My friend Mike has always followed politics a little closer than I have. I just kind of took an interest in some of this stuff in the last couple years. I have Mike to partially thank for that.

Personally, I'm no Republican. I make this point clear because it seems I haven't made this point at all to some people. I only personally know a couple of people who say they are Republicans. I'm not Libertarian, Green, Independent, etc. I have no upper case affiliations. I'm just conservative. I have a set of political and social beliefs that intersect with all of the parties in some places, more often with the Libertarians and Republicans than any others, but I cannot stand by a party like you would a friend, because the parties are the source of a lot of scheming and in-fighting. Politically speaking, I'm not alone. Mike is no Republican. I have liberal friends who are not Democrats. Think of all the Democrats leaving for the Green Party in the last few years. In my opinion, I think that the Democrats and Republicans are both guilty of trying to make everyone fit into one club or the other. In a broader sense, I have discovered that liberals seem more often than not to group everyone into two groups: people who think like them, and everyone else. This is where I give the edge to conservatives. It seems to me that more conservatives than liberals are aware of the varying degrees of political interest, ideology and action. You don't see conservatives screaming at "lazy" college students for not being more involved, and getting out the vote. As an example, the right to vote is just that...a right. You can, but you don't have to. In fact, maybe you shouldn't.

Would you join in a conversation with a group of people without knowing what they were discussing? This seems to be the best analogy I can think of for this situation. People who cast a vote for the candidate that appeared the most favorably on The Daily Show, MTV, or the major news outlets, are generally uninformed. They are joining in a conversation on a subject that they hold little to no interest in, primarily because they've been told that it would be lazy not to do so. It's your right to vote...so what about other rights? How about gun ownership? That's a right, but you don't hear many (intelligent) people saying "if you don't own a gun, you're lazy." Uninformed voters ARE like uninformed gun owners...they have the power to appoint the people in charge of the guns.

People complain that not enough young people vote, or not enough black people, or not enough illegal aliens (zing!). What exactly is enough, and why DON'T they vote? Well, that's not my question to answer. Think about this though....as far as young people are concerned (we'll just say age 18 to 25), what makes us all think we're so smart? We spend most of our time avoiding news and politics (except, of course, The Daily Show). As a group, we are the most uninformed of all voters. The problem is that many people choose to phrase it differently. You'll instead hear "young people never vote." We hear a lot of "we need to get young people to the polls!" How often do you hear, "if these young uninformed voters show up, we're screwed!"? Seems to me that at all levels of politics - local all the way up to national - we don't need people joining the conversation without knowing what we're talking about.

Maybe instead of having these "get out the vote rallies" that try to get people excited about voting, we need more people to take a political science class and paying more attention to history...or more non-partisan publications aimed at people in our group. Honestly, I don't think I've EVER been "excited" about my right to vote. Do I take it for granted? Possibly...but isn't that my right?

I feel like the Democratic Party in particular tries too hard to use these get-out-the-vote events for their own sort of recruiting program. Again, they feel like you're with them or you're "everyone else." Republicans seem less interested in just getting people to the polls. It may be to their detriment, but possibly not. What about all of these uninformed voters, anyways? Who are they more likely to fall in line with? Well, with their lack of political knowledge, I'd have to go with the Democrats (zing!). So obviously, wouldn't do much good for the Republicans to get these people to the polls, now would it? (Of course, I'm just trying to get on people's nerves with that last comment...)

Hopefully I'll get some real hateful posts about Bush's Nat'l Guard service in response to this. We're waiting on you, lil' Miss Miami.