For all these reasons, I admit that I am prepared to vote for a less personally impressive Republican over a more personally impressive Democrat. The Republican will vote for America's values (E Pluribus Unum, In God We Trust, and Liberty, which by definition means small government). The Democrat, no matter how personally charismatic, will not vote for these values.
This is my response to the liberal media, which have portrayed virtually every popular conservative in my lifetime as a mediocrity at best, a dummy at worst. In not one case -- from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin -- was the media's depiction accurate. To give but one example, George W. Bush can probably run rings around Vice President Joseph Biden in his understanding and knowledge of history and of the world.
But even if the media's depictions were accurate, it wouldn't matter to me. I will take common sense and values over intellect any day and in any election. Left-wing intellectuals have abysmal track records when it comes to confronting great evil in the world. Their willingness to fight tyrants and despots is one of consistent and abject moral failure.
Take the left's favorite Republican to depict as a dummy, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
This country would be in considerably better shape if Palin were either vice president or president. Palin would have confronted Iran rather than place her faith in negotiations and the United Nations. She would not have sought to impose a peace on Israel (as if peace can ever be imposed by outsiders on any countries, let alone upon those in which one of the parties seeks to annihilate the other). She would not have bought into Keynesian economics and spent nearly a trillion dollars largely to keep overpaid and overcompensated government workers voting Democrat. She would not have expanded the number of government agencies and "czars" to the point that this country may well be governed for the next two years not by congressional laws but by unelected and unaccountable federal agencies. She would not have declared a date by which America will leave Afghanistan and thereby ensured that fewer and fewer Afghans fight alongside America. She would not have signed a 2,000-page bill about anything, let alone health care. She would have expanded oil drilling in America so that we can actually begin the long journey to energy independence, not the imaginary journey to windmills and solar panels. She would never have considered taxing energy, the engine of our economy, on the increasingly absurd claims that human carbon dioxide emissions will bring the planet to ruin.
So, it is time for us Americans to realize that the old days of choosing the better candidate are gone. The Democrats have, at least in this way, achieved their goal of rendering us more European -- we will have to vote by party.
That's the bad news. The good news is that in almost no case is the choice between a more impressive Democrat and a less impressive Republican. The quality of most Republican candidates this election is the highest in post-war American history, Republican or Democrat. But even if it weren't, a Republican mediocrity would get my vote. My first concern is America's greatness, not the candidate's.