Bill Marvel: Requiem for a Democrat

Recently I've come to frown on political endorsements as pretentious suggestions that other people cannot think for themselves. One might as well say "All you really need to know is that this is the candidate I prefer." 

Local Democrats seem to envision hordes of voters needing such instruction. That's implied by the many ads they've placed identifying themselves solely as Democrats, and hoping to attract support on nothing but gang loyalty and vague slogans. The determination with which their party is soliciting new voters suggests that political novices are the specific targets, and that's smart. Virgin voters are the least cynical about unscrupulous, self-interested officeholders; they are also more susceptible to simplistic, self-righteous mottoes. 

My newfound aversion to advising people how they should vote left me hesitating when I was specifically asked to submit endorsements, as a sort of counterbalance to this newspaper's flood of progressive political promotion. Ultimately I decided that most people have probably already voted, as I have, so revealing my choices would not constitute recommendations so much as recollections. 

Lousy options for president left me equivocating for weeks. I deplored Donald Trump long before it was popular, but since he took office his Democratic opponents have made themselves even more obnoxious than he is. Not so long ago I might have voted for Joe Biden, before he sold out to party radicals, but I could never endorse the ideological intolerance and irresponsible rabble-rousing of his progressive puppeteers—let alone the ruthless chameleon who sees him as her presidential placeholder. 

If both presidential candidates suffered from diseases bound to kill them by the end of January, I would have enthusiastically cast my first vote (ever) for a Republican presidential ticket. Instead, I opted for the Libertarian for the second time in a row. Had my left-leaning wife not finally decided to do the same, I would have felt obliged to nullify her vote with mine. 

If the Harris-Biden ticket wins, the last of our battered civil liberties will depend on a hostile Senate. Toward that end (and in response to her part in a frivolous, partisan impeachment) I voted against the entrenched Jeanne Shaheen, whom I once supported. 

Unless Biden installs a food-taster, we should soon see President Harris—the woman The New York Times exposed as an especially repressive California attorney general, who now pretends to have been a "progressive prosecutor." She would deserve a Republican-majority House, where Republican-chaired committees could paralyze her administration with endless investigations and impeachment ploys, in imitation of the Pelosi-Schiff-Nadler cabal. She might even be subjected to something like her own vicious invective and innuendo in the attempted lynching of Brett Kavanaugh, whose reputation she smugly sacrificed to further her own popularity with the mob. 

Considering all this, for the first time in my life I supported a majority of Republicans, and it was a heavy majority. In local races, this rather pacifistic old veteran supported every candidate with a record of military service, except one. I think it says something about each party's current view of the correct balance between a citizen's rights and responsibilities that the Republican field includes numerous veterans, while the Democrats have only Steve Woodcock—and Steve's career in the “education" racket aligned him with the unionized teachers who have become its primary beneficiaries. I've been on the opposite side of many an issue with Karen Umberger, Frank McCarthy, and Norm Tregenza, but I voted for them all. 

I regretted that my ballot did not include Ray Gilmore—yet another veteran running as a Republican. I'm rooting for him in his race against Anita Burroughs, whose voting record betrays attitudes about taxation and personal responsibility more common to New Jersey and Massachusetts than New Hampshire. She'll be easy game for the lobbyists clamoring to assess the Statewide Education Property Tax on statewide evaluation, which would make Bartlett assessments skyrocket to fund even greater subsidy of the state's property-poor communities. 

Carroll County's northernmost towns have been excreting candidates lately who are newcomers, or relative newcomers, who apparently came with the goal of transforming our communities into replicas of the ones they abandoned. They seem to expect us to appreciate it, too.