The American presidential election has narrowed the field to two candidates now, Obama and McCain, Democrat and Republican, respectively. The support for the first one seems overwhelming in the city where I live and has many traits of a personality cult. I have been in possession of a dollar bill on which "In God we trust" has been replaced by the phrase "In Obama we trust" with accompanying picture of the man. McCain on the other hand seems to have fatally stumbled in making the choice of Sara Palin for his VP. In a desperate attempt to garner support of women and various independents, he made an unwise choice of a person unqualified for the office.
The most characteristic feature of this election is the lurch toward statism and likely far toward socialism. Obama is unabashed in proposing programs that "invest in the people" using government resources of course. Good thing is he is aiming many of his programs at spots which need attention - like health care. McCain is more inclined to focus on issues of fixing the government where it failed - and it failed tremendously and spectacularly under Republican stewardship, - but his proposals will result in increased intervention of the government in economy and society. Both of them betray an awesome lack of faith in market mechanisms - its traditional for the Democrats to call for restraining the evils of capitalism by means of bureaucratic muscle, but it is new for Republicans to essentially admit that they really do not know how to supervise a free market.
My vote will most certainly go to Obama. Although McCain is an honorable and basically honest man, he is burdened with the legacy of the Republican party for which I developed a profound distaste after the ridiculous demise of their contract with America in 1994-95 where they promised to reform the government, but ended up persecuting Bill Clinton for his dealings with a woman. In recent years, under George W. Bush, Republicans demonstrated an utter incompetence in the stewardship of a free market system, which was their main claim to political relevance, and as a substitute chose to defend various disciplinarian and religious ideologies. These apparently saw G.W. Bush as one of the Angels of Apocalypse. Therefore I despise the Republicans.
Someone wrote on CNN that this election will be under the battle cry: "You morons, what have you done with my money, my life and my children's future" - a paraphrase of "it's the economy, stupid" of Clinton years. And this election will lead the US quite a way into socialism.
