Q:Can I ask what candidate you will most likely be voting for in the presidential election, or is that restricted information?

Anonymous

I voted for Obama last time around even though I had lowish expectations for his Presidency. (I was afraid of Palin.) This time around, I am much more impressed with Obama than I was in 2008, and I’m much less impressed with Romney than I was with McCain. So this is not going to be a close call for me.

I think Obama has been an excellent President, and genuinely moderate. He has far exceeded my expectations. The House of Representatives and particularly the senate have consistently failed to make policy effectively, but that would be the case regardless of who was President, and Obama has done some important stuff:

1. He used traditionally conservative ideas about market-based solutions to universal health care to overhaul our unbelievably inefficient health care system. (This may get struck down by the Supreme Court, but I hope to God not.)

2. We’re out of Iraq and will be out of Afghanistan in 2014.

3. We got a couple Supreme Court justices who do not consider corporations people.

4. The stimulus worked and was well worth the money and saved us from a European-style austerity situation that would have resulted in a much deeper recession. The arguments that the stimulus made the economy worse seem to me really and truly just to be lies, as the modest increase in debt did not cause our borrowing costs to go up. (In fact, they went down, and have been extremely low throughout the Obama Presidency.)

5. Income taxes are already incredibly low, and I generally think that politicians who say they should be lower are either A. pandering or B. not thinking very hard. Capitals gains taxes are also very low, and by further decreasing them and other taxes on investment income, we’ll incentivize all kinds of idiotic behavior, like for instance trying to create an America with 100,000,000 bankers and 0 engineers.

6. We got at least a little banking regulation, which I think is hugely important. Obama certainly wins no gold medals on this front, but he is a far better candidate than Romney, who continues to labor under the belief that the free market can regulate itself. That’s true in an ideal world, but history has shown us again and again and again and again that it is not true in the actual world in which we actually live.

As an enemy of ideological rigidity, I like that Romney has shown a willingness to change his mind frequently and without apology. But I think Obama is much less under the thumb of his party and its platform. More generally, while I have often voted for Republicans in the past, I feel the party has in the past decade become less interested in compromise and more confrontational/ideologically rigid.

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