Long time, no see folks. I completed a long journey from the Republicans back into the Obama camp, and some of my friends have asked me why I switched from Romney to Obama. I decided to finally just put my thoughts to words and typed up why I can't vote for Romney. Here you go:
6 Reasons Why This Independent Cannot Vote for Romney
1. Character – I don’t know who Mitt Romney is. Is he a “severe conservative”? Or a moderate as he was in Massachusetts? Or is he the pragmatic businessman? There are arguments for all three, which is equally confusing and nonsensical. Since he started running for President in 2006 he has flip-flopped on the following issues: abortion, guns, gay rights, immigration, the bank and auto bailouts, Iraq and Afghanistan’s war policies, global warming, the individual mandate and healthcare reform, and it goes on. I am no stranger to changing views over time, but his radical transformations are cold, calculated decisions to appeal to whatever audience he is selling to, which means he doesn’t lead by convictions but rather by consultants.
2. Money – We need to get money out of politics. Period. Lobbyists and the elite have dominated the national conversation with their own Super PACS and personal agenda. Mitt Romney’s largest contributor is Casino-Magnate Sheldon Adelson who has tacitly admitted that the motivation behind his $34 million in contributions to Romney is to get Obama’s justice department to halt ongoing investigations into his shady deals in China.
Mitt Romney doesn’t see this as a problem; in fact, he sees it as a right. If you don’t find that revolting, I don’t know what will.
3. Math – Romney’s plan, to many, sounds great: $5 trillion in new tax cuts to stimulate record job growth, $2 trillion to expand our fighting forces to handle the challenges of the 21st century, repealing Obamacare and putting $716 billion back into Medicare and on top of this he wants to balance the budget in less than a decade. The problem is this: He won’t tell us how he intends to pay for it. The money has got to come from somewhere: but he refuses to tell us from where. Or he doesn’t pay for it, but borrows from China and explodes our deficit. President Clinton was right, the math doesn’t add up.
4. Results – He’s running as the jobs creator candidate, but his record isn’t all that impressive. Massachusetts, under his leadership as governor, ranked 47th in the nation in job creation in 2006. Now Politifact contends governors can’t have much of an impact when the national economy was souring, but if Romney is such an innovative job creator, why did Massachusetts rank only above Michigan and Ohio, which were in freefall from the tanking manufacturing sector and Louisiana, which was absolutely devastated by Hurricane Katrina?
5. Rights – Mitt Romney opposes equal pay for women, equal rights for gays and lesbians, equal opportunity for innocent children of illegal immigrants, and both equal access to voting and equal justice for the African American community. Additionally, he opposes equal investment from the American people, where the middle class are burdened by additional taxes that the rich are exempt from. That’s not only class warfare, it’s a breakdown of the American dream.
6. Wrongs – We can disagree on policy positions, but many of the previous stances Romney has taken, he has just been objectively wrong. On the auto-bailout, Romney’s restructure through bankruptcy would’ve devastated the Midwest, lost hundreds of thousands of jobs, and would’ve stalled the recovery for the nation while fatally wounding our proud manufacturing sector. He was plain wrong on the bailout.
In 2008, candidate Romney said he would not “move heaven and earth for one man”, referring to bin Laden, and that he would ask Pakistan permission to pursue bin Laden if intelligence led him there. By all accounts, he was dead wrong.