Voter guide

By Ken Marks

Voting to elect a president is essentially a defensive act. Our choice, in all but a small fraction of elections, is guided by a reflex to protect. In effect, when we vote we act as physicians: our byword is "Do no harm." That's why the worst thing we can do next week is to cast a vote that does harm without our realizing it. With this in mind, I've devised a simple survey that will tell you in advance whether your well-meaning vote will be harmful to the country.
Take a look at the following statements:

• Climate change is a real phenomenon, but people are at most a negligible part of the cause.

• The problem of voter fraud is a threat to the integrity of our voting system.

• Raising taxes on millionaires will do more harm than good.

• Our lives would be more financially secure if the federal government reduced its regulation of financial institutions.

• President Obama has proposed no legislation that might have stimulated an economic recovery if enacted.

• We can cut our budget deficit significantly by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.

• Vouchers would offer older Americans a broad spectrum of quality health care options at an affordable cost.

• Given all the threats in the world today, the magnitude of our military expenditures is about right. (Nearly $1 out of every $2 that the world lays out in military expenditures comes from America. We spend about 6.5 times more than China, the #2 country on the biggest-spender's list.)

• We should put Muslim people on notice that if they harm Americans in their country, we will retaliate with force.

• I know what American Exceptionalism means, and I believe it's true.

If you agree with any item in the list, you will probably do harm. Rather than try to understand why at this late date, you should simply cast no vote for president. Be assured that declining to vote is not a shame. On the contrary, it's a courageous admission that you haven't sufficiently engaged with the issues and don't want to do something regrettable.
   If you disagree with all ten items, you can vote with confidence. You'll have two options, voting for President Obama or voting for a third-party candidate. Voting for Mitt Romney is not an option; it's impossible to disagree with all the items in the survey and still vote for him. If you find yourself in this conflict, you deeply misunderstand his intentions, and you should not vote.
    Voting for President Obama is not only a safe choice, but one that may actually result in some good. Whether it will is impossible to predict. Voting for a third-party candidate can also have a good result, but only for you personally. If you're really pissed off with both major parties, a third-party vote can have a therapeutic effect. It can make you feel strong and proud of yourself, and everyone needs the benefits of these emotions. There are rare elections in which America benefits, too. If, for example, a third-party candidate is a nationally recognized figure who has media attention and a charismatic personality, he or she can cause shifts in the attitudes and perceptions of the electorate, even in a losing cause. Next week's election is not such a case.
    I hope that in some small way, I've prepared you to vote—or not. So go out there and exercise your franchise—or don't.
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Addendum to "Mitt's ace in the hole": In my post that preceded the third debate, I wrote that Romney could gamble for all the marbles by accusing Obama of concealing the facts of the attack on the Libyan consulate. As we've seen, he played it cautiously and signaled disingenuously—is that adverb even needed when discussing Romney?—that he was Mr. Moderation on foreign policy matters.
    So, was he telling us that Libya was off the table for the duration of the campaign? We know now that the answer is emphatically no. Even though Romney was burned by the issue in the second debate, he's more than willing to send surrogates into the fray. Last Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner sent an open letter to Obama that urged him to come forward and say what he knows "as soon as possible." The same day, in a TV interview, Tennessee Senator Bob Corker said, "As I've been saying from day one, the administration knew [the facts of the attack] within 24 hours. I know this for a fact. I've known it all along; they've known from the very beginning." Then on "Face the Nation" yesterday morning, John McCain finally dropped the C word—coverup. He even went so far as to compare the coverup to Watergate, and added that even in Watergate no one died!
    There's no reason to doubt that this offensive will continue and, in fact, intensify. There's a lot of mileage in this issue, and the Republicans know it.
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Copyright © 2012 by Ken Marks