Jeffrey Dean Foster wrote this morning to ask if I had some succinct words that might encourage people to get out, stand in line, and vote for Kerry. I don’t know that this is succinct, and it’s certainly nothing you haven’t heard from this quarter before, but I did spend a couple minutes pulling together an informal little summary. Honestly, I could go on for days, and in the last several months I guess I probably have if you add it all up, and today I don’t feel that I have a winning sound bite for you. By now, you probably have your mind made up. But as I say, here’s a brief summary for your consideration…..

1: Economic: are you better off than you were four years ago? No, the flagging economy and desperate unemployment/underemployment situation isn’t all Bush’s fault, but his policies have fed the crisis rather than starving it. He was responsible for a massive tax cut and those cuts DID wind up mostly in the pockets of the richest Americans, the people who needed the break the least, and that’s not just my opinion, it’s one shared by incredibly rich people like Warren Buffett. Jobs are leaving America and heading overseas, and this administration’s policies reward it when they should penalize it.

If you’re better off now than in 2000, by all means vote for Bush. If you’re not, ask yourself if you believe he’s really on your side.

2: Social issues: I’m sorry, but there’s nothing remotely conservative about Bush’s values – at least, not in any traditional American sense. Americans believe in leaving people the hell alone to make their own decisions – we’re a live-and-let-live society, but now the GOP, once the party of LESS government, is all about using the massive heft of the Federal Gummit to make you live the way fundamentalist Christians think you ought to live. If you’re a real conservative, gay marriage is important not because of the issue of gay marriage, exactly, but for a Constitutional reason. On this score, Dick Cheney is actually right – this isn’t a Federal question, it’s a state question, and a president who seeks to use the government in this way is a lot of things, but conservative isn’t one of them. He’s a big government, Federal activist, something that is about as out of line with historic GOP and American principles as you can get.

Whoever wins tomorrow will perhaps get a chance to appoint as many as three new Supreme Court justices. Bush’s two favorite justices are Scalia and Thomas. Think about an America with three more Justice Thomases on the SC.

3: Iraq: Bush asserted that things were true that weren’t. He had no plan to get us out. He still doesn’t. In fact, read the paper – it’s getting worse, not better. And in the process he squandered the greatest outpouring of goodwill from other nations around the world that we have probably ever seen. After 9/11, EVERYBODY was on our side. Now, Bush has so alienated our allies that he’s reduced to whining that Kerry “forgot Poland.” That coalition of the willing is primarily composed of nations that Bush couldn’t find on a map – over 90% of the people in Iraq are ours, over 90% of the money being spent is ours, and over 90% of the body count is ours. That won’t change as long as Bush is in power. Four more years of Bush and Iraq won’t be the Vietnam War all over again. It might well be World War III, as the entirety of the Islamic world decides there’s something they all agree on.

4: The environment: Bush says his administration has made the air cleaner and increased the wetlands. Well, when you put former pollution industry hacks in charge of the enviro policy and let them rewrite definitions, that can happen. How do you double the wetlands? Easy – redefine what constitutes a wetland. Duh.

Listen, the environment is probably already screwed no matter what we do, and Kerry has hardly made cleaning it up the top item on the agenda. But getting Bush and his corporate cronies the hell out of office would at least slow down the pace at which we’re poisoning our planet, and that alone is all the reason you need to vote for Kerry.

5: What kind of man is Bush, anyway? This election cycle has seen two really interesting things happen on the voting front. First, we have seen unprecedented levels of new voter registration and interest by young people and previously apathetic citizens. That’s fantastic – more involvement is what democracy is all about, right? Unfortunately, we have also aggressive tactics aimed at voter suppression – Bush’s people are scared senseless on increased participation in democracy. They want as few people as possible voting, especially if they’re black or college-aged, and they have had the dirty tricks teams working around the clock in places like Florida and Ohio trying to scare people into staying home.

More than anything else, you should go vote tomorrow because George Bush doesn’t want you to.