In principal, it sounds great to say you won't sell your vote. In reality, I don't see a single candidate this time that represents
my views, and would be hard pressed to trust them if they said they did. I don't want any of these bozos in office, so yes, I'd sit this one out and take the money. But I would never permanently sell my vote, that's for dang sure.
I had a great conversation today with a girl who is a political consultant, and who worked for the Edwards campaign during the last election. We were talking about politics in general, and I asked her if there were any that didn't pander to whatever crowd they were talking to at the time. I mean, I know some are worse than others, but in general, politics is the business of lying to get elected. She said, no, unfortunately, they all have to play that game to some degree if they want any hope of getting elected. Really sad.
I brought up two examples... the first was the issue of the Hillary campaign planting questions in the audience. She didn't have a problem with that at all, and said they used to do it all the time, but only in one-on-one scenarios, like town hall meetings. She thought to plant questions during a debate would be unethical.
The second example was of Hillary's "Tipgate" scandal (
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... d=16138132). I asked what the big deal was with someone just admitting a simple mistake, instead of lying a few times about it. She agreed it seemed ridiculous, but that again, that was just the way it was done.
I'm just so done with politics right now... We need some
major change, but I doubt it will happen with the current structure in place.
