In the interest of full disclosure, I thought I’d list the reasons why I voted the way I did. I know conservative media regularly accuse professors of politicizing the classroom, but an honest discussion of why one chooses the way one did can also be useful exercise of citizenship. (See Drezner for an example of what I was thinking of.) So with that goal, not demagoguery, in mind, here we go:
1. The Tea Party Scares Me
This is easily the most important reason for me. Regular readers of this blog will know that I vote in the Republican primary and write regularly about the Republican party, but almost never about the Democrats. (Even in Korea where I live, my sympathies are with the conservatives.) I don’t see myself as a Democrat. I see myself as a moderate Republican, like Andrew Sullivan or (less so) David Frum. Unfortunately, the Tea Party has made the GOP very inhospitable for moderates.
Given Romney’s propensity to blow with the ideological wind rather than stake a claim somewhere, I think it is likely he’ll get bullied by the hard right once in office. Following Kornacki, my problem with Romney is not his ideology – because I don’t know what that is – but the party from which he stems, run, as it is, by increasingly radical, Christianist, southern right-wingers. I find it simply impossible to vote for a party so contemptuous of science, so willing to violate church-state distinctions, so committed to a heavily armed citizenry, so obsessed with regulating sex, so strutting and belligerent toward the rest of the world, so unwilling to compromise on taxes to close the deficit, etc. Hint to the RNC: the rest of the country is not Dixie; please stop dragging us down this road. This southernization of the GOP in the last 20 years has made it harder and harder for me to vote for national Republicans, even though I vote for them a lot in Ohio. Not surprisingly, I find Andrew Sullivan’s conservatism quite congenial.
As I argued before, Romney won the primary by pandering to the Tea Party, not by confronting it. He did not by carve out his own moderate GOP base against it. Instead, he coopted voters who preferred Santorum, Bachmann, or Perry, by calling himself called himself a ‘severe conservative’ and all that. (All this is why I ultimately voted for Ron Paul in the GOP primary.) This means that once he’s POTUS, he’ll be under regular right-wing pressure. Old, rash promises from the primaries will be replayed on TV, and Romney won’t have the moderate coalition to push back. Grrr. I just wish Romney had fought the primary as who he was, rather writing all these Tea Party checks he’ll get bullied to cash. I might have voted for him then. Too bad Huntsman got no traction…
2. I don’t really know what Romney wants to do with the presidency.
In 2004 and 2008, I felt like the ideological choices were pretty clear. The candidates were distinct, and choices were meaningful. This year, I really have no idea, primarily because of Romney. He’s just all over the place, and his epiphanies and changes of heart regularly follow his electoral needs rather than any believable personal growth. (This, on abortion, is a good example of what I mean; who knows what he’ll do?) Romney also doesn’t disclose much – most obviously how his budget math would work. His secrecy just confuses me more as to what he’ll do as POTUS. So it’s not clear to me why I should vote for Romney if he is only the not-Obama. As I argued after the first debate, my sympathy for Romney evaporated when he so shamelessly etch-a-sketched himself. Not-Obama is not really a reason. Here is a nice piece from a former Gingrich primary staffer that illustrates just how slippery and unknowable Romney really is. It notes how many Republicans were calling him a liar already during the primary. That should be worrisome for everyone, regardless of partisanship.
3. I am very uncomfortable giving the POTUS to a creature of Wall Street just 3 years after the Great Recession.
I am amazed this issue gets so little play. Has everyone forgotten already how much damage the financial industry did just a few years ago? The scale of the bailouts required? (If you have, go watch this and this.) I don’t actually mind that Romney worked for a capital fund. They play a necessary and useful role in the economy, and the issue has been unfairly demagogued by everyone from Newt Gingrich to Barak Obama. The bigger question is whether Romney has the professional distance to properly regulate Wall Street. Until the first debate, he seemed to want to roll back Dodd-Frank entirely. (Now of course, no one really knows. See point 1 above.) Assuming he still carries about the values of the class where he worked for many years and made his wealth – particularly that disturbing corporate raider/Gordon Gekko posturing (see this famous pic, if you haven’t already) – I wonder if that is good for the county when almost everyone, but Republicans on the Senate banking committee, believes Wall Street needs a tighter regime.
4.Romney’s foreign policy team is filled with neocons, and I think he’ll start a war with Iran.
His instincts seem to be centrist. I thought his performance in the 3rd (foreign policy) debate was pretty good. He said smart, sane stuff about Pakistan and China. But his advisors give me the chills, and the big foreign policy voices on the right – the WSJ, Heritage, Weekly Standard, AEI, Washington Post editorial page – are still unwilling to honestly admit that American overreached under Bush. I would like to see a far more cautious US foreign policy that doesn’t spend nearly so much money – the defense budget is far too large – and shifts the burden more to our allies. Let Japan and India deal with China first before we ‘pivot’ and spend even more on aircraft carriers. More generally, I would really like to see a significant de-militarization of US foreign policy and domestic culture. The neocons of the Romney camp make that pretty unlikely.
5. The gridlock-producing, scorched-earth GOP opposition to Obama should not be rewarded.
Obama’s efforts to turn around the economy, and just about everything else, including appointments required for the government to function properly, were blocked by astonishingly extreme Republican opposition. Romney, disturbingly, marketed this as a reason to vote for him: the GOP House would not loathe him intensely, so he therefore might actually get legislation through. But morally, that’s a terrible, cynical position. It allows Republican radicals to hold the country hostage by effectively shutting down policy-making until they get the president they want – which is what the Tea Party did in the summer 2011 debt-ceiling fiasco. The response to that shouldn’t be capitulation, as it effectively undermines the two-party system by allowing progress only when Republicans are in the White House. That’s awful, and undemocratic. It effectively denies legitimacy to any Democratic president by obstructing him at every turn.
The GOP House has blocked record numbers of appointments in this presidency and even filibustered the debt ceiling hike, despite 70 years of pro forma votes for it in the past. So if you vote for Romney, because the GOP Congress will work with him while they’ll continue to stone-wall Obama, then you’re effectively allowing the most radical elements of the GOP to blackmail the country. That kind of behavior should not be rewarded; it should be punished – even if in practice Romney’s opportunism is accurate because Democrats won’t be nearly so leninist-obstructionist if he wins. Again, Kornacki makes this point quite well. Also, I still suspect that a fair amount of the extremist response to Obama on the right is identitarian (racial and cultural panic), rather than political. He’s hardly the ‘socialist’ he’s made out to be, and that kind of paranoia should not be validated either.
In short, I am not really voting for Obama or against Romney. I am mostly voting against the Tea Party and the southern-rightist radicalization of the GOP. I suppose I could have voted for a libertarian or other third party (I found this tempting), but the logic of strategic voting in strict two-party system means that’s a wasted vote.
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Here are a few more read-worthy endorsements:
I found the Washington Post editorial endorsement of Obama a good statement very close to my own views.
I also thought the Economist endorsement of Obama was pretty much on target.
Here is nice run-down of all the suspicions I have of Romney – the manipulation, the refusal to share information, the susceptibility to tea-party bullying.
If you actually really like Obama, Chait’s endorsement is for you.
Here’s a good endorsement for Romney from Douthat, and here is probably the best I’ve seen, and closest to my own views, from Frum.
Robert E Kelly 
If I were voting these are exactly the reasons why I would have voted for Obama. Romney just scares me with the kind of people he has surrounded himself with. I don’t know if I should be happy or sad about this but I found myself agreeing a lot with Gary Johnson.
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As someone who voted for Ron Paul but who worries about the Tea Party, you might find this research on the movement to be of interest (assuming you haven’t already seen it): http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/PA705.pdf
And here’s a video of the study’s authors – as well as Jonathan Rauch – discussing their findings: http://www.cato.org/multimedia/events/libertarian-roots-tea-party
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Thanks. Who do libertarians prefer?
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Well, if you take Reason Magazine as representative of a broad swath of libertarians, it’d be Gary Johnson (see here: http://bit.ly/VAZCYz ). Between Obama-Romney, my sense is that they tilt toward Romney, if only because they prefer a disaster to a catastrophe (as most can’t stand Romney).
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The problem is that voting for third parties is a lost vote.
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That’s certainly what Georgetown’s Randy Barnett argued in yesterday’s WSJ ( http://on.wsj.com/Qo0wpR ), although Andrew Napolitano likes to quip that it’s better to vote for what you want and not get it rather than to vote for what you don’t want and get it anyway.
I am, at present, agnostic on this matter. I take Barnett’s point, but I need to look into the history of minor/3rd parties and the degree to which their relative success has prodded the major parties to co-opt their message.
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Great read, especially like the simpsons video at the top ha. I wrote an article on it myself if yoy fancy a read http://economicinterest.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/the-best-man-for-the-job/
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Thanks. I read the link. Sounds very similar to what I am trying to say as well.
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Please remove me from your list. I find it very interesting that someone so educated can so ignorant.
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Sorry. This is why I tried to say in the first paragraph that this post was meant to be an honest statement of my own thinking, however flawed, and not ideology. I did link to Romeny endorsements at the bottom of the page. So tell me why Romney would be a better choice. It’s a debate worth having.
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I’m not American, but I’ll add my thoughts anyway. First of all, great post. I consider myself a right of centre voter, but I would not have voted for Romney for exactly the reasons you outlined.
It seems to me that reasonable Republicans like you could quite easily find a home in the Democrat’s camp. It is only broadly defined as ‘the left’ in the States because the Republicans have moved politics so far to the right since the days of Reagan (who himself would be seen as too liberal by all too many of today’s conservative Republicans).
To those of us observing America from the outside, it’s a very disturbing sight. As someone on the centre right, the modern Republican party is a sobering warning of the consequences of pandering to the very worst in the electorate and neglecting the common good.
Hopefully sensible Republicans will be able to work with the Democrats to reduce the deficit AND raise taxes to sensible level. America is falling behind Asia and Western Europe in terms of infrastructure and human capital but if the Republicans continue to wage a war of attrition against Obama, it seems to me that there is little hope of recovery.
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Question: Senator Harry Reid wants to raise the debt ceiling of the United States, I think by another 20 trillion USD. Should the US Republicans just say yes? If they think that this runs contray to fiscal order, are they allowed to disagree? If they disagree, would you say that are blocking?
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Yes, I think they shoudl vote for it. The debt ceiling is a useful reminder that we should be balancing not borrow, but blocking the hike, as in 2011, jeopadizes America’s credit rating.
What really needs to happen is agreement on spending cuts and tax hikes, and in what ratio. The debt ceiling does not help clarify those choices. It just raiseds the temperature of the debate.
In fact, I recall reading somewhere last summer, that the US is the only country in the world that does this. If we want to stop borrowing, then we have to raise more revenue and spend less of it.
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Thank you. I am glad you liked it.
1. You are absolutely right that the GOP freaks out foreigners. I see it all the time. The insularity of the American right is a point I make on this blog a lot. In fact, this is one of the reasons I vote for Democrats at the national level now.
2. The GOP has moved so far to right that I am now basically a conservative Democrat. I guess that is true. But I think it is important that moderates stay within the GOP and vote for moderates in the primary, in order to slow the right-wing take-over. I voted for Bush 1 in 92 and Dole in 96, and I am still proud of those votes. Someone needs to stay in the GOP and pushback, and I did work with the Ohio GOP for a decade, so…
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I’ll out myself as a Canadian right off the bat so you can put this into perspective. One result of the presidential election that I found amusing were the reports of traumatized Republicans who thought that moving to Canada or Australia was a rational response to Obama’s reelection (no idea whether it was true or not). It seems no one had bothered to inform these guys that despite our conservative government in Ottawa, gays can marry north of the 49th, socialized health care has been a fact for nearly 50 years, the fight over abortion rights was settled in the 1970s and the only thing keeping us from legalizing marijuana is a freaked out DEA and the rest of the American security apparatus. Usually we see these “I’m moving to Canada!” responses from American liberals enraged at GOP triumphs, not this time. Odd, but funny.
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That’s a good observation. Canada is like the nice version of the United States. 🙂
I also think your DEA quip is right. In fact, that’s probably the case in lots of places. Thank god legalization is coming, however slowly.
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Douglas is, of course, correct in his description of Canada and the fact that social conservatives, in particular, might not find the place to their liking.
For economic conservatives, however, Canada deserves – and has been getting – a lot of praise in recent years. The Fraser Institute recently ranked Canada at #5 in its “Economic Freedom of the World” index. The USA’s ranking? #18. To some extent, this is because other countries have been liberalizing their economies faster relative to the US, but it also accounts for the creeping regulatory state and exploding fiscal situation here in America. So, yes, Canada has nationalized healthcare, but social insurance programs tend to be less distortionary than a dense web of regulations and an ballooning debt/deficit (which create uncertainty about future taxes). Here’s the Fraser Institute’s report: http://bit.ly/SNKFNx
Canada has also been touted as a model of economic reform for the United States for the way it handled its budget troubles back in the 1990s. By dramatically cutting spending – and, eventually, the deficit – Canada got their fisc in order, a process undertaken largely by a liberal government. The result was a decade (’97-’07) of strong growth. See here: http://bit.ly/SNKOAt
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Yeah, Canada is a nice place. Sorta what America would be like if our government was less dysfunctional and our conservative party less self-destructive.
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Well, all is not lost for the GOP, but they might have to do something they are loath to do….take a lesson from Canada. The federal Tories were in a somewhat similar situation a decade ago; in opposition, locked out of the fastest rising voting block (new Canadians), shunned and labeled as mouth breathing nativists by urban voters. Stephen Harper changed that by reaching out to and recruiting candidates from those immigrant communities and, more importantly, muzzling and leashing his social conservatives from rural BC and Alberta who were scaring the hell out urban voters and enfranchised immigrants. The result….two minority governments and now a comfortable majority government, none of which would have been possible if he’d allowed his reactionary caucus to give full vent to their pet theories of immigrants destroying Canada, re-fighting abortion and gay marriage. And all this from the most socially conservative Prime Minister we’ve had since…probably ever. But he is a smart politician who is not willing to impose his personal beliefs on a country that would categorically reject them.
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Learn from Canada?!! Never! You traitor!
(Actually, the deal you sketch out sounds pretty good.)
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I know its a little late to continue this thread but I came across this:
http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/02/02/welcome-to-my-world/
which explains in some detail how the federal Conservatives managed to make themselves immigrant friendly. Whether the GOP can duplicate this success is something I’m not qualified to speculate on.
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Hey Prof Kelly, you got a new reader here. You can thank your lovely kids in your famous BBC appearance.
BTW, this is my first time seeing that 2012 Simpsons clip. Yes, still quite funny…
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