i have voted 3rd party for president since 1996 because i feel like there needs to be more than 1.5 parties controlling the government. the democrats and republicans are too similar in most regards, especially at the national level, and i'd like to see someone with a different set of financial backers make it to washington one day. there is far too much incest at the national level for my taste.

back to obama, i honestly don't think he's done much less than he promised when he ran the first time. in fact, he hasn't lived up to a couple of the promises he made i was hoping for: closing gitmo and changing the way washington does business. of course, that last one was always a pipe dream, because there is no way the people in congress will give anything up willingly without some kind of revolt that is never going to happen. one of my major problems with candidate obama in 2008 was his insistence that the US has the right to strike inside pakistan whether they like it or not if it means we can get a strike on an enemy of the state. and while it's probably ultimately a good thing that OBL is dead, i'm not sure violating another country's sovereignty is necessarily a great precedent to set. yes, pakistan was stonewalling us, but i like to think that we should have a foreign policy that doesn't rely on doing things that could be turned around on us some day.

for romney, i just don't see how he could possibly make things better for the economy no matter what his success in business. the federal government is not a corporation no matter how much republicans believe it can be run like one. i find romney to be symbolic of one of the major problems in america when it comes to taxes and the inequality between the bottom and the top. and at the end of the day, it's still incredibly difficult to defeat an incumbent that is not widely disliked. i just don't see obama having enough people against him for romney to win the election, which is why this election is still shaping up to be a repeat of 2004 in my mind.