This is a melancholy day for me. Over the past few years I have been studying American politics and have enjoyed learning perspectives from different ideologies. I personally lean towards conservative values when it comes to creating legislature, however I am socially liberal. I have watched the two candidates for a long time and now that it's all over I cannot help but feel a sad calmness sweep over me. What would have Mitt Romney as a president been like? I personally don't think any theory would be correct, he had plans we were not completely aware of like any presidential candidate.
What concerns me about Obama is his partisanship, erratic behavior and lack of bipartisan communicative abilities. I have watched both parties intently and have concluded that the democratic party is much more stubborn than the republicans. The republicans are too split and cannot properly organize. The democrats seem to stop at nothing to see their ideas to the end, even if that end doesn't look so bright. They seem hell bent on ignoring a large portion of this country's population and fighting against any who stand in their way often in a very dirty manner. They have a vision for America that doesn't fit in line with what all the people want, only what the more liberal crowd wants. The republicans are not simply money grubbers looking to shrink big goverment to aid their own ends and I have seen motivation and drive to work with the democrats, but they are refused their fundamentals and offered slanted compromises.
Frankly, Obama frightens me. He will cater to a specific demographic, like gays or blacks for instance, because they help his campaign and then will largely ignore them while president. I get the feeling like the presidency is a position with extremely privileged information that can change any previous plan and the population will be left scratching their heads. I see candidates campaign one way and then once in the seat play the role dramatically different. Does this make them a liar? I would say to a degree yes, but the simple fact is that there is a lot of classified information and the president is privvy to most of it.
Take Benghazi for instance, from an outsiders perspective it looks at the very least negligent on the part of the administration. Weird misdirection about a hate video, secretary Clinton wrongly taking the full blame, that was a weird scenario. The Fast and the Furious scandal also seems very odd and it appears that more facts are needed as is the case most of the time when it comes to government scandals. There just seems to be a lot of corruption in my country and it's very worrisome. Someone needs to stand up to it and I thought that might have been Mitt Romney.
I had my hopes up for Romney because I think he could have changed things for the better. I think his choice of vice president was very poor, there were better choices like Marco Rubio and a few others. I think Romney would work with democratcs much better than Obama works with republicans. With all the hate that has been thrown towards Obama for years I don't see how he can regain respect from his opponents. Will this simply be four more years of a gimped democratic party being challenged by the republicans to the point of stalemate? Or can there be some kind of understanding and legitimate compromise?
My country fell ill a while back and doesn't seem to be getting any better. I think a lot of people lost hope yesterday and it scares me to think about what might happen. We were all faced with a scenario where we had to weed through lies to discover shakey kernals of truth at best. People won't vote when the waters look muddy. In the end, who really knows what is going on in the oval office and in the government in general? What's presented to me through the TV screen and the internet can be a captivating experience, but it's largely just smoke and mirrors displayed by porcelain personalities. Why have democracy if the country is just going to split into factions and vote merely based off those? There are better ways, much much better ways than this.
-Sab