My biggest problem with John Kerry is that he's a career politician, and a vote for him is a vote for continuing the stagnation of the two-party system. Bush tries to counter this by pretending that he's not a Washington insider, but the actual definition of a Washington insider is how close you are to the President, so he's really just posturing.
We're so deep into the election cycle right now that it's just about impossible to get any unbiased information. Earlier today I read that Sinclair Broadcasting, which owns a whole bunch of local ABC affiliates, will be airing a 42-minute "documentary" bashing Kerry on November 2nd.
This is the same company that refused to air Ted Koppel reading the names of American military personnel who had died in Iraq.
So, I've kinda given up on avoiding bias, and am instead trying to
get my news from sources where they don't try to hide when they're
publishing opinions. My favorites tend to be
salon.com,
slate.msn.com,
and (somewhat surprisingly) the Christian Science Monitor (
csmonitor.com).
Getting back to Kerry vs. Bush...as I see it, the next two years won't be
very different either way. I /am/ scared of what Bush's extreme agenda
will do to us when he doesn't have to run for re-election anymore, but
even that's relatively short term. Taking the longer term view, though,
I think that we're more likely to see /real/ progressive change in eight
to twelve years by electing Kerry now. That doesn't have as much to
do with the man -- or even the party -- as it does with the kinds of
attitudes his administration is likely to foster: hope rather than fear,
and cooperation instead of isolation.
