Nobody to vote for, again

I tried, really I did.

After a history of voting for third parties for President, based mostly on a dislike of both major party candidates, I proclaimed that this year, I was going to vote for one of them. The motivator for this decision was the realization that politics is inherently all about compromise-- that the very act of voting, no matter for whom, is a declaration of compromise, given that no candidate will ever represent my views exactly. At that point, it's much like the famous quote, apocryphally attributed to Dr. Jonson: "Madam, we've settled that. Now we're haggling over the price."

The problem is, both major-party candidates have gone out of their way, it seems, to tell me they don't want my vote. Leaving the foreign policy realm out of the discussion for now, President Bush has initiated one of the most disastrous fiscal policies I've ever seen out of a Republican, and John Kerry is naive enough to believe that technology can somehow save us money by instituting a national health care plan. (I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt on that one; I'd rather not believe he's intentionally planning on wasting trillions of taxpayer dollars on a boondoggle.) Bush believes that gay couples don't deserve the same social and legal protections straight couples do, and Kerry apparently sees no ethical problems whatsoever in using the stem cells from aborted fetuses for research purposes.

How am I supposed to vote for either of them, when they both tell me, "Your core beliefs aren't important to me" ?

And before y'all go all third-party-candidate-y on me, let me just point out that one does not generally start one's political career with the Presidency. Even the current President Bush spent some time as Governor of Texas, after all. So no, sorry, I will not entertain seriously any candidate who hasn't even been elected to the position of Junior Assistant Dogcatcher.