On Voting

A Substack about voting caught my eye. I think it is too one-sided. 

Voting is always and only about enacting certain policies. No candidate is going to be your friend, counselor, avatar, or defender. They enact and administer laws and policies.

I don't think so. The overall point ("No one will agree with everything you want" etc.) is fine. If something is mostly true, it's appreciated. 

Still. This is a somewhat simplistic account. There are people in public life, especially on the local level, who will do those things. Are we saying that, for instance, no one in public life is going to be the "defender" of trans people? 

No one will have the staff and constituent services to help specific people? Are they not partially about personality, not pure policy?

One of my principles is to be wary of absolutes. This does not mean good rules of thumb are not common. I am somewhat tired of people who go all "let's press that" to find some sort of exceptions to make things complicated. This is especially so when a comment online is parsed as if the person wrote a carefully crafted brief. Things are messy.

This is the primary season. The stakes are higher in November. My current House representative bothers me in various respects. For instance, he is just too knee-jerk pro-Israel. But, he "mostly" agrees with me on what matters given the alternative. I also doubt he will have a primary opponent, anyway, though I hope he does.

The primary season is a chance for you to look at the candidates and see more than "enacting certain policies." Yes, there is a certain minimum you have to seek out. Again, the substack provides a good rule of thumb. 

But, not every electoral choice is going to turn on that. Personalities matter, including when choosing who will be the ultimate nominee.

(There also will be limited cases where the candidate is someone you will find very hard to vote for. When the stakes are Biden or Trump, even if you are a left-wing type, you vote for sanity. A vote for the Alabama legislature might not have such high stakes.)  

I saw a comment elsewhere that people should not be "fans" of politicians. The word "fan" is broad enough that a person can be a fan of a politician. The politician can be such a good politician (and person) that being a fan is okay. Fandom is not the same as worshiping a sports figure or something. This is a case of an open-ended word being used too narrowly.

Nonetheless, Substack is correct if the lesson is that voting should not be used as an emotional act of preference. Voters do that. Voters are human. We should recognize the human aspect of our institutions. But, politicians are also not just "policy machines." They are individuals.

That factors in our voting. It isn't always bad. 

ETA: DeSantis suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Trump. I guess he can focus more on making Florida more fascist. 

Some people had fun ridiculing how lousy his campaign was as well as people trying to make him the alternative to Trump. At some point, that didn't do much for me, especially as Florida (third most populous state) continues to be so lousy.  

To the extent you actually want to at least pretend you are not all in for Trump, Nikki Haley was the person to support. She is far from ideal, including her weathervane ways (which on another level is politically useful), but there is more there to work with. 

Heck, she even has foreign policy experience as the U.N. representative.  She also has some personality. Anyway, I continue to be disgusted that Trump is so readily accepted as the candidate. "Well, yeah, my party's standard bearer is Ted Bundy, but JOE BIDEN!!!!"  Uh yeah. Come on.