Well, not officially yet; I dropped it off at the local post office recently. I should be able to check on its status online or I may get a notification automatically when they scan the barcode into their system (I think they did that last time.)
Interestingly, I just discovered that I'm now in the district of Maryland's only GOP Congressman. I did move a few miles since the 2020 election (did not vote in the recent primary). I think the last time my Congressman was Republican was when I lived in South Carolina about 7 years back. Maryland is a solid blue state sort of like Massachusetts; it'll occasionally elect a governor like Ehrlich or Hogan, but the last GOP senator was Mathias nearly 45 years back. I was hoping term-limited Hogan would take on Van Hollen for US Senate this year, but I think Hogan has POTUS aspirations. I think Hogan's 2024 hopes are marginal, given the Trumpist/"national conservative" dominance nationally.
To unfamiliar readers, I've registered in the Libertarian Party since I left the GOP in 2016 when Trump clinched the GOP nomination. Technically SC did not recognize the LP, so it probably became official when I moved to Arizona. There was a time after I moved back to Maryland that MD wrote to tell me they no longer recognized the LP, but something must have happened because I was able to vote for Jorgensen on the 2020 ballot and I believe they've noted my affiliation after I moved locally and registered at my new address. I haven't registered and/or paid dues with the national party. I will reply or retweet/comment to various LP groups, none of which I'm following but probably inherit from following Amash. We libertarians often differ sharply amongst ourselves.
I thought about republishing my ballot, but let me briefly summarize: many races didn't have an LP candidate, and I had no intention for knowingly voting for a Trumpkin or a pro-abort candidate.With many Democrats explicitly running pro-abort, like Van Hollen, and/or left of me on economic and social issues there were few Democrats I would vote for; if we had ranked voting, I would vote LP and then Republican, with the exclusion of someone like a Trump: I would likely not specify a subsequent choice. MD also has a vote on legalizing cannabis; I have never consumed or transacted in marijuana and never will (barring certain medicinal purposes, not currently relevant), but on principle I oppose the war on drugs.
Let me be clear: as a former Democrat and Republican, I don't officially have a dog in this fight. (As a young more socially liberal but pro-life and fiscally conservative, I eventually became more consistently conservative by the time I was in graduate business school; it had nothing to do with the politics of UH professors; I had become more skeptical of Big Government initiatives. But the Reagan Administration, southern Democrats like me had been marginalized, and for me the final straw was when the Democrats sniped Robert Bork's SCOTUS nomination.
With the Republicans, it was more of a marriage of convenience. They included conservatives, even libertarian-leaning ones, like Ron and Rand Paul, Justin Amash, and Tom Massie. We had a string of balanced budgets for the first time in decades. George W. Bush, at least in his initial campaign, spoke out against nation building., The Republicans, while unable to stave off ObamaCare, did derail the public option and/or Medicare for all. They managed to negotiate sequesters to moderate spending increases in Obama's second term.
It's difficult to pinpoint when my marriage of convenience began to fail. Despite the horrific events of 9/11, I was wary of war with Afghanistan, given the closer USSR's failure in the 1980's, and I similarly worried about Bush's opening the Pandora's box of Iraq intervention, which his father had prudently avoided, not to mention he lacked the international consensus his father had built after Iraq invaded Kuwait and had initially attacked Saudi Arabia. I had been born military brat and had brief experience as an honorably discharged Navy officer, and so I still considered myself a military conservative but not a principled neo-con, bent on extending a Pax Americana. I was a skeptic of Bush's evolving rationalization for our Afghanistan intervention, including feminist ideals. (Don't get me wrong; I do believe in full participation of women as citizens, including fair access to education, etc. But I never thought the Constitution empowered us. us to impose our principles on other countries.)
I still gave Bush the benefit of the doubt that he had access to better information than I did, but it was clear, once Hussein was toppled, that we were not prepared for a government meltdown and sectarian strife. The occupation seemed to be going nowhere and chewing up American casualties.But I think what finally what clinched my emerging non-interventionist perspective was a Woodward book ("The War Within"?) The only question was a moral one over responsibly exiting the country.
There were other parts of the Bush years that made me cringe: the return of deficit spending, the Miers SCOTUS nomination, the unpaid-for 2003 Medicare drug expansion, the earmark kerfuffle (with a GOP senator threatening to resign if he didn't get funding for the Bridge to Nowhere)., the failure of immigration reform, easy money fueling a manic real estate market (with Bush hyping all-time high home ownership stats). Hyper partisanship on Capitol Hill. Long gone was my my naive expectation that Bush could bring the kind of bipartisan leadership in DC that he showed as a popular Texas governor.
I started this blog during the 2008 campaign. Let's be clear: once the economic tsunami hit, McCain was done. It was bad enough that Bush's approval numbers were in the toilet, and McCain thought he had to tie himself to Bush's record to win the nomination. It was also a change election year since Bush was term-limited, and Cheney opted out (with low approval, health, and/or other reasons). I had my own doubts with McCain's pro foreign intervention perspective and a confession he needed to be educated on economics didn't help his cause. But he sabotaged his experience talking point against Obama by nominating a first-term governor from a small state with no federal experience as his VP and by impulsively suspending his campaign over TARP--and he didn't use whatever leverage he had to negotiate TARP terms to reflect House Republican dissent. He could have used TARP to draw a distinction from both Obama and Bush. That being said, whatever private concerns I had about McCain's tactics and strategies, I don't regret my decisions to vote against an incompetent leftist, Obama. Should I have cast a protest vote for Barr, the LP nominee? Certainly my vote wasn't going to make a difference in deep blue MD anyway...
I did identify with Santelli's clarion call Boston Tea Party moment.in response to Obama overplaying his hand, proposing basically morally hazardous mortgage loan bailouts, and the 2010 midterms were a strong rebuke to highly unpopular ObamaCare passage and mammoth deficits. We started to see a rebuke against establishment candidates, as then Florida GOP governor Crist lost his US Senate bid against former FL House Speaker Rubio and the younger libertarian-leaning Republicans above were voted into Congress.
However, budget cutting can be politically unpopular, and the Tea Party movement got infiltrated by anti-Obama partisans and nativists. It was confusing as the GOP in 2012 would nominate the arguable godfather of ObamaCare, Mitt Romney, to oppose Obama's reelection. (I thought Chris Christie was probably the hottest politician in America then but took himself out of the running as not ready.) I thought Romney had lost a golden opportunity to distance himself from Bush/Obama's positions on Iraq and Afghanistan (and in fact tried to position himself to the right of Obama if that was possible) I think he ever successfully anticipated or answered the class-warfare attacks following the infamous "47% quote". The same thing with countering his being the maligned poster boy for outsourcing. I was disappointed he identified with immigration restrictionists making life so miserable for migrants they would deport themselves on their own. Trump would later blame Romney's loss on Romney's "cruel" immigration policy.
I have mixed feelings about Romney. Surprisingly given his parents having run for statewide office, Romney wasn't a talented politician (from a standing of charisma, street smarts and messaging) and wasn't good on policy from a pro-liberty perspective, but he was, in my opinion, the brainiest and best administrator among politicians in my lifetime. If you look at how he dealt with RomneyCare with Democrats in control of the Massachusetts legislature, it was probably the best you could have managed under the circumstances. I see absolutely nothing comparable from any of the 4 Presidents this century.
Speaking of Trump, he had flirted with running in 2012, even leading a couple of polls. I had dismissed his chances since he was the ultimate RINO, a registered Dem in 2008 who had supported both Clinton and Obama. McCain had a hard time in 2008 justifying votes against Bush tax cuts and for campaign finance report, but he had never been a Reform Party POTUS candidate or a recently registered Dem like Trump.. I'm still amazed by Trump calling his critics RINO's. It's like living in an alternate universe. I never thought Americans would vote an unqualified celebrity for POTUS, but I was wrong.
I still can't believe Trump won the nomination in 2016. He treated a question on the nuclear triad strategy as a "gotcha question". Most of his GOP debates were pathetic, little more than soundbites and cheap shots at his opponents, portraying them as corrupt politicians on the take, including from himself personally. One prominent example was Rand Paul soliciting donations for his eye surgery charity work in Central America. Trump's trashing of Paul was grossly misleading and immoral. I do understand a populist backlash against elitist career politicians, but Trump buying a politician would be like his saying, "Unlike Stormy Daniels, at least I'm not a whore." His argument that he is incorruptible because he's rich is self-serving rubbish. Power is at least as seductive as wealth; the government can seize your wealth at gunpoint. I could easily see Trump getting dirt from the FBI to extort his political foes; he tried to do that against Biden with his shakedown of Zelensky in impeachment 1.
Much has been written about Trump's unlikely 2016 election. There were two big steps: first, he faced a fragmented GOP opposition who were convinced his campaign would crash and burn and wanted to inherit a good share of Trump's supporters when that happened, not to mention financial support, so he largely got a pass. Oh, Cruz and Rubio had their moments; I never thought I would hear a Presidential candidate feel the need to defend the size of his manhood on the debate stage like Trump. I thought for sure that would be his undoing; how could you trust a guy working on the thorniest issues on the global stage if he couldn't deal with some adolescent taunt you might hear in a boys' locker room? Trump responded by mocking Rubio's height. And don't get me started with his juvenile petty nicknames. I halfway expected him to plant a whoopee cushion under Cruz' chair cushion. And his minions loved it, like he had the comedic genius of Jerry Lewis.
I don't know if things would have changed if the crowd of candidates had thinned earlier vs. diluting the anti-Trump vote or if they would have taken him on earlier, taking off the gloves. A significant percentage of voters saw political experience was part of the problem. And he tapped into blue collar angst embracing labor protectionism. Trump's anti-trade rhetoric was all economically illiterate rubbish (I remember him talking about how US trade representatives getting outmaneuvered by "smarter" foreigners and I was trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about. Free trade pacts are more like, you lower your tariffs, we'll lower ours. Consumers gain by improved variety and price competition and savings can fund their way to new markets of goods and services. and the labor behind them. For some less globally competitive businesses without comparative advantages in either domestic economy, it can eventually result in lost businesses and jobs, but it's important to realize this can happen within the domestic economy, there are other costs besides labor, the percentage of manufacturing jobs has been declining for decades and that is also an international trend (even China is losing lower-skilled jobs to Vietnam), and far more jobs are lost to productivity and improved technology, like robotics: e.g., there used to be a number of telephone operators and full-service gas station attendants when I was a kid; I think there are only 2 states (NJ, OR) mandating full-service, and I almost always bypass checkout lines for self-check kiosks.
On the other hand, in the "new economy" I myself have changed my profession multiple times and even when I was an MIS/IT professor for 5 years, I taught at 3 universities. I've basically worked at IT professional jobs since leaving academia (and I was a programmer/analyst before then), jobs that really didn't exist beyond small niches in very large companies) when I was a young adult. And whereas as a database and system administrator my job skills were/are in demand, I have experienced jobless periods. At least 2 former employers went out of business. I worked for a few IT companies who lost re-competes for the federal government contract I worked on, I did some temp gigs, and a couple of jobs were lost on an acquisition and a merger. I think the worst was literally on my first day of work for a DoE contractor; I never even got a desk. My new supervisor had changed his mind on hiring me over the weekend. I think they ended up paying me one workday when I showed up to get the news in person. I lost jobs in recessions. It took me nearly 3 years to land a decent IT job when my academic career ended without an academic job offer in a recession.
Probably a general discussion of the job market in academia is illustrative. MIS was the IT discipline in business schools. I had started my MBA part-time at UH, hoping it would open new career options in my IT career. I had thought of pursuing PhD's in my undergraduate majors in math and philosophy, but the academic job prospects for newly minted PhD's were dismal. MIS had really started as a discipline at U Minn around the late 60's and quickly spread, including doctoral programs at UH and elsewhere. MIS was red hot with grad students; classes seemed to fill within minutes at registration. I used to kid my fellow students that if they offered "Basket weaving for MIS Majors" it would fill up. My ambitions to become a professor resurfaced, I applied to the doctoral program and was accepted before I finished up my MBA. Our first 2 PhD graduates went to major schools: Arizona State and Iowa State. By the time I (#4; #3 defended her dissertation a week earlier than me and had a position at UH Downtown branch) was in the market as an ABD basically the major state/private universities weren't recruiting at the 2 major conferences (maybe they were but not posting; if they were, they didn't contact me; I was in a select pool getting named to 2 doctoral consortia). However, the market was red hot for state branch or regional schools. I barely had to call schools; I quickly fully booked half-hour interview slots (and probably could have booked 3 times as many at each conference. I ended up with 2 offers: BGSU and UWM. I actually preferred Bowling Green, but I would have had to give up reaching graduate courses. They had some textbook author teaching the survey (Intro to MIS) grad course. UWM had a doctoral program,, etc., and I wanted to do research. So I chose UWM and have regretted it ever since. I ran into freakish office politics at all 3 universities (beyond the scope of this post, but I've never heard anyone going through what I did). But as I saw my academic career swirling down the toilet in El Paso (ISU was a last minute temp job), I heard the guy who BGSU recruited after me had just won early tenure. Life sucks. Woulda, coulda, shoulda.
I never thought I would have the informal MIS lead professor (UWM did not have departments in their business school) threaten my tenure when I privately criticized his student's dissertation proposal which was really premature/bad. The student had rushed it because he was going into the academic job market and felt he wouldn't get taken seriously without a proposal defense. This is no joke: he hoped to use his chair's Wisconsin Bell connection to do a field test (this was a pipe dream); his backup plan was to use student subjects. He hadn't fleshed out the specifics of materials, measurements, outcomes, statistical tests and power, related theoretical constructs and prior studies, not even a comprehensive discussion on the use of students as proxies for real world decision makers. He had hypotheses of the nature, "Managers will make better decisions with better information." I liked the dude; I remember him bringing his kids to the office with McDonald's sundaes. I had wondered why he had been hiding his proposal from me, but once he froze it, I could check out a copy. I told him, "Dude, you need to withdraw this. Your proposal is like a contract with your committee. You could get killed at your proposal or dissertation defense." So his chair maneuvers things so he drives me home after a visit to Wisconsin Bell. He reminds me I don't have a vote in my tenure decision, pays lip service that his student needs to address my critique, and then tells me he's recruited PN [a heavyweight org behavior professor] to the student's committee with instructions to take me out if I open my mouth at the student's defense. I'm like, "What the hell just happened?" This is off-the-charts unethical. I have absolutely no problem with debating PN or even famous MIS researchers to their faces. I was in my FIRST semester as a junior prof. I probably wouldn't go up for tenure until my sixth year. But if I pissed off DH and PN, I had no chance of getting a tenure vote through senior faculty. Woulda, coulda, shoulda.So DM got through his proposal defense with my sitting silently through it. Nobody challenged that POS. But the committee was morally culpable for signing off. I knew then I would have to move on when my 3-year contract expired, but I didn't want a life sentence working with people I don't respect. At that point, I just wanted to build up my teaching record and publications and leave on my own terms.
But the point of this discussion was to point out the market changes when I tried to win an appointment out of ISU. I had given up the hopes of teaching graduate school and joint research with other profs, and in fact I would even settle for teaching service courses. In the interim, branch colleges were arguing they couldn't recruit pure MIS program graduates, Milt Jenkins (I think) of Indiana University offered a program to retrain other (e.g., PLM) faculty as MIS in certain summer school programs. Also, course enrollments had started to slow. Some waiting-list classes went to half-full. I had leap-frogged some 12 ABD's at UH, and UH threatened to have them take comp exams again if they didn't get their dissertations done. In addition, some computer science graduates who looked down on business schools joined the competition especially given the then recession. So I went from a rime where there were 12 jobs for each new MIS PhD to there was 1 job for every 4 applicants. Schools did not expect this. This went from schools used to getting maybe a dozen resumes to getting swamped literally with 85 or more. I was no longer getting unsolicited calls; I was the one reaching out to schools, even though I was a much stronger candidate than 5 years earlier. I went from exclusive half-hour interviews to some schools running multiple interviews in the same hotel suite. Schools went to filter rules; two at the time I remember, they wanted some expertise/coverage in certain hot disciplines like networking, and for affirmative action reasons a lot of schools wanted female applicants to balance the male faculty ratio. So I got excluded from a lot of searches from the get-go. I'm not blaming those for the fact I didn't get an offer. I didn't know the competition. It was frustrating, because I wasn't an ABD and had my PhD in hand, I had over a dozen articles, conference papers, and book chapters, and I had taught a number of standard courses.
So, in short, I have plenty of experience in tough job markets. And I understood why Trump was exploiting their fears of economic insecurity. As someone with no spouse or dependents, no mortgage to pay off, and probably more income or retirement assets than a number of others, it is easier for me to relocate. In one 3.5 year period I moved from MD to WV to SC to AZ back to MD. I have been actively but unsuccessfully looking for work in TX over the past 20-odd years.
So, yeah, Trump did a good job of exploiting economic uncertainty and over-promising what he could do as POTUS; could another Republican have picked up PA, MI, and WI? Probably not. Does that mean Trump actual had policies to address his supporters' angst? Not really. The underlying economic conditions leading to plant closures hadn't changed; improvements in technology and robotics weren't going to roll back. Technically Trump couldn't roll back the trade agreements Trump insanely argued had been incompetently negotiated. (Just as a side note: Trump's renegotiated version of NAFTA actually worsened the ongoing infant formula crisis basically because Canada couldn't export infant formula under negotiated terms) China, with its trade surplus with the US, provoked Trump's wrath, and he launched an unprovoked tariff war. Never mind it was American citizens, not the Chinese, paying the tariffs; also, usually the target nation responds in kind, China has imported a lot of US agricultural exports with (alternate global producers like Brazil), making Trump's farm belt support vulnerable. Trump's farm state bailouts were at the expense of American consumers.
But Trump had other advantages. I recall FNC was saturating coverage on Trump, even live coverage of campaign flights.
So why did I leave the GOP over Trump? It really wasn't Trump Derangement Syndrome. I'm not like all those leftist Twitter trolls obsessively over Trump's possible incarceration, the endless clips of Trump mocking the disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski, Trump's "grab [women] by the pussy", etc. Does that mean I was giving Trump a pass over his boorish behavior? No. I have opinions, of course. I think he was trying to impress other men with tales of his extramarital affairs. I was raised in a Catholic household with the ideal of lifelong marital fidelity. I'm not impressed by Trump's womanizing exploits. I was annoyed by his adolescent name calling, his endless self-promotion and narcissism, his impulsive decision making, his pretentious, incompetent, dangerous rhetoric (recall his "helpful" discussion of using disinfectants to treat COVID-19, that testing for COVID-19 was counterproductive). But character and integrity (or their lack thereof) are part of what I take into account in choosing politicians.
As a pro-liberty conservative I had a number of concerns including, but not restricted to:
- fiscal conservatism. This was a key consideration because the national debt had all but doubled under Obama. Oh, he had paid lip service to wiping out a $20T national debt in 8 years, but with federal revenue in the $3.5-4T/yr. and spending hundreds of billions over that, Trump never had a credible plan. He presumably floated selling national assets (which are currently valued at just over $3T). I don't have an issue in principle with privatization, in fact, I embrace it, but asset sales are one-time events which don't deal with the fundamentals of what's driving the deficits. Never mind the fact Trump can't sell assets without questionable Congressional approval. And that leads to the second point.
- senior entitlements. Trump wanted no part of reforming senior entitlements, which are exploding with Baby Boomer retirements on a pay-go basis; discussions of increased payroll taxes or cuts in the form of means-resting, delayed enrollment or COLA constraints are highly unpopular. Trump figured that the crap would hit the fan after he was out of office, so why take the heat? That's not leadership.
- immigration. The polarizing rhetoric went beyond inflammatory rhetoric of Mexico dumping violent criminals over the border; Trump wanted to cut LEGAL immigration. I see immigration as win-win, Visa constraints have hampered the economy and employers, immigrants are a key source for entrepreneurs, And undocumented immigrants were actually down since their peak in 2007.
- free trade. I've discussed this topic above. Free trade is win-win. Trump also has a muddled confusion over the trade deficit. The interested reader can find several references to it by Donald Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek and others; basically, a trade deficit implies an investment surplus, which is good for economic growth.
- a muddled concept of national defense and foreign affairs. Trump is all too ready yo jawbone or bully allies and to use the military, in contrast to his "America First" principle.
- an expanded notion of the Presidency. Trump doesn't think his authority as POTUS is limited under the Constitution. He exploits ambiguity of "emergencies" in law and believes in issuing executive orders. He bashes companies for expanding overseas or for not allowing a government back door to mobile devices. He has called for killing security violators like Snowden and convicting Bergdahl up under the UCMJ, basically undermining a fair trial.
I could go on but his utter lack of political experience, his incompetence, his temperament, his poor work ethic, his impulsiveness, lack of integrity, and character, along with policies discussed above made him unacceptable, and his reelection effort in 2020 even worse
So some general comments about the upcoming mid-terms:
The Democrats seem obsessed with 2 things:
- making Trump and the events of 1/6/21 an issue
- making Dobbs and abortion a major point.
First of all, I think the failed Jan. 6 protest, while deplorable and illegal, is more of a Democrat vs general voter concern. I think security wasn't handled well, despite numerous advance warnings. Much has been made of Republicans seemingly backing Trump's crackpot conspiracy theories as a sore loser. I don't think anyone really bought that Trump beat Biden. The polls before the election showed Biden winning. Trump was presiding over a shrinking pandemic economy. There wasn't a vaccine approved before the election.His approvals were below 50. As to attempts to overthrow state results, these fell in court and in states, never mind Congress, the system held firm. Trump's gubernatorial choice in MD did not gain my vote. I'm not saying Jan 6 21 is unimportant but it's not going to motivate people beyond their party base
As for abortion, I've written several post-Dobbs essays. I'm not going to repeat them here. I'm pro-life. But even on Hallmark Channel, I'm getting deluged by ONLY pro-abort ads for Sen. Val Hollen and a Dem state legislative candidate. Van Hollen is outright lying about Sen Graham's bill calling for a "ban". First all, all Graham's bill allows abortion up to 15 weeks, and some 90% of abortions occur by the 12th week--a common restriction in Europe. Furthermore, there's no chance Graham's bill would survive a filibuster or Biden's veto. But more to the point as I have repeatedly stated, neither Roe codification nor Graham's bill would pass SCOTUS review, when Dobbs specifically said it's a state issue.
The Dems are all but ignoring the economy, inflation, crime and border security. I think that's a huge tactical error.
The Republicans are running on the just listed themes. To some extent we are also hearing about Biden's student loan cancellation plan and bloated spending exacerbating inflation, anemic growth and declining 401k's, the huge increase in IRS hiring, Biden's choke hold on energy exploration and independence, national pandemic policy (Fauci, gain-of-function research, etc.), excesses of Biden's FBI, Biden's exit from Afghanistan To some extent, we are hearing about hearings on the Biden Administration.
Personally, I am sympathetic to seeing more of a check of a check on the Biden Administration. That does not mean impeachment of Biden unlikely to be sustained in the Senate. I also would like to see accountability at the local and state level for horrendous Draconian shutdown policies on the economy and public education.
