Who Are You Voting For

 

 

The 2008 presidential election pitted rising star Barack Obama against elder maverick John McCain. Fair or not, Obama painted the vote as a referendum on the Bush years. Part of tapping into a message of "hope" and "change" meant contrasting that with the previous eight years, which Obama gambled a majority of Americans wanted to move on from. 

I recall McCain, exasperated that "choose Obama over Bush" left him out of the discussion, once in a debate addressed Obama saying, "you're running against me; if you wanted to run against Bush you could've run in 2004." After all, while he was the same party as Bush, McCain certainly wasn't shy about acting independently and even in opposition of the Republican Party.

Thankfully, there was plenty of room in the national discourse to carry multiple threads, namely how do we feel about this new guy from Illinois, how do we feel after 8 years of Bush, AND in what ways would a McCain presidency contrast with an Obama one. Even as the election had a lot of style, it had a lot of substance that voters could look at and base their decisions on.

Fast forward to the present and you'll forgive me for wishing we had more substance in our coverage of yet another momentous presidential election, particularly of whether or not we have liked the 4 years of the Biden presidency. It would seem to me that if the standing VP is one candidate, and the previous president is the other, then whether the past 4 years have been good or not should be front and center in determining who we should vote for.

I for one believe that Biden has had a pretty successful presidency, but that's not quite the point I'm making in this post. I just feel that whether he has and why has felt woefully under-covered in the news. Sure we have our opinions about Joe the person, but Joe the president: has it been good or bad for America? And, for that matter, to what extent will Harris the president continue or change those things? To what extent would Trump take things back to 2016-2020 or go in a different direction?

Maybe I'm consuming the wrong sources, but I feel I am searching in vain for this kind of analysis. Strangely, the question "who are you voting for," for which the emphasis is usually on the "who" (as in, which candidate do you prefer) feels like it should give way to an emphasis on the "for" (as in, what exactly are you voting for when you are voting for your candidate). This deep into the cycle, it seems crazy to me that we don't really know.