Locobot

I'm glad you're taking the time to make an informed choice. Your vote is important, it's the ultimate patriotic duty. You won't find a candidate that completely matches how you feel on every issue so you have to assign each issue a degree of importance. It's also unwise to base your vote entirely on any one issue. Here are the candidates running this year:

REPUBLICAN PARTY:
President George W. Bush (Texas) *
Presidential Nominee
Vice President Dick Cheney (Wyoming) *
Vice Presidential Nominee
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DEMOCRATIC PARTY:
US Senator John Kerry (Massachusetts)
Presidential Nominee
US Senator John Edwards (North Carolina)
Vice Presidential Nominee
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REFORM PARTY / INDEPENDENT:
Ralph Nader (I-Connecticut)
Presidential Nominee
Peter M. Camejo (Green-California)
Vice Presidential Nominee
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LIBERTARIAN PARTY:
Michael Badnarik (Texas)
Presidential Nominee
Richard Campagna (Iowa)
Vice Presidential Nominee
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AMERICAN PARTY:
Diane Templin (California)
Presidential Nominee
Al Moore (Virginia)
Vice Presidential Nominee
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CONCERNS OF PEOPLE (PROHIBITION) PARTY:
Gene Amondson (Alaska)
Presidential Nominee
Leroy Pletten (Michigan)
Vice Presidential Nominee
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CONSTITUTION PARTY:
Michael Peroutka (Maryland)
Presidential Nominee
Chuck Baldwin (Florida)
Vice Presidential Nominee
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GREEN PARTY:
David Cobb (California)
Presidential Nominee
Pat LaMarche (Maine)
Vice Presidential Nominee
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PEACE & FREEDOM PARTY:
Leonard Peltier (Kansas)
Presidential Nominee
Janice Jordan (California)
Vice Presidential Nominee
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PERSONAL CHOICE PARTY:
Charles Jay (Indiana)
Presidential Nominee
Marilyn Chambers Taylor (California)
Vice Presidential Nominee
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PROHIBITION PARTY:
Earl F. Dodge (Colorado)
Presidential Nominee
Howard Lydick (Texas)
Vice Presidential Nominee
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SOCIALIST PARTY USA:
Walt Brown (Oregon)
Presidential Nominee
Mary Alice Herbert (Vermont)
Vice Presidential Nominee
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SOCIALIST EQUALITY PARTY:
Bill Van Auken (New York)
Presidential Nominee
Jim Lawrence (Ohio)
Vice Presidential Nominee
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SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY:
Róger Calero (New York)
Presidential Nominee
Arrin Hawkins (New York)
Vice Presidential Nominee
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WORKERS WORLD PARTY:
John Parker (California)
Presidential Nominee
Teresa Gutierrez (New York)
Vice Presidential Nominee

Bush and Kerry will appear on every ballot but the rest of the candidates may not, depending on which state you live in, appear, in which case you'll have to write in their name. Write-in votes may or may not be counted depending also on the particularites of your state. Bush and Kerry are the only two who have a chance of actually winning. Nader and Badnarik are the only other two capable of garnering more than 1% of the vote. It's important to consider that voting for a third-party candidate will in effect aid whomever ends up winning.

My personal political beliefs fall to the left of the Democratic party in most respects and yet I'm voting for Kerry. In a parlimentary system of democracy representatives are elected from many parties after which they form coalitions to control the congress and elect a president or prime minister. In our presidential democracy those coalitions need to be built before the election takes place.

No matter how shrilly Democrats and Republicans try to label the other as extremist and themselves as moderate, they are both coalitions of centrists and more-extreme voters.

There are literally thousands of other issues you could consider when making your decision. For the sake of brevity and politeness I will only address the issues you asked about.

Bush made tax cuts the cornerstone of his 2000 election bid. He made moderate tax cuts for the middle class and drastic cuts in the tax rates for the top 1% of earners. The Bush tax cuts have shifted the tax burden to the middle class. Kerry has proposed repealling the tax cuts for those earning $200,000 or more per year, effectively redistributing the tax burden.

Kerry has also proposed closing corporate tax loopholes including those which allow companies to open an offshore headquarters and thereby pay no taxes at all.

The Bush camp sees outsourcing as being a boon for corporations and therefore a good thing. Outsourcing also fits with the en vogue, but unproven, economic philosophy of the day: globalism.

Kerry voted for NAFTA and has followed the globalism line on many issues but he arrives at the position from a different path. The leftist arguement for globalism rests on a belief that it will create better trading partners (people who can afford the products we manufature) and result in mutual prosperity. I don't agree with Kerry on this and neither does his running mate John Edwards who opposed NAFTA and other globalist agendas. It seems that Edwards has swayed Kerry somewhat, judging on Kerry's campaign speeches.
Kerry is a life-long hunter and advocate of gun ownership. Bush and Kerry supported the recenty expired Assault Weapons Ban, Bush however did nothing to see that it was extended. Bush may very well win this catagory for you, but it's important to remember that neither party seeks to take weapons away from anyone. Kerry and some Democrats seek to ban certain weapons from production and sale in the U.S. It's a fairly hazy issue when you consider how vague, ineffectual, and arbitrary the bi-partisan-passed Assault Weapons ban was.

Bush's Attorney General Ashcroft refused to search gun purchase records during the D.C. sniper crisis. I disagreed with that strongly, you may not. Remember that we didn't know at all who they were until they were caught. They could have very well been foreign terrorists to whom 2nd amendment rights don't apply.
Kerry is pro-choice, he supports the right for women to make their own choices about their own bodies.

Bush is vehemently anti-choice and receives a large portion of his support from people who make this their singular overriding decision-making issue. Bush has followed a steady line of actions intended to errode the Roe v. Wade supreme court decision. He has extended healthcare and legal benefits to unborn fetuses in a quest to establish them as citizens under the Constitution.

Bush is also a career-long proponent of abstinance-only sex education and has seen that government funding goes to these sex ed. programs only. The idea being that young people will avoid unsafe sexual practices despite not being taught about safe sex. Personally I'm deeply skeptical of any government policy that promotes ignorance.

You hold an historically conservative position on immigration and yet you would be better served Kerry, weird I know.

Cheap immigrant labor is important Bush's corporate constituancy. Bush has proposed the most sweeping immigration reform of the past 20 years. "Bush proposed a new temporary worker program to match willing foreign workers with willing U.S. employers when no Americans can be found to fill the jobs." Not many Americans will pick oranges 10 hours a day for sub-minimum wages. You have to come from another country's economy for that to be worthwhile. Bush's policies exacerbate the reliance of corporations on immigrant labor and legitimize those who entered our country illegally.

Kerry approaches the issues from a labor perspective and therefore seeks to limit the immigrant workforce. America doesn't have a shortage of workers it has a shortage of middle class jobs.
Perhaps not as entirely moot as you may think. Votes for Bush will be seen as support of his Middle East policy, including the invasion of Iraq. The Iraq invasion was a priority for the Bush regime before the Sept. 11th attacks, which they used to goad the American public into war. A vote for Bush would, in your case, condone the lies and lack of planning that preceeded the preemptive strike against Iraq.

I would urge you to condemn the Iraq war and it's planners in the most effective way possible by voting Kerry. Personally I'd like to see Kerry pledge to have our troops out of Iraq in 4 years but that hasn't happened yet.
The current system of managed care (HMOs) is the Republican plan proposed and passed after the defeat of the Clintons' health plan. Bush seeks to shift healthcare to the profit-driven private sector. The Bush plan creates more bureaucracy, but it's private-sector, not government bureaucracy.

I don't have high hopes for Kerry on this issue. The medical industry has been one of his largest contributors. Kerry's position is fundamentally different from Bush's in that he sees healthcare as a right not a privlege. Personally I favor a socialized system of healthcare without HMOs telling doctors which procedures they can afford to do.
Neither Bush nor Kerry supports gay marriage. Kerry supports civil unions that extend all the rights of marriage to gays without the word "marriage."

Bush supports a constitutional amendment that would deny gays the ability to marry. This would be the first ever amendment that would take away the rights of citizens instead of providing them. I believe this shift in philosophy, to a constitution that denies rights, is more radical than a move allowing gays to marry. I do not take this lightly, in fact I consider it fundamentally unamerican and a danger to our republic.
Kerry supports the status quo, Bush does not. A large contingent from the business community supported the most recent precedent (University of Michigan case reinforcing Affirmative Action). So the issue isn't as clear cut as it may seem. I think the Republicans are content to wait out the time limit the Supreme Court placed on Affirmative Action in the UM decision. I think it was 20 or 25 more years, there's not much that can be done until then in any case.
A smaller federal government is a goal championed by both parties and followed by neither. The Federal government has grown steadily for the last 50 years irregardless of which party was in power. If you consider national defense as part of the federal government, it's typically included, defense spending tends to fall gradually during Democratic presidencies and rise gradually during Republican terms. Due to our commitments in Iraq I don't see the trend of a steadily growing Federal government changing during the next ten years.

Personally I see the Patriot Act as the largest government intrusion into people's private lives, well, ever. Bush and Ashcroft are actively campaigning for its renewal. Kerry seeks to amend the act to include safeguards against government abuse. I'd like to see it scraped, I see Kerry's position on the act as unsatisfying, but relatively better than Bush's.

Do the right thing, vote for Kerry!

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the only way I see this thread working is if all criticism and questioning comes from Stare At the Sun. Accordingly I will respond to him only, unless PMed.
[grammar edit]