I didn’t vote for Dick Cheney.  Nobody did.  He came as a part of the package with George W. Bush.  I didn’t vote for him either, but that is another story.  The point is that there were a whole lot of folks for whom nobody voted who came along with the election of the president, including Cheney and Rumsfeld and the whole lovely bunch who visited upon the American people the worst, most senseless and longest war in our history.

When you vote for a president, you vote for a whole lot of people whose names are rarely mentioned before the election.  The president will have her role, of course.  She will — okay, he or she — give speeches, meet with foreign dignitaries, and generally be the public face of the United States government.  More than that, however, she will appoint a huge group of people who will very much influence the everyday lives of citizens:  the head of state, of defense, of the treasury, of labor.  She will appoint the people who run critical organizations like the Veterans’ Administration, the National Labor Relations Board, the Justice Department, and, of course, she will appoint at least one person, and likely several people, to the Supreme Court and many, many more to the lower federal courts.

 

So you don’t just vote for a person.  Every time you vote for a president, you vote to send the country in a direction, and that direction might have thunderous impacts on your daily life, and that direction might affect the conduct of the country for generations after that president is long gone.  Consider just one point.  The Democrat candidate has announced that she will be taking major steps to slow, and ultimately eliminate, global warming.  The Republican candidate has announced that the whole idea of global warming is a hoax.  If there is such a thing as global warming, and the evidence is overwhelming, then spending the next four years ignoring it will have an effect that will run into the next century and beyond.

 

We are shooting blind on this, of course.  We can’t ask, and they won’t tell, who it is whom they will appoint as Attorney General or Secretary of State or Secretary of State, not to mention the host of lesser positions.  This is why — sorry to harp — it is so profoundly important to measure the candidates, not by their personalities, and not by their genders, but rather by their policies.  What do they think about the areas of daily life that affect you most.  Will an increase in the minimum wage affect you?  Will an attack on global warming affect you and yours?  Will it matter to you what the president thinks about people of color?

 

The list of policies is long, so the job of educating yourself is substantial.  We owe it to ourselves, and most certainly the candidates owe it to us, to put aside all questions of personality and lay out as fully as possible what kind of policies each candidate will pursue and therefore what impact each candidate is going to have on our lives, and, quite likely, the lives of generations to come.

 

 

There is this thing built into humans that lets them know whether the person they are talking to is being honest or not.  I have, in the past, called it a bullshit meter.  We need spend no more than a few minutes with a person before we decide whether that person is the kind of person we believe, like, trust, etc.  It’s not infallible (witness Bernie Madoff and his ilk), but it is fairly accurate.

 

We are now faced with a presidential campaign unique for the fact that neither of the candidates are much believed or trusted.  So we are left to pick through their comments and see which we can believe more, and, assuming we can determine that, which policies we believe the candidate will actually carry out.  If, for instance, you were counting on Donald Trump assembling a force to remove eleven million undocumented aliens from the geographic United States, and you are aware that he, or his surrogates, have recently announced that he is not actually going to do that, you are left in a quandary as to which position he holds and also which course of conduct he will pursue if elected president.  If, on the other hand, you believed that Hillary Clinton was telling the truth when she said she did not send or receive information marked classified on her private email, and now you learn that she has taken that statement back to some extent, then you are left wondering whether you can believe other statements she has made about which policies she will pursue.

 

I am supporting the Clinton campaign because the policies she espouses are closest to the policies I espouse — universal health care, greater support for education, reduction of student debt, a living wage, greater taxation on the wealthy.  I also believe that she will appoint a Supreme Court justice (or justices) who will be fair and impartial and not committed to the right wing political worldview.  I am also supporting her campaign because Donald Trump is a living nightmare, and if he wins I will have to seriously consider moving to another country.  That is not the point, however.  I will vote, as we should all vote, for policies rather than personalities.

All of that being said, one serious way to determine which side is more to be believed — or perhaps which is less to be disbelieved — is to be on the lookout for rationalizations.  Many good and honest conservatives are trying to rationalize how they can support a disaster like Trump while clinging to their basic principles.  It is painful to watch good and decent people making arguments to skirt the outrageous statements made by Trump.  I cringe as these good people claim that Trump’s comments are being taken out of context or that they are, as Paul Ryan characterized Trump’s suggestion that someone shoot Hillary, “a joke gone bad.”  On a recent Anderson Cooper show, it took Cooper 30 minutes of constant questioning to get a Trump supporter to admit that Trump had changed his policy from deporting eleven million people to not deporting eleven million people.  There is another word for these rationalizations:  lies.  When you rationalize, you lie.  .

 

I am not free of this disease as a Clinton supporter.  To say about her comments on emails that she “short-circuited” is a rationalization, i.e., a lie.  Period.  When you say you didn’t use your public office to benefit your charitable foundation and you did, you are lying.  Period.  I can rationalize those.  I can say that, if influence was used, it was not for personal profit but rather for the benefit of a charity that is helping people around the world.  I can say that all kinds of people used private emails and that no one was hurt, etc., etc.  But rationalizations are lies, and we cannot choose a president of the United States on the basis of lies.

 

It would be wonderful if two things would happen.  First, it would be nice if the candidates would hold themselves to absolute honesty.  But second, and more important, and certainly more in my control, it would be nice if we all would smell out the rationalizations, call them what they are, and decide this election on the basis of our own absolute honesty.  Wouldn’t it be nice if the Koch brothers would stand up and say, “We want to keep as much of our money as possible, and we will support those candidates who will let us do that”?  Wouldn’t it be nice if Paul Ryan would stand up and say, “I want to install a conservative on the Supreme Court, and that is why I am holding my nose and supporting Donald Trump”?  And wouldn’t it be nice if I could stand up and say, “Hillary screwed up on the emails and she screwed up on influence peddling for the Clinton Foundation, but she is more likely to put in policies I like than Trump or the down ballot Republicans are, so I am voting for her anyway”?

 

Oh, wait.  I just said that.

 

 

The conventions are over, and the primaries have been held.  Voters everywhere are now faced with choices about national and local candidates to provide the direction of their nation, their state, their county, their city or village.  Huge amounts of money will be spent, and immeasurable personal efforts will be made.  There will be canvassing, and advertising, and those awful robo-calls will try to disrupt our evenings.  Gladhanders will work the aisles of our high school and college and professional football and basketball games.  In the end, we will be glad most of all to be relieved of the constant political pounding.

 

All of that is true, but it is a fact that our choices will determine the direction of our communities, and that is a very big deal.  We do not, we cannot, we must not choose a candidate on any other ground than how she or he will affect the policies of our communities, national, state or local.  It is not who we want that matters.  Most of all, primarily, alone among all else, we are most concerned, not about the individual candidate, but about what will happen to our lives and the lives of our families, friends and neighbors.  The candidates, once elected, may or may not turn out to be who they sold themselves as, but what they do will affect us and our communities, in some instances, for the rest of our lives.

 

Here, however, lies a major difficulty.  I’m just a little guy in a little corner of the world.  And yet I am being asked to decide, by my vote, what I want to happen with education, with health care, with taxation, with the environment, and even, God save the mark, with our relations with a host of foreign nations.  I have enough trouble balancing my checkbook.  How can I decide how I want us to deal with Afghanistan or Russia or China?  What could I possibly now about national and international economic policy?  What could I possibly add to the efforts to provide reasonably priced health care?

 

The too easy solution is to say, “Well, this person seems to know what she’s talking about, and besides, she likes babies and goes to church on Sunday,” etc., etc.  In other words, we bail out on our duty as citizens to choose the direction of our community, and instead we pick person over policy.  Candidates, and the people who back those candidates, know that, and so they sell themselves, not on policy, but on personality.  They talk about their youthful struggles and their religious beliefs.  They parade their families around the stage.  And, yes, they kiss babies.  They do what they think we want, and we let them do it, because we don’t want to do the arduous work of understanding where we want our community to go.

 

So, want to be a real citizen?  Want to be a knowledgeable voter?  Want to really participate in the critical work of participating in American democracy?  Then here’s a list.  Get off your dead ass and figure out what you think are the correct answers.  Then go pick the candidate who will do what you want.

 

I.  THE WEALTH OF THE NATION IS BEING CONCENTRATED IN A VERY FEW PEOPLE AS NEVER BEFORE.  IS THAT A GOOD THING OR A BAD THING?  WHY?

II.  THE PEOPLE NEED MEDICAL CARE.  IS IT A RIGHT OR A PRIVILEGE?  THE COST OF CARE IS OUT OF CONTROL.  HOW DO WE BRING IT UNDER CONTROL?

III.  THE COST OF EDUCATION IS SO HIGH THAT GRADUATES ARE SADDLED WITH DEBTS THAT OPPRESS THEM FOR YEARS.  HOW CAN WE EDUCATE OUR YOUTH WITHOUT THAT CRUSHING DEBT?  HOW IMPORTANT IS EDUCATION?  AT WHAT LEVEL?

IV.  PEOPLE NEED JOBS.  THE WORLD HAS CHANGED, AND THE MANUFACTURING JOBS OF THE PAST ARE GONE FOREVER.  SO HOW DO WE PROVIDE THOSE JOBS?

V.  GLOBAL WARMING IS A FACT.  DO WE IGNORE IT?  IF NOT, WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT?

 

This is not an exhaustive list.  In fact, it may not even be a good list.  I beg you to respond here with your own list.  The point I am making is that your choice of candidate has nothing to do with gender or race or even party.  Your choice, perhaps as never before, determines what we will be as a country, a state, a county and a city or village.  Do the work.