“Someone challenged me to defend my plans to vote for John Kerry.”
I’ve found that those whose presidential preference is based around vague notions of “leadership” tend not to be thinking about the actual duties of the president in the American system of government. They think, as George Lakoff has astutely diagnosed, in metaphor [ref: 1, 2, 3. —dan]. A couple of weeks ago I was listening to NPR and heard a guy at a Bush rally say he’s voting for Bush because “he won’t just give the terrorists a time-out — he’ll smack ‘em in the mouth.” This is hardly an isolated incident: I can hardly count the number of voters I’ve heard opining about foreign policy by scaling up their stances on corporal punishment. The problem is, global geopolitics is not parenting! The world is not a suburban house and you’re
not voting for Dad.
I had a truly surprising number of “a ha!” and “well put sir!” moments reading Adam Cadre’s “John Kerry for President” piece, the thesis of which is, in essence, “I’m actually voting for Kerry, rather than merely against Bush, and here’s why.”