Who's It Gonna Be?

Alan's got a great post at Maverick Views outlining all the reasons why he'll be rooting for the Democrats come Election Night. I agree just about entirely with his conclusions:

"The Republicans no longer have a real agenda and are focused mostly on adding pork-filled earmarks onto spending bills and trying to get useless Constitutional amendments passed. Even on national security they seem to have lost much of their clarity and can no longer distinguish necessary actions from politically opportunistic ones.

So let’s find out if the Democrats can do better. Let’s give them a chance to stop complaining and start governing. Have they really skewed unacceptably far to the left or is that just an illusion created by the fundraising power of the liberal base? Are they serious about helping out the least among us without taxing the rest of us to death? Do they have a vision of a better America like they claim?

Give them two years and we’ll see what they got. If they blow it, we’ll vote them out and cast them to the depths. It’s not so much that they’ve earned control of Congress. It’s that the Republicans have lost the right to be in charge. Democrats win by forced forfeiture. They’ll earn no mandate. They’ll have no time for crowing. We’ll give them just enough skeptical trust to allow them to prove whether or not there’s something there.

I offer no ringing endorsement. I simply think we can afford to try a little change."

I cast my absentee ballot on Friday, and for the first time ever I voted a straight party line in all the races for which I could make a choice. And my votes did not go to the party of which I am a registered member.

If you'd told me six years ago that I'd be voting for Hillary Clinton's reelection I'd have laughed in your face. But I did cast that vote this year, without reservation. I voted for Eliot Spitzer to be the next governor, and for Michael Arcuri to replace the retiring centrist Republican Sherwood Boehlert in Congress. (To be fair, if the Republicans had found decent candidates for any of those races I might have considered supporting them - I'm not just reflexively voting Democrat).

Each state's races are very different this year, and for some, the choice won't be as easy as I found it (as Alan notes, the TX gov's race is a good example; I don't know what I'd do there either). But on the whole, I am in agreement with Alan: it's time for a change, and in many cases, we can do better than we've got right now. On November 7, I too will be hoping the Democrats can manage to pull off a win - the GOP simply hasn't earned another two years of congressional control.