United Liberty

Note: This is part one of a three-part series that will cover reasons that a voter may choose to support a specific presidential candidate. Parts 2 and 3 for Barack Obama and Gary Johnson will be available soon.

No matter where you stand politically, there are reasons you might want to vote for Mitt Romney in November. Mitt certainly has some unappealing points on his resume, but there’s a silver lining to every cloud. At least that’s what I’m told.

So here are a few possible reasons you might have for standing with Romney in November:

You believe a Republican victory is all that matters.

If you look for the people with the “R” beside their name and vote for them, no matter what, then obviously Romney is your guy, and your mind was made up before the presidential primaries started. I’d encourage you to consider candidates and issues more than parties and party lines, but that’s a different conversation for a different day. Vote Romney, and hope for the best.

You really liked Obama in 2008, but you aren’t crazy about him now.

A lot of people fell for the “Hope and Change” rhetoric last time around. Obama is a great politician, and beyond that, McCain was no better than Bush. The good news for you is that Romney and Obama aren’t really all that different. Sure, Romney is a Republican, so he’ll be a bit farther right than Obama on some issues, but Massachusetts Republicans don’t get to be governor because they’re conservatives.

He’ll take the Republican view on some social issues, and he might not want to grow government as much as Obama would, but the reality is that there are few differences between Romney and Obama. If you thought you liked Obama in 2008, you could probably like Romney in 2012.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” - Thomas Jefferson, 1816, Letter to Thomas Yancey

Our nation, for several years now, has been in extended crisis mode. By the end of the Bush administration, we’d reached a point of complacency. We had wars raging on two fronts, but rather than being something the entire nation was focused on and engaged in, it was little more than partisan fodder to be used against Bush and the Republicans in the newspapers and on the nightly news (as evidenced by the fact that the constant front-page stories of soldier death counts miraculously disappeared once Obama took office).

Then came the financial collapse, which effectively ended John McCain’s chances at the presidency and ushered in Barack Obama, a political neophyte who campaigned not on specific policy positions and political philosophies, but on his claim to being “not Bush”, ushering in an era of “hope and change”. Unfortunately, while Obama has certainly achieved “change”, in doing so he has all but destroyed hope in America, at least until he leaves office.

These past two weeks we’ve seen the stock market rising and falling more often than a Kennedy after a night of partying. The dollar continues to be weakened, America’s credit rating is downgraded for the first time in history, unemployment remains high, and the prospects for improvement seem bleak in the short term. We are largely dependent on our enemies for our energy consumption, mainly because we refuse to access the vast reserves of energy we have on our own soil and in the oceans surrounding us. The waves of bad news crashing over us seem endless right now.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010 will be recorded in the history books as one of the most historic and tumultuous in the annals of American politics. Just two short years after a relative political neophyte named Barack Obama swept across the political landscape, winning the presidency, increasing Democrat majorities in the House and Senate, and driving out record numbers of youth and minorities to the polls with his steady mantra of “Hope and Change”, it seems some of the luster has faded.

Indeed, it is precisely because America saw little hope in their smooth-talking but results-deficient president that they turned on him and his party resoundingly. Even up to Election Day he was rallying the Democrat troops, and Speaker Pelosi was proclaiming that Democrats would retain control of the House, yet the rest of America had seen the writing on the wall for months. As it turned out, the American people had placed their hope in changing the balance of power.

With a smattering of races across the country still too close to call and undergoing recounts, here is what we know. The Republican Party has picked up at least 61 seats in the House, giving them their largest majority there since 1946, and five in the Senate, rendering Democrats impotent in any attempts to ram through any more controversial legislation. Republicans have picked up nearly a dozen governorships, including Michigan and Pennsylvania. The state legislatures in North Carolina and Alabama have turned Republican for the first time since the end of the War Between the States. This was part of the 11-state pick-up for Republicans of state legislatures.

This historic Republican wave ended the tenure of some of the longest serving Democrats, including Ike Skelton (elected in 1976), John Spratt (1983), Paul Kanjorski (1982), Rick Boucher (1982) and Russ Feingold (1992).