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Voting a straight Democratic ticket is always easy, but today I’d like to extend a special thank you to Ohio’s Libertarian, Green and -especially- Republican parties for not only making it easy, but also making it the right thing to do.

Thanks guys, you’re the best.

The Green candidate pissed me off the most, because I loved his ideas and would have loved to vote for him. But the disconnect between what he was promising, what he could deliver, and what the state actually needs was so bad that voting for him would have been the equivalent of just kicking the voting machine and walking away. Pandagon has a huge scuffle going down about if it is better to vote your conscience or vote pragmatically for the lesser of the more plausible evils.

In Ohio today, it was a no-brainer. It helped that the lesser of the more plausible evils, Ted Strickland, is really good and I’m thrilled that he won. So it’s not like I had to hold my nose to vote for him, but even if he was less than awesome I’d have still voted for him over Bob Fitrakis.

Fitrakis’ fruity hippie granola-eating platform as given to the Ohio League of Women Voters is a dreamy list of goals:

As governor I will provide universal health care for all Ohioans, subsidize high-tech sunrise
industries and provide tax incentives for new small businesses. Also, I would allow the industrial
growth and use of hemp for food, textile, paper and fuel products. I would fight to keep the
traditional separation of church and state and stop the growth of theocratic forces in the state that
tend to drive out talented and well-educated college graduates. I would invest heavily in Ohio’s
infrastructure, particularly with my back-to-the-future program building trains, trolleys and trams
for mass transit. I would invest as well in alternative energy resources – solar, wind and biofuels
like butanol. I would reduce the amount of prisons and reserve them only for violent people. I
would medicalize drug addiction and take the savings from the prison industrial complex and
invest it in higher education.

Decriminalize non-violent drug addicts? Treatment? Alternative energy? Mass transit? Industrial hemp? *Swoon* All awesome things. But as for his power to deliver, he may as well have offered me a pony.

You can have a Green government when you can prove you’re ready for it. This year, you can have a Democrat.

There is no way that the Greens could take my smoking shell of a state and deliver any results from a single one of these promises at the end of four years. A governor has only so much power especially without lots of support from other members of his party in the state government, and there is 20 years of Republican-appointed beauracracy and general fucked-uppedness to machete through. And when they didn’t deliver the sun, the moon the stars and the pony, we would then have evidence that all the Green’s ideas are stupid and third parties are so dumb. I don’t want that. I want for the voters in Ohio to see how good liberal ideas are, even if they have to be eased into them like universal health care and alternative energy is a cold swimming pool.

This election gives me hope that we’re getting ready to start swimming. We have a minimum-wage amendment on the ballot that would provide for the wage to rise in the future as the cost of living increases. The whole state saw through Blackwell’s self-interested godbaggery and gave him a well-deserved thrashing at the booth. Strickland is the kind of guy that can get Ohioans to calm down after six years of being whipped into a gay-bashing, ID-supporting, self-interest-ignoring frenzy by the Republican machine.

Strickland has an impressive amount of political experience and is extremely popular. Sure, he’s religious, but if it wasn’t for the past six years of Free-Market Jeebus having the balls of our leadership in a vise, religious wouldn’t be the swear word it is now among some on the left. And there is a part of me that wants to watch the wingnut faction go blind from the glare of a religious politician who has actually cracked a Bible open once or twice and read the parts about not being a bigoted sexist greedy asshole.

There’s another part of me that likes the fact that his wife wrote a book called “The Little Girl Who Grew Up To Be Governor” and that they met while getting their PhDs. Come on, how feminist is that?

He’s got religion, so people who vote for the right because us lefties are so godless are happy. He’s a genuine Democrat, so the godless lefties can be happy. He’s worked in a prison and is the son of a steelworker, so the men’s men are happy. He’s married to a PhD-holding, feminist-leaning not-prop woman, so us feminists can mostly like him. The only thing I can find that is wanting is his record on abortion. If that NARAL rating was about 50% or more higher, Strickland would be as close to perfect as a Democrat could reasonably be. I’d feel better about the NARAL rating if reproductive rights were in a more secure place, but he does have a few votes that I agree with (notably NO on making it a seperate crime to harm a fetus during the execution of another crime and NO on banning family planning funding in foriegn aid) that make me optimistic about dealing with Strickland about abortion. Certainly he’s leaps and bounds above Blackwell and haven’t seen any info on the Green or Libertarian that would make me think we had a better option there.

Strickland kicked the ever-living crap out of Blackwell at the voting booth today, so I can’t come down too hard on the 1-2% of Ohio voters who are die-hard Greens and voted their conscience and went with the guy who’s platform is basically a progressive wetdream.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 12:03 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.