For the record. A complete ramble down my thought process. I apologize if it offends in its lack of rhetorical vigor.

Politically speaking, I'm very close to the center. (Any time I take one of those political position quizzes on line, I land almost dead center. On ones that are scored -10/+10, I usually hit around .1/.3) I've actually shocked a couple of people when they find out I'm not a Democrat. ("He seems so rational" was the one that amused me.) As explanation, I have to point out that Washington County, where I grew up, has always posed this scenario:

Democrats: Conservative in approach, and some combination of corrupt, ineffective, and/or incompetent. A winning combination to the point of a hammerlock.
Republicans: The chamber of commerce types, plus the anti-corruption people, no matter what their politics. Generally clueless about how to beat the machine, and almost always unable to. (As an example of cluelessness, please note the Washington County Republican Party's logo. It wasn't until this year that I finally noticed that it certainly looks like that elephant's happy because it finally passed the county.)

So this mental image has held for me, with occasional forays into the Reform party (after all, what I'm looking for is somebody to reform wherever I live into something that isn't idiotically governed.) I mention this because I keep looking at this election and worrying about the corruption aspect. For all the arguments about Haliburton and Enron that I've seen, I tend to see far less about the UN's Oil-for-Food program, and the utter cravenness of the corruption that involved. If the trails of money in these cases lead, as they seem to now, directly to just the right people in the UN, France, Russia, and China, it becomes clear that the term "Coalition of the Bribed" was not applied to the correct side of the Iraq argument. The allies we lost weren't going to go for us. It wasn't in their own interest to shut down that cash stream. So that's been eating at me. I already knew they didn't have the military levels to support us meaningfully, so I could understand it, but this felt like betrayal.

I'm not all that sure I like Bush, he's probably only about 60% of what I want in a President. A bit too conservative, definitely; and yes, he really does tick people off, and I really don't know if it's him making all the moves. I liked Howard Dean a lot back in 2002-03, mostly for reasons completely alien to a lot of his supporters. I wasn't sure I would vote for him, but he at least would make the discussion about interesting issues. That and he wouldn't have been the Democratic Party's guy. But he lost me when he dropped the center and became a one-issue guy.

In early 1998, I was sitting in the driveway of my house in Connecticut listening to another NPR report on how Iraq was ignoring sanctions/inspections/etc. I followed it all the way to my office, and by the time I got there it was clear enough to me: this wasn't going to get fixed by the current arrangement of things, and no other country in the world had the power to fix it. It had to be done at some point. It would be regrettable, unfortunate, and ultimately necessary to prevent something worse. About a week later, on that same drive, I was introduced to the term "White House Intern", and the third thing I thought had was "well, we don't have the power to fix Iraq either."

I have to admit, George W. Bush is probably the weakest Republican candidate fielded in my lifetime, save maybe Ford. And yet...

Do I give him a pass on the economy? Personally, I can. I know the recession began under Clinton. I lost 80% of my nest egg in Clinton's last year. Now, I recognize I was probably in the minority there, and that was mostly paper winnings, but I have it back. Paid in full, plus interest.

Jobs, jobs, jobs, you cry... Fine, I understand that. But do you really think the jobs that were lost in manufacturing will come back? We used to do it in steel, now there's plastic, aluminum, ceramics, specialty alloy. I've seen the companies around here burn away to nothing in the past 30 years. Didn't they see it coming? Yes, and they couldn't do anything about it because they were trapped, the jobs were not exchangable. We're still clearing buggy whips out of the economy. And yes, it IS my fault, partially. My job's all about making computer aided design more efficient. Efficiency...Productivity... The story goes that the American worker is more productive now than ever before. My fault, too, I guess.

My fault. Edwards, see, he actually scares me. Kerry still had a shot at me. Then he picked this guy. First of all, he's still got that Damien: Omen 3 thing going for him, but then he's also a trial lawyer, and well, I'm an engineer. It's a predator-prey relationship we have with each other. Kitty heaven is mousie hell, and as an engineer whose work is used to determine safety, I feel like mousie number one. And then there's what he was proposing as an economic plan. Well...I've seen that before. I've lived through that here. It's the Pennsylvania plan. Every half-hearted, half-protectionist plan that's greased its way through Harrisburg to save our state, encapsulated in one neat little package. When were we a miracle? When were we a model worth following?

Let me encapsulate other domestic issues this way:
Government size: I'm not a drown-the-government in the bathtub type, but I would like us to be able to get it out of the bathroom without it getting stuck in the door. Neither side's going to give me that this year, but Bush is slightly, slightly better.
Medical coverage: The first joker who points out that giving everyone the healthcare senators get is impractical (and completely infeasible), would get my vote. Neither side's going to pull that.
The Supreme Court (aka abortion): I'll admit, I'm counting on the Senate to keep it legal. I think we've reached the point that something has to break here, over fifteen years we've hyperpoliticized every appointment to the point of gridlock.
Privacy/PATRIOT Act: I assume it will sunset in 2005 either way. I don't think that PATRIOT II can pass in any meaningful way. Which is a shame, because there are a few good policies in it. There's some nasty crap there too, but it's trimmable. I also would love to see most of the RIAA/MPAA funded legislation get nuked, but nobody's backing that horse here. Some of those laws stole your privacy long before you even got scared by the PATRIOT Act, they just sold it to companies, rather than the government.
Civil unions: Amazingly, both candidates have now reached the same position, and I'm slightly more liberal than both. And I still don't see how this was the issue it was.
Stem cells: On one side: ignorance of science. On the other side: willfully misleading and deceptive use of science to fit their aims. See why I don't like Edwards? It's a visceral reaction, I know, but it's far more personally painful to watch that.

As for foreign policy, beyond the notion of our allies, Kerry gets one major mark against him. That was his notion, thankfully abandoned in August, for Iran. The notion in August was to supply Iran with nuclear fuel for its power generation, and thus prevent them from ever developing the nuclear materials for weapons. Well, I hope you see the hitch. I did work in nuclear power for a while, but it should be obvious that this had fraught written all over it. Mostly in the chain of custody, and the ability to observe, but also in the notion of transporting materials. Amazingly, Iran rejected this. It's the first time I ever looked at a policy and went: "This is the stupidest, most gratuitously elaborate, ineffective thing I've ever seen, and it could concievably kill me."

The hard part of this for Kerry is that I can't see his political capital lasting more than a few days. I know this is a referendum on Bush, but without that anti-Bush glue holding it together, what's Kerry got? The choice between a near abject surrender to pacify one wing, and the political reality that his position is almost locked into place by other events. What happens when Kerry's position is just Bush's plan, the plan he promises to do better, after the allies he goes to refuse to help? The majority of what his debate strategy was "I will do exactly what he did, only better". Which is fine, and it isn't even a flip-flop. I don't think Kerry flip-flops. I just don't think he has any position he feels strongly about, 30 years in and still an unformed block. Without an opposition argument to lean against, I don't know what he's going to do to change anything. And that's what's grating on me, if the best I can hope for out of a Kerry administration is that it will be just like the Bush administration, what's the point?

I keep looking at this election, and it's still the question of whether 60% of what I want is enough. It's the question of whether we get four more years, or whether we get eight more years. The stakes are high. I could make this easy on myself. In the past four years I've gotten to see a lot of people who I consider friends, become caught up in a blind rage. And then they throw that snarky assumption out, and expect me to laugh alongside them. But I can't hate like that. I wish I could understand that hate, but I can't. I fear that I will lose friends this way, but better to know how bad the taint is, isn't it?

When Arlen Specter was voting on the impeachment of Clinton, he brought up the old Scottish law position of "Not Proven" which someone described as "We know ya did it, but the evidence lacks. Just don't do it again." Arlen's always been slightly crazy brilliant like that. That's why I'll vote for him without question. And that's why I'm still up at 3:30 putting this together. In this case, I'm going to have to judge Kerry as "Not Proven."