Well, it now looks like Charles is the only person in America who thinks healthcare reform will pass. This is especially depressing, because all the House has to do is swallow its pride and vote for the Senate bill word-for-word and Scotty-Mc-whats-his-f#@% won't be able to do a thing about it. Apparently, that's not going to happen, either because liberal Democrats think the Senate bill is too weak or because conservative Democrats want summary executions for anyone who tries to have an abortion (my brother thinks that the 2050 health care bill should include a provision banning the expenditure of Federal subsidy dollars on some other entirely legal procedure; maybe appendectomies; or operations that involve the left kidney, but not the right kidney). I guess the moral of this story is that people running for office do it, not because they want to help any of us, but because they think it would be fun to be a Representative/Senator/President whatever. Actually helping people would jeopardize their chances of reelection (this wouldn't be the case if health care involved more explosions and predator drones; something else to work on for 2050), ergo...
The funny thing is, this is an even stronger argument for voting than if the people you were voting for actually cared about your problems.
I volunteered for the Obama campaign. I was really bad at it. I could not for the life of me understand why anyone would be on the fence. On one side of the ballot, you had cranky-Mc-old-guy who wanted to be President (as far as I can tell) because he thought it was his turn, and his side-kick, who seemed (seems?) at first, second, and third glances to be barely literate. Given that the founding fathers (not anticipating future developments in technology, or the fact that we would ever choose to have a standing army) accidentally gave the President the (legal) authority to end the world, I am hard-pressed to think of someone the Democrats could have run that I wouldn't have voted for (Lieberman, I guess, but I already made that mistake in 2000).
That's why I don't understand people's uneasiness with "negative campaigning." Our leaders can hurt us. They can hurt us a lot. Sometimes the best argument for voting for someone is "hey, at least he's not that other guy." Gore wasn't exactly inspiring, but he didn't treat war as an amusement park ride.
So, in summary: those of you who never vote because you don't trust government are technically right, but should probably vote anyway.
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