To the editor:
First a little history: I was born a Democrat, and never dreamed of voting Republican. During the Kennedy vs. Nixon campaign, I carried a Kennedy banner to a whistle stop visit by Nixon at the railroad station in Lewistown.
I remained a loyal Democrat through Lyndon Johnson's White House time and I rejoiced when Nixon tried to cover up the Watergate affair and lost his office. I then gleefully voted for an outsider. Someone who I felt was an honest, godly farmer, who promised to restore dignity to the presidency, and respect for government, and for each other.
To this day, I truly believe that Carter meant well, but was just plain not up to the job, and was in over his head from the day he took office. During Carter's re-election campaign, his handlers, with nothing good to campaign on, resorted to character assassination and scare tactics such as: Reagan would start a nuclear war that could destroy the U.S. While I don't believe that tactic, I did believe that somehow Carter would solve the Iranian hostage crisis before the election and would solve our domestic woes during his second term.
Luckily, we had a fairer press at that time, which actually reported news, and I realized that Carter had to go. As a Democrat, I voted against Carter, and then when Reagan ran for re-election, I voted for him as a Republican. Now I realize how difficult it can be to betray your party (as far as your family or friends are concerned), but it's not about the party, it's about saving our country.
Now I said all of that to say this: Right up to Election Day you can change your mind. In fact, you can even change your mind after you've entered the voting booth, and the beauty of this is, that nobody needs to know but you. Think about the fact that Obama has a record, and that even rabid Obama supporters can cite nothing he has done that has worked out well for the country, and they can only promise that in the next four years he will give us more of the same, but will also get even with the evil rich (probably to the degree that fewer and fewer small businesses can survive.)
Obama himself said in a previous campaign that when you can't run on your record, you trash your opponent. Sound familiar? So they call Romney a murderer, a corporate raider, and a tax cheat, none of which are true. Romney is painted as a rich, non-caring, closet racist, who will ignore the poor and get us into a war on a whim.
To sum it up, you don't need to be a Republican to vote against Obama. You need only to be able to discern truth from fiction and right from wrong.
John Kauffman
Belleville
