A vote too late for Obama

At the time, not voting felt right. Now it's time for regrets.
By Norah Vincent
LA Times

November 11, 2008

I did not vote this year, and up until a few days ago, I felt good about that decision. But now I wonder if it wasn't a mistake. Or maybe not so much a mistake as something I will come to regret in time. As I've watched the wave of post-election elation rushing over so many people in recent days, and as I have been unexpectedly and powerfully moved myself, I've started to feel a little, I don't know, out of it.

I decided not to vote for what I think are good reasons.

Though I am by no means as doctrinaire as I once was about political and social matters, I'm still a libertarian fiscal conservative. In the most concrete terms, this means I don't believe that penalizing people who make more than $250,000 a year is going to fix the economy.

In fact, I think it may worsen it. The argument goes deeper than that, of course, but no doubt you've heard it before, so I'm not going to bore you with it now. Let's just say that that's the short version of the reason why I didn't vote for Barack Obama.

There are two reasons why I didn't vote for John McCain. The first is that I think he is a man of brittle intellect and doctrinaire sensibility. These are potentially fatal flaws that he shares with the current president, flaws incidentally, that Obama does not share. In fact, Obama's intellectual curiosity and suppleness of mind is, in my view, one of his biggest selling points, whatever your political beliefs.

(More here.)