least not about the horse-race
aspects of which candidates are ahead, which will come out on top,
which of their strategies did and didn't work, etc. I follow those
matters with some interest but with a sense of detachment. I am not
part of that process.
For one thing, there are plenty of other writers in the
mainstream and gay press, and innumerable bloggers, television
commentators and talk radio personalities who eagerly share their
opinions and speculations. I doubt if I have anything new and
significant to add, anything that some or all of them haven't
already said.
So far as indicating a preference for one candidate over
another, whether openly or between the lines, there hardly seems
much point. To do that would be an exercise in egotism. I write for
a limited-circulation newspaper. Nothing I write is going to affect
the outcome of an election. Then too, I understand my job to be
writing about gay issues, broadly conceived, and I figure that most
people already know who the gay-supportive candidates are.
Nor do I have much enthusiasm for any of the candidates who are
or have been running. They all have a few good points on gay or
other issues and a large number of bad points: I generally tend to
agree more with the criticism candidates make of one another than I
do with the candidates themselves. The most that could be said of
any of them is that they seem less bad than the others.
It is no secret that I am, on the whole, a libertarian, meaning
that I view governments (city, state, federal) with deep suspicion.
Government is a Borg, constantly grasping more power, more control,
more of our money.
I am in favor of both economic and civil liberties. Economic
liberties include lower taxes (for everyone), less government
spending, and less government interference in the marketplace and
our economic lives. Civil liberties include more freedom from
government intrusion into our personal lives, free speech, personal
privacy and property rights, abortion and drugs decriminalization.
And this necessarily entails equal treatment of gays and
heterosexuals.
None of the viable candidates believes anything like this. Which
is not surprising because they are part of the government and have
a vested interest in promising government policies using government
power and government money (ultimately your tax money) for various
constituencies.
So, I want there to be a line on the ballot that says "None of
the Above." If that line got a majority, the parties would have to
go back, find new policy packages and/or new candidates and try
again in a second election in, say, three months. At the very
least, "None of the Above" would be a safety valve for those of us
who feel dissatisfied with the "choices" we are offered.
To be sure, there is the small Libertarian Party which espouses
libertarian principles. And I have voted for its candidates pretty
regularly in national elections since they first ran a candidate in
1972. The candidate that year was University of Southern California
philosophy professor John Hospers who had just written a book
called "Libertarianism." As I recall, he got about 6,000 votes
nationwide.
I remember casting a write-in vote for Hospers that was almost
not counted. A major-party election judge was about to throw out my
ballot as a joke vote like Mickey Mouse when a friend of mine
stepped in to explain that Hospers was a real candidate of a real
party. Hospers also got one vote in the electoral college from a
renegade Republican elector in Virginia.
People sometimes say, "But you're throwing away your vote. Don't
you want your vote to count?" But I defy anyone to show me that
their precious little vote made any difference in any election they
have ever voted in. If it didn't, then their vote didn't "count"
any more than mine did. They might as well have gone to Starbucks
and had an espresso instead of voting.
In fact, we might say my vote "counted" more than theirs because
my vote was a larger portion of the vote for the candidate I voted
for than theirs was of the candidate they favored.
There you have it. I don't like the major-party candidates, so I
vote Libertarian. Is that a protest vote? In a sense, yes. But, of
course, I am also voting for what I believe. If I voted for "None
of the Above" it wouldn't be clear what I was for. But "None of the
Above" should be on the ballot for people to vote for if they
aren't libertarian.