D. None of the Above

A comment on my last entry asked who I thought should be President and why, so I thought I would oblige whoever asked. It was a little long for a simple comment, so here goes:

Truth be told, I'm not exceedingly impressed with any of the current candidates for president. In the interest of full disclosure, there are incredibly few instances in which I would ever vote for a Democrat, so I won't go into great detail as to why they don't impress me. Suffice it to say that I don't agree with their core beliefs on taxation, government responsibility/interference, and pretty much all foreign and domestic policy.

On the Republican side, as I said, I'm still waiting to be impressed. I can't seem to get excited about any particular candidate, although there are several that I could get behind should they win the nomination.

My gut tells me that Rudy should be the guy, but he's having a tough time wrapping up the conservative base -- so much so that there's even been talk of a conservative third party should he be the Republican nominee. This, in my opinion, would be incredibly stupid. Does anyone remember what happened the last time dejected conservatives ran a third party candidate against someone named Clinton?

I understand the concern that Rudy is, in the eyes of many conservatives, wrong on abortion (and to a lesser extent, gun control). But what I don't understand is the propensity to either vote for a third party candidate or abstain from voting altogether rather than vote for a candidate with which they agree 80 percent of the time. Given that a third party candidate will never win national office in this country, every vote that isn't cast for Rudy would be a tacet vote for Hillary. So instead of voting for a candidate with whom they don't agree on abortion or gun control, they end up with a candidate with whom they don't agree on abortion, gun control, taxes, health care, foreign policy, education, etc.

Not to mention the fact that essentially the only sway a president has over the issue of abortion is in his (or, God help us, her) appointments to the judiciary. And Rudy has already stated that he intends to appoint conservative judges should he be elected president. So it really should be a non-issue. Unfortunately, it isn't.

For several months, rumors were that Fred Thompson was going to enter the race as the conservative savior. Thus far, I've yet to see anything that would convince me to vote for him over any of the other top-tier Republicans. Granted, he hasn’t yet had a real opportunity to set himself apart from the rest of the field, so I’ll be interested to see how he performs in the upcoming debates.

John McCain just doesn’t do it for me. Don’t get me wrong -- I think he’s an honorable man for all the sacrifices he’s made for his country. But his positions on immigration and his role in the disaster that is campaign finance reform are just deal breakers for me. That said, I think he’d make an incredible Secretary of Defense. I have no reason to believe he would be nominated for said position, but for what it’s worth…

When it gets down to bare bones and brass tacks, I just want a president who is going to keep taxes low, recognizes that the role of government should be as minimal as possible, keep the economy strong (by staying out of it as much as possible), have a firm and direct foreign policy, stop screwing around in Iraq and do what needs to be done to win the war and leave Iraq to the Iraqi people, head off the looming disaster that would be universal health care, balance the federal budget, appoint constitutionalist judges to the judiciary, etc.

I realize that’s asking entirely too much, but my vote will go to the candidate who aims to achieve more of those goals than his opponent. I’m not yet sure who that candidate will be, but I’m listening with an open mind.