By
John Perich
, Boston College
I Hate the Candidates
I was in an odd position a few weeks ago, when the time to register for my
absentee ballot came up. Thusly:
(1) I didn’t want either Bush or Gore to win. Gore, our current President’s
loyal understudy, has all the centrist position-swapping of his role model. In
addition, his environmentalist ideology could take us from the modern age of
dirty, polluting automobiles and coal power to the classical age of dirty,
disease-spreading horses. Bush, the “opposite” of Gore, has all the
eloquence of Abraham Lincoln chewing on his beard. Most of his issues are either
borrowed from the Democrats (trigger locks on handguns, prescription plans for
those on Medicare) or stolen wholeheartedly (and half-assedly) from the
Libertarians (school vouchers, privatizing Social Security, etc).
(2) One of those two candidates would win, regardless of how I voted. In case
the “@bc.edu” didn’t clue you in (you were going to e-mail me, right? …
Hello?), I live in Massachusetts. My state has the distinction of electing a
Senator so stupid, he couldn’t decide whether to kill his mistress in a
drowning or a car crash-so he did both. Massachusetts didn’t just hand over
its electoral votes to Gore; it called him on Election night to make sure he
slept well. “I’m thinking of you, Al … yeah, guess what I’m wearing
…”
(3) As far as I was concerned, voting for a third-party candidate would be
the practical equivalent of not voting at all. It’s not as if I actually
wanted to support any of the “also-rans,” anyhow. Ralph Nader looks about as
qualified as you’d expect a potato-faced busybody whose greatest hit was
destroying the perfectly-decent Chevrolet Corvair. Harry Browne, the one
candidate with whom I most agree, has his share of wacky ideas (putting a bounty
on the heads of troublesome foreign leaders doesn’t fly so well when
Ayatollahs do it; why should the President do it?). And if Buchanan’s such an
isolationist (heavy tariffs, strict immigration, etc), why won’t he just
isolate himself in a dark room and leave us be?
