Jamie

Weinstein

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October 27, 2008

I Do Not Endorse Baldwin, Keyes, Barr, McKinney, Nader . . . or Obama

It’s endorsement season and I can only imagine how many undecided voters have been waiting to see who I will endorse before making their minds up. In many respects, I have been doing a disservice to the country by keeping my endorsement secret for so long.

And, unfortunately, I will not be able to fulfill this civic service in today's column. Instead, I will announce the list of candidates for president who I will not be endorsing this election cycle.

Chuck Baldwin

Ron Paul has endorsed this Constitution Party nominee. If you are of the persuasion that the reason radical Islamists hate us is because of our actions around the world and if you believe that if we were only nicer everything would be just peachy in the world, you are a Chuck Baldwin man.  If you don't live in Candyland, I would suggest you vote for someone else. I will be. 

Alan Keyes

Alan Keyes is still running for president. Having failed to secure the Republican nomination and the Constitution Party nomination, Alan Keyes started his own party which will be on the ballot in all of three states, including my home state of Florida. 

Having followed Keyes's political career closely since the 2000 election, and having been an admirer of his tremendous rhetorical ability and outstanding mind, I do regret being forced to dismiss his presidential aspirations so casually. But any person of a sound mind would have to do just that.

During a wide ranging interview I conducted with him in April, Keyes showed an ideological rigidity and extreme megalomania that was simply disturbing. He called John McCain "evil" and accused him of wanting to destroy our republic. Welcome to crazy town. Fortunately, being on the ballot in three states makes a Keyes victory an impossibility. The real question is whether he will top a couple thousand votes.

Bob Barr

I have some libertarian tendencies myself, but like every other third-party candidate, Libertarian nominee Bob Barr simply does not have a serious foreign policy plan. Add in his opposition to the Patriot Act and his candidacy falls flat on its face in terms of understanding the threats that face us. And if you don't understand our enormous foreign policy challenges, you are not qualified to be president.

Cynthia McKinney

This is easy. No way in a million years. There are inanimate objects I would encourage you to support over Cynthia McKinney. I met her when she was appointed a visiting professor at Cornell University when I was an undergraduate there. I have followed her bizarre career since. She has shown a certain toughness that some may say is necessary to be president (she once punched a Capitol Hill police officer, for instance). Such "positives" aside, she is absolutely loony. Add in her seeming hatred of Jews and her recent assertion that the government executed 5,000 prisoners under the cover of Hurricane Katrina and, well, the decision writes itself. She is to politics what Jeremiah Wright is to preaching – incoherent, irrational and simply idiotic. No thank you.

Ralph Nader

Yes, he is running again. I won't be voting for him, but if you are ideologically predisposed to vote for someone of the left, please, by all means, vote away. In fact, I encourage you to do so. And bring friends.

Barack Obama

After dismissing the easily dismissible, we arrive at Illinois Senator Barack Obama.

Mr. Obama is a personally impressive person. He clearly has a sharp mind. He has succeeded terrifically in his academic career, first at Columbia University and then at Harvard Law School, where he became the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Furthermore, Obama deserves credit for being an excellent public communicator, a good family man and a historic figure who has inspired millions of Americans.

But that doesn't mean he should be president.

Economically, you don't even have to go any farther than his position on trade. Barack Obama has campaigned on an anti-free-trade platform. Nothing would be more ruinous to our fragile economy.

On foreign policy, Obama's running mate Joe Biden said it best when he predicted last week that if Obama is elected, rogue nations will test him shortly after his inauguration. The world's villains will likely view Obama as soft and pursue their maniacal ambitions betting that an Obama Administration will not act firmly and decisively to stop them. And they may very well be right. Obama has shown a stunning naivety when it comes to foreign policy, even offering to sit down with the world's worst dictators during his first year in office without any preconditions. While he has backed off that statement slightly, you still get the sense that Senator Hope and Change believes that the only reason we have a problem with the Iranian regime is that their leaders have yet to have encountered his charming personality.

If this were not enough, Obama and a Democratic Congress will have free reign to ram through reams of liberal legislation, including the anti-democratic Employee Free Choice Act, defense spending cuts – as Congressman Barney Frank has recently called for – and global warming legislation that will hamper our economy, not to mention all the liberal justices that will be confirm in the judiciary.

Boiled down, Barack Obama has an ideological predisposition for liberal policies that would hurt this country both economically and internationally. He has no record of accomplishment that one would expect of a presidential aspirant, and despite his calls for change and bi-partisanship, his record is paper thin in that regard.

The senator from Illinois is a fine man with some extraordinary talents, but there are plenty of fine men who shouldn't be president. Count him among them.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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