In the end, I voted McCain

This is not an endorsement by any means.  I think both candidates are terribly flawed and I am dismayed that this is the best we can come up with at such an important time in our nations’s history.  The electorate would have been much better served if the nominees had been Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney, each of whom was far superior in both intellect and leadership to their parties’ actual nominees.

I’m a two issue voter this year, even with the financial crisis still unfolding around us.  My issues are geopolitics and energy.  Neither candidate, in my opinion, has a genuine understanding of geopolitics or a true theoretical foundation upon which to build such an understanding.  Both are mere ideologues on geopolitics, their positions are non-reflective echoes of partisan positions that may or may not have any grounding in geopolitical realities.  I expected this sort of thing from McCain, but I was amazed at the general thougtlessness of Obama.  He has the reputation of a scholarly, thoughtful man, but I’ve read just about everything he has published (and that is not very much), and find him bright but not particularly insightful.  His work is primarily descriptive and reminds me of a class report one would expect from a college sophomore.  Where he is prescriptive, he is largely an unimaginitive and doctrinaire liberal.  This is not meant to use “liberal” as a pejorative, but merely to state that I find no spark of insight in his thoughts.  There is nothing there to turn me against him, as McCain is similarly unimaginative, but there is nothing to excite me either.

The difference that I do find on the candidates is on energy.  I have found flaws with both candidates’ energy proposals on this blog.  McCain’s nuclear plan is pure fantasy, and his “all of the above” approach has as much depth as a bumper sticker.  But, despite her characterization in much of the mainstream media as a lightweight, Palin is by far the strongest of the four principles on energy policy.  So, McCain has that slender reed going for him.

Obama, on the other hand, lost my vote late in the race solely on the energy issue.  Earlier, I was dismayed at his selection of Joe Biden and Biden’s comments on coal.  Then, over the weekend, Obama’s long suppressed comments on coal were the last straw.  This nation is going to need growing capacity on its electrical grid.  In addition to that, old and obsolete plants will continue to go offline.  There is no way the US will meet increasing demand without utilizing coal fired plants over the next few decades.  Closing the door to coal as Biden wants to do, or making them prohibitively expensive as Obama indicated he plans to do, is unconsionable.  Electricity prices will skyrocket and blackouts and brownouts will increase in frequency.  It is a simple equation – we need capacity, and wind and solar will not be sufficient get us there for several decades.

I don’t like to use the common phrase because neither man and neither party is evil, but my vote for McCain was definitely a vote between two lessers.