Since I turned 18 and became able to vote, I've prided myself on trying to remain moderate. My political view can basically be summed up as "highly progressive social reform with regulated financial conservatism." As a result, I often find myself at odds with people who consider themselves liberal or conservative because there's bound to be something I disagree with them on. Living in Berkeley I am drenched in dyed-in-the-wool liberals who will stop at nothing to make me vote for Obama. Fortunately for them, this time I do support Obama this time around, so I can fit in.

People seem to be taken aback when I criticize him, though. While Obama is really an intellectual (one of the first intellectual presidential candidates I've seen in my life), he isn't the salt of the earth for me. To make a really brief example, I think he wants to spend too much considering the economic situation we're in, and god damn it he won't shut up about "change." But that won't stop me voting for him because, among other things, I'm excited about having a black president. Yet that doesn't mean I am 100% behind him.

But many people here are, and I don't like it. I feel like Berkeley has drunk too much of the Obama Kool-aid in general and it's hard for people to sit down, lose their biases, and work hard on seeing whether they actually like all of the presented policies from the candidate they support. I've met too many people in the past couple months who say they "support Obama 100%." How can that possibly be? They can't realistically have thought through all of his domestic and foreign policy and said, "OK, I've studied all this and determined that I am fully behind it." Not that I have gone this far either - but I feel like I read more about politics in the news than many do, and making a bold statement about 100% support ought to require more study than what I have done.

Berkeley is a very politically active place and its (usually) intelligent inhabitants deserve to raise their political standards by learning to not take the candidate they support for granted. It's important to make a decision about who you want to vote for, but it's also important to make sure you know exactly what you're in for if you do. Does anyone else feel this way?

P.S. Republicans can be equally bad about drinking their party's Kool-aid. This story disgusted me.

Tags: politics
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