2012 GOP Presidential Primary views, predictions, and rants.

With Super Tuesday less than two weeks away, and the final televised primary debate over, we have a close four-way GOP race between Gingrich, Romney, Santorum and Paul. Each candidate has their own issues with voters including: Santorum‘s religious rhetoric that won’t sit well with non-religionists and atheists; Gingrich’s baggage which will not sit well with many looking for a morally sound candidate; Paul is seen by many as a fringe movement that threatens the establishment; Romney is definitely a favorite among the establishment, but these days that’s not seen as good thing for most younger voters.

The big question I have, is who will drop out after Super Tuesday, and who will their disenfranchised supporters move to? Paul would seem like the most likely to drop out based on popular vote but a more realistic delegate count says otherwise. After all, the presidential candidate isn’t elected based on popular vote, but rather the number of delegates at the national convention that supports him. Still it’s looking like an up-hill battle for Paul for the time being.

This begs the question of if the delegate process is unfair to voters, or perhaps the real question is if the popular vote for president is actually misleading; making voters feel they have done their part, when in fact they have only provided a suggestion or their wishes to the delegates. On the other hand a voting process fits easily into the other elections occurring at the same time regardless of its binding power. Of course here in Texas, with the redistricting court challenges, delegates may be picked outside of the primary voting process.
If Santorum and/or Gingrich drop out, will Paul actually have a chance at winning the nomination, or will their supporters, who tend to be considered conservatives, support the more moderate Romney?

I’ve had a lot of friends asking me who I’m supporting, and until recently I haven’t had an answer for them. Four years ago it was Romney, but that was before I came to some realizations about which party truly best represents me. It was before Bush showed his true colors with his business interests being put above the interests of the average American worker, and working with a democratically controlled congress, allowed for the National debt to start exploding; thanks to bailouts for Monopolies that were “too big to fail” (if they were truly too big to fail, they should have been treated like the telecom industry in the early 80’s: split up into pieces, allowing the failing parts to fail, and the rest to continue on without government assistance).

I ended up voting for the Constitution Party Presidential candidate in 2008, before I fully understood why they weren’t too popular; the same reasons that Santorum isn’t more popular, thanks to ideas like “Separation of Church and State“. I fear Romney has many of the same Bush like qualities that will allow him to feel justified in using government to “solve” business related problems; which usually end up being at the expense of the average Joe Plumber.

What I really want is someone with new ideas, and new ways of looking at the world in a more peaceful, empowering, and collaborative way. Someone who truly knows what the purpose of the U.S. President is. While I don’t agree with him 100%, Ron Paul is certainly the only one who meets most of these qualities. Where I differ the most with him is on his foreign policies, the one area the President should be most concerned with, but I’m still more in-line with him then the others who would have become bankrupt while continuing to police the world.

What I want most, is a much smaller Federal Government, that allows the people of this country to be empowered to solve problems, instead of bogged down the government regulations that are meant to solve problems, but only create more in the process while getting in the way of innovation. Ron Paul understands that, and also understands that you cannot have a small Federal Government, when you have the largest army in the world; bigger than all other nations combined.

While I feel we were justified to invade Afghanistan, and that our presence there for decades to come (2-3 generations) will be necessary if we want to prevent them from falling back in there old ways, what wasn’t well justified was the invasion of Iraq, and Libya wasn’t even authorized in any way. What is no longer justified are all the military bases we have in peaceful places like Europe; where they have finally figured out how to become unified through peaceful means. Certainly we need to keep an eye on countries like China who are ramping up military sending, and North Korea and Iran who are both attempting to build up Nuclear missile arsenals, and possibly even Pakistan, but we could do all that with only a few bases in places like Afghanistan, Japan, and our existing domestic military infrastructure; not to mention working closely with other countries like Israel, England, and Australia. This would allow us to cut military spending in half without compromising our security.