Election ramblings...

It's election time again and once again I am astounded by  the entire process, good and bad.

 Recently President Obama visited Madison and held a rally on the Library mall of the UW campus. Politics aside (a bit hard to do considering the visit was soley a political move); however, just try to remove the politics and it really was one of those moments in time where my daughter can later tell her children and grandchildren about the day the president of the United States came to town and she saw Air Force One, the presidential motorcade (more than once), and heard the president speak (albeit from a very far distance).


Aside from that though, as a taxpayer I am concerned about just how much I (and my fellow taxpayers) will end up having to pay for this visit--a visit that was nothing more than a political ploy to get votes for Tom Barrett. When you figure that the Madison police department alone had over 300 cops dedicated solely to various security-related tasks for the president's visit, that is a lot of wages that we'll now have to pay. Then add in the 129 Dane County deputies , 16 Capitol police, 53 State troopers, and the unknown number of UW campus police (by the way, why doesn't the secret service want people to know how many campus police were on duty?) and we are looking at a pretty big price tag! 

Now, certainly it is all well and good that the Democratic National Convention said that they are/were paying the costs of getting the President to the rally and that they paid the UW $10,500 to rent out the Library Mall area, but what about the other associated costs? I mean, lets be realistic this was not just a run of the mill national address that the president just happened to choose to give in Madison, Wisconsin, this was nothing more than a political endorsement and an expensive one at that that we taxpayers will have to carry the brunt of.

I see no reason why we, as taxpayers, should have to front the cost of endorsements for any other candidate! If you want to lend your support to another candidate, great but do it on your own dime or the dime of the candidate you are supporting!

Even more depressing than the thought of the costs of this shindig (which have yet to be fully tallied) is the number of  people who were interviewed in various media outlets who made statements like "I didn't even know there was an election, but I'll vote now."  The optimist in me says that maybe those people will go out and educate themselves on the various candidates and then go to the polls armed with that newly aquired knowledge and vote in hopes of helping guide our country to a better future. However, the realist in me also knows this just isn't likely. These people will have heard the retoric from the various outlets and, yes, from the President and vote because of some hero worship and because someone "famous" told them X was better than Y.

Look, lets all be honest here, X isn't necessarily better than Y, anymore than Y is better than X. Party affiliations are just that affiliations, it doesn't mean that they're better candidates or that they will lead the country to a better place simply because they choose to run on a Democratic or Republican ticket--it only means that they chose to connect themselves to a party. Sometimes this is done ONLY as a way to get on the ballot and has very little to do with where they actually stand on issues.  There are good Democrats and bad Republicans, just like there are good Republicans and bad Democrats, it is our job as voters to decide where the candidates actually belong (in the good or bad column). To just go down party lines because you heard that Republicans or Democrats were better than the other is not necessarily (ever?) a good idea. Do yourself and all of the rest of us a favor and EDUCATE yourselves on the various candidates and where they stand on issues that matter to you.  

Realistically sometimes (who am I kidding--most times) it comes down to not voting who is the "good" or "bad" candidate but instead becomes a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils and at that point it is a matter of hoping that all of the education and investigations that you have done gives you enough information to make that choice and that once all of those "lesser of two evils" that win will work together to help move our country along instead of continuing to try to prove who is better, and maybe that is the secret in voting we are putting forth our hope for our country's future, our own future, and the future of our children. We hope our votes will actually end up meaining something, and sometimes they do and soemtimes they don't, but we have to at least TRY!

So, please vote in the elections, but before you do so: Educate yourselves, do not simply vote for someone based on what someone else told you (even if it was a movie star, president, or your neighbor), and try to make a chose based on issues and not retoric.

If for no other reason, vote so you have the right to complain once the elections are over.