I voted yesterday, early, something I am generally loathe to do. I am afraid that I will find out something between early voting and Election Day that will make me regret my vote. Indeed, Harold Ford did something today that might — though probably not; I will deal with that in a later post — have changed what I did in the voting booth. So why vote early? Because my voting place is split between city and county voters, but the city is only allocated two machines there, despite the split in voters appearing to be even. In 2004, it took almost two hours to vote and I just don’t want to go through that if I don’t have to. Yesterday was convenient so I took the opportunity. Besides, it was raining, and I like to vote in the rain. It seems appropriate.

I won’t bore you with the school board or state senate seat races, other than to say the state senator in my district was running unopposed so I wrote my name in. No one should get elected unanimously. Onto the votes.

First, the state constitutional amendments.

  • Amendment One

    • This is the anti-equality amendment. Since I approve of equality, I voted NO. HELL NO was not an option, unfortunately, but I did press the NO button extra hard.

  • Amendment Two

    • This is an oddly worded amendment that appears to allow the state legislature to force local communities to freeze the property tax rates form people over 65 on their “primary residence”. They don’t define primary residence, however, and I don’t understand why the state legislature should be micro-managing those kinds of decisions for local governments. The whole thing felt like another “all taxes are evil, screw the schools, cops, and firefighters” law so I voted NO.

Next, the federal elections:

  • US House, TN-7: I already wrote about my reasons for voting as I did in this race here. The short version is that Marsha Blackburn sucks and Bill Morrison doesn’t, so I voted for Morrison.
  • US Senate: I have hated this race from the beginning. I don’t like family dynasties, so I am temperamentally opposed to Ford from the start. He is much too conservative for me, having voted for the Iraq war, for the Military Commission Act, and for the anti-Gay Marriage Amendment. Corker actually looked interesting to me, despite the fact that he would have voted the same on those issues. He beat two real out there wingnuts in the primary, and he appeared at least reasonably moderate, something that the GOP desperately needs more of. But it turns out that appearance was actually a cover for being an empty-suit hack. He used illegal immigration to lower his business costs, he enriched himself questionably as mayor and, worse, he allowed the city’s 911 system to continue its slide into tragic uselessness. I don’t think a man who cannot manage a 911 system is fit to sit in the Senate and help decide how to manage homeland security and natural disasters. Finally, in the last few weeks his campaign has turned to trying to get out the white sheet and burning cross crowd. Corker doesn’t belong in the Senate.

    Not voting for this race, then, was an option. I don’t think the Senate is going to turn over this year — the playing field is just tilted too much to the red states in this Senate cycle. Even if the Democrats do get the six seats they need, Lieberman will almost certainly switch parties and hand control right back. Besides, I would prefer a more progressive Democratic caucus, and Ford is definitively not progressive in a lot of areas. But he is fairly progressive economically, and he is, aside form marriage, pretty good on equal rights.

    Voting for Ford came down to two issues, in the end: the war on terrorism and intelligence. Ford, unlike Corker, realizes that “stay the course” is a disaster making things worse. He recognizes the need for change. And he appears bright enough to deal with the hard question of what that change should be. The one overwhelming impression I have gotten form the debates and from Ford’s position papers and appearances is one of strong, above average intelligence. To be charitable, you cannot say that about Corker. Ford seems to be a very bright man, and we are going to need that in the years ahead. The country is in for some rough times, and we are going to need smart people in place to help handle it. Since the choice is between an intellect like Ford, who is good on some issues, and an empty suit hack like Corker, I will take Ford every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

    So, perhaps a bit reluctantly, I voted for Ford.

And, finally, the one statewide office on my ballot:

  • Tennessee Governor: I did not vote. I hardly ever do that, unless it’s a race I know nothing about. But if you are going to vote, I think, you should make a decision. It is very rare for two candidates to be so close on issues as to not matter. So I stood in front of the machine for a long time before I moved on. Maybe things would be different if the polls didn’t show this race to be a blowout, but as things stand now, I just could not bring myself to vote for Bredesen or Bryson. Bryson is a bit of a joke. He says interesting things, like reforming TennCare enough to bring the terminally back online or ending the sales tax on food. But he doesn’t seem to have any actual plans or details to chew over, just peppy sounding slogans. And, yes, Bryson is anti-choice and creepily obsessed with illegal immigrants and Bredesen is neither of those things. But abortion is already very much restricted in Tennessee and I doubt that Bredesen will veto more restrictions short of an outright ban, or that he would veto any punitive anti-immigrant measures. I doubt that because when Bredesen has had opportunities to stand up, he has always backed down.

    The tax system of Tennessee is a regressive, brittle, third world worthy joke. If the state is ever going to become anything other than an economic backwater, that needs to change. But Bredesen has refused to touch the tax issues so far, and he shows no signs of doing so in the future. He is afraid of the backlash.

    Even, worse, though, was how Bredesen killed TennCare. If TennCare had died because all the remedies had been tried but failed, I could have lived with that. If TennCare had died because Bredesen lost his fight with the legislature over needed reforms. But Bredesen didn’t even try. He left options on the table that could very well have saved TennCare and just went straight to gutting it. He took the easy, cowardly way out. And now, because of his political cowardice, people go without life saving medicine, emergency rooms are once against the doctor of first resort for our working poor, and people are almost certainly going to die who would have lived if he had just shown an ounce of political courage.

    Maybe I will regret this, but standing in front of the voting machine, knowing that Bredesen was almost certainly going to win in a walk, knowing that he killed TennCare without even the hint of a fight, knowing that he would almost certainly never stand up to the GOP controlled legislature on anything important, I just couldn’t push the button for him. So I left the ballot blank and hoped that in four years, we would have a better class of politician running.