For president

It looks like I’m gonna vote this time. I at least want to vote for the propositions. I’ve read the synopses that the state of California sends out, and I think I know enough to decide. Thank you, state of California. Will you make the type larger? Thanks again.

I’ve always voted for the person I’d most like to see as president of the United States, not necessarily the one who seems the lesser of two evils from the Democrat and Republican organizations, but the one I want in the job just to see what would happen.

I’ve voted for Leonard Peltier because I’d like to see what he’d do in the job and what he would try to get the rest of us to do. I’d like to see how his Native American sensibilities affected his performance and his decisions.

I’ve voted for Ralph Nader not because he’s a little nuts, although I don’t count that against him, but because he’s a crusader on the side of people, not commerce—he and Dennis Kucinich. I’d like to see what either of them does with NAFTA, for instance, and with corporate law as a whole. That interests me more than anything else when I vote for a candidate. I don’t care what corporate media want me to think about, or what the cat lady down the block thinks either, and I might decide to vote for a candidate just so things will get bad enough for real change to somehow be more likely.

I’m sometimes a single-issue voter—say, eliminating the Federal Reserve system. I’d vote for any politician I thought would do that. I wouldn’t care if she hired her cronies and sucked off the help, as long as she killed the Fed.

Mostly I want a candidate to be centered and happy, at peace with himself and able to bring the best of himself—not just the top three layers—to the tasks at hand. Any idiot can do the job, and has. I want someone who’ll think about things without a lot of preconceived notions about what ought to be done and what no one must ever do. So I don’t think much of experience as a criterion.

Obama looks good. I wonder if people expect me to support him and vote for him because we both have Negro blood. I admit I’m curious about how his Negro blood would affect his decisions as president of the United States. Would he be kind to people with Negro blood? I hope so. I want him to be kind always to everyone.

A friend of mine said that Obama isn’t black. He doesn’t fit her notions of black authenticity. That’s the thing about racism: The races all seem to have the same range of behavior, from horrific to wonderful, and there are as many ways to express us as we are.

Obama says he’s a Christian and yet doesn’t plan to eliminate the military, so he must have some issues. Still, he seems a decent sort. Maybe he’ll be corrupted slowly.

I’ll probably vote for Nader again, and I’m betting on Diebold to win.