Your Choice: Hard Decision 2008

What about a candidate is important to us? We cannot let the major news stations decide for us. We cannot not let base psychological appeal decide for us. We should not even let our parents decide for us. But considering these three things are the primary ways of consciously or unconsciously creating an opinion about one candidate or another, how do we get away from them in the first place?

The only way I know how to do so is to strip away all the “noise” surrounding me and get down to brass tacks: what do I want to get from the future president's actions for myself? What do I want this president to do for others? This is a question you must ask yourself: though they will try, no media source can answer this one for you.

Secondly, how to do we assess a candidate's probability of actually doing these things? We do not have much to go by considering almost every piece of information we receive is strategic propaganda. This includes all major candidates: Clinton, McCain, and Obama. As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd commented, “Voters try to figure out who they trust to have life-and-death power over them, but there’s so much theatricality and artifice in campaigns you can get a false impression of who someone is.”

Please do not believe for a moment that you can choose a candidate based on their trustworthiness, because any politician that looks more trustworthy than the other is just a much better liar. Opponents of Bill Clinton called him “Slick Willy” for a reason. Or if you are thinking about giving your vote to whomever you fancy most, we need to have a talk about how you got into Fordham.

We could try voting for someone based on the issues they claim to care about, but history has shown us that presidents often go an entirely different way once in office (even Lincoln, who initially stood up for state's rights “to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively,” interfered with the issue of slavery on a federal level through the Civil War). In addition, all candidates have flip flopped on many of the issues important to voters, including Barack Obama, who voted for bills supporting the Iraq War such as the “Military Funding and Tax Cuts Amendment” in 2006.

We could attempt to choose a candidate based on party politics and the people that would surround them once he or she were in office (after all, it takes a village to make a presidency), but this method still amounts to quite a bit of guesswork: George W. Bush's first campaign in 2000 was funded by many fiscal conservatives that believed his term would echo his father's. Instead, W. increased non-military government spending at twice the speed of his predecessor.

Perhaps those with the most experience should be given preference. After all, politicians that have been in the media's radar screen for a while are known quantities. This process would lead a voter to one of two candidates: Hillary Clinton or John McCain. However, please consider the idea that all this experience has let these candidates become jaded and totally without the refreshing vision that Obama so glibly offers.

For purposes of efficiency, we could flip a coin, but that deprives us of our future right to complain about the president, since the method is probably just as productive as not voting at all.

I don't have all the answers (just yet). So I leave this question to you, dear Dímelo readers. We have some time to think about this – until November, really, since none of your absentee ballots being submitted in March will actually be counted (except for you, Ohio...stupid swing state...).

For the next issue, email us at dimelo_publication@yahoo.com and explain to us what your criteria is for choosing a candidate. We don't particularly care if you are voting for McCain, Obama, or Clinton right now, just how you came about (or are about to arrive at) your decision.