Let me make one thing perfectly clear.

I did not vote for Barack Obama in 2008. A lot of people, even those who don’t normally vote for Democrats, did vote for Obama, and for understandable reasons.

When given this kind of choice, Americans, at least since World War II, prefer to vote for the optimistic, forward-seeming candidate. That candidate in 2008 was Barack Obama, not John McCain, at least in the minds of voters.

Two years into his term in office, voters got a chance to opine on what they thought of Obama’s first two years of work. The grade in the 2010 election was a solid F, which is why a huge House of Representatives majority and filibuster-proof Senate majority for Obama’s party disappeared like Brewers relief pitching at the end of a 2012 baseball game.

Obama completely misinterpreted the results of the 2008 elections, the first, but not last, evidence of his arrogance. Voters not blinded by party identification want improvement, not change. Voters vote for the candidates they think will make things better, not merely change things. (That’s a message for both the Obama and Romney campaigns.) Obama promised change, and failed to deliver improvement. Instead of focusing on the economy, Obama delivered ObamaCare, which will improve the economy to the extent of one-fourth of small businesses’ dropping employee health insurance by 2014, and health insurance premiums going up 30 percent.

The question of every presidential election is …

There is no sense — none — in which this country is better off today than it was four years ago. (For starters, consider this list.) Osama bin Laden dead? The American ambassador to Libya is unavailable for comment, because he’s dead. Is the United States more respected internationally? No. Gas prices are only twice as high as they were when Obama took office, and that was during a recession, remember. The weak dollar policy Obama’s Federal Reserve has enforced has worked as well as inflation in reducing Americans’ purchase power. So have Obama’s “investments” in much-more-expensive green energy, which have resulted in a string of bankrupt “green energy” firms, while working to make conventional energy more expensive.

Speaking of bankrupt, there are GM and Chrysler, whose bailouts (started in the George W. Bush administration) resulted in zero benefit to Wisconsinites. Disagree? Ask the workers at GM’s Janesville plant and Chrysler’s Kenosha plant.

Four years after the recession Obama inherited, the economy is imperceptibly growing. Nearly 15 percent of Americans are unemployed, underemployed, or no longer looking for work because they can’t find any. The remaining 85 percent experienced average family income drops nearing $4,000 in the Obama presidency. (So much for supporting the middle class.) And much of the reason has to do with the Obama administration’s official intolerance of business, with logical results.

And, by the way, the Obama administration managed in four years to accumulate half as much federal debt as the previous 43 presidents managed in 220 years. That’s right — 220 years of depressions, two world wars, and presidents who claimed they were fiscal conservatives but weren’t accumulated $10.3 trillion of debt, while Obama accumulated $5.3 trillion of debt by himself.

The problem whenever you vote for a candidate for president is that you get that candidate’s party’s hangers-on, who end up surrounding the winning candidate. For Obama, that means Valerie Jarrett, who said (without refutation from the Obama (mis)Administration):

“After we win this election, it’s our turn. Payback time.
“Everyone not with us is against us and they better be ready because we don’t forget. The ones who helped us will be rewarded, the ones who opposed us will get what they deserve.
“There is going to be hell to pay. Congress won’t be a problem for us this time. No election to worry about after this is over and we have two judges ready to go.”

If Obama is reelected Tuesday, a recession worse than the 2008 recession is guaranteed, starting in less than two months. On Jan. 1, the George W. Bush-era tax cuts, extended after the 2010 elections, end. Instantly, American paychecks will be smaller when the payroll tax cut ends.

The only thing that focuses politicians’ minds is the prospect of losing. Let’s say Obama wins Tuesday. (I’m a pessimist, remember.) What will stop him for the next four years? If you vote for Romney and he does a bad job, you can vote for Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections and someone else for president in 2016. (Perhaps Obama, for all we know.)

If Obama wins Tuesday, our petulant president will be so angry, and immune to voter challenge, that out of spite he will not compromise with Congress, at least half of which (the House of Representatives) is likely to be in the hands of the GOP. (Keep that in mind in deciding whether to vote for Democratic candidates Ron Kind in the Third Congressional District or Mark Pocan in the Second Congressional District. The House, remember, is a dictatorship of the majority.)

One reason I rarely vote for Democrats is their cult-like devotion to their candidates. (Anyone who says “Ooooh! Obama is so cool!” in my presence is not going to like what will happen next.) Democrats have the Cult of Obama and before that the Cult of Bill Clinton and before that the Cult of John F. Kennedy. Wisconsin had the Cult of Russ Feingold and has the Cult of Tammy Baldwin. By any moral standard, that is not merely wrong, but loathsome and evil. (In contrast, I generally hate politicians.) If you are voting for candidates based on how cool they are, or how cool their hangers-on are (for instance, Katy Perry this past weekend and Bruuuuuuuuuce Springsteen in Madison today), you should not be able to vote.

Votes should be based on performance. It is impossible to reconcile the majority of Americans who believe the country is going in the wrong direction with a vote for Obama, or any of his Democratic supporters. Those who complain that it’s unfair to saddle Obama with the results of his four years of malignant incompetence (1) would never think of extending the same courtesy to a Republican president and (2) ignore the fact that Obama asked to be president to (so he claimed) fix the economy, heal the planet, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

Wisconsin voters also get to decide the U.S. Senate race between Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, the state’s longest serving governor, and U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D–People’s Republic of Madison). It’s ironic that Thompson, considered not conservative enough among some Republicans both during his 14 years as governor and his primary run earlier this year, is up against the most socialist Wisconsin politician there is. Non-liberal Wisconsinites spent 18 years being unrepresented in Washington, with Herb Kohl, nobody’s senator but his, and phony maverick Feingold in Washington. At least conservatives have Sen. Ron Johnson, but a vote for Baldwin is a vote for someone who makes Feingold look like a Reagan Democrat.

Wisconsin voters will also be deciding 17 Senate seats and all 99 Assembly seats. Control of both houses of the Legislature flipped after the 2010 elections thanks to the disaster that was the 2009–10 Legislature, which managed to follow a $2 billion tax increase with a $3.6 billion deficit. Democrats’ answers were (1) the deficit didn’t exist, but (2) the state needed to raise taxes again.

Wisconsin Democrats have given no indication they have learned a single lesson from their 2010 election disaster. Find one Wisconsin Democrat willing to criticize public employee unions. Find one Wisconsin Democrat looking to dump Milwaukee Public Schools, one of the worst school systems in the entire country. Find one Wisconsin Democrat who doesn’t take his or her marching orders from the most radically left-wing environmentalists.

Republicans haven’t done enough to improve the state’s economy. Democrats made the Wisconsin economy worse when they were last in power. An incomplete grade can be upgraded; an F cannot.

We close with the words of blogger Tim Nerenz, who is not a Romney fan:

And I say that not as a Republican, because I am not one; nor as a Romney guy, because I am not one of those either; and not even as a libertarian because he is not one of us.  It is the suggestion of a businessperson with a pretty good grasp of what the effects of an Obama re-election will have on small to medium-sized firms – the ones who provide the majority of jobs in this country and whose owners pay the lions’ share of taxes.  The big dogs like GE and Goldman Sachs win no matter what; they’d get theirs even if Vlad the Impaler wins on a write-in.

But the rest of us have to earn our way in this world.  There is no reason not to believe President Obama when he says he will allow the tax increases on business owners to go into effect January 1, will proceed with the next round of national health care mandates, will further restrict energy production, and will use sequestration as the means to cut DoD procurement.  Those policies are the four horses of the economic apocalypse.

And there is also no reason not to believe the brave business owners who have come out and told us how they will be forced to respond to those higher imposed costs – by reducing headcount, cutting back hours, scaling back pension and retirement contributions, paring or eliminating health care benefits altogether, consolidating operations, and shifting capital investment and job creation to countries with more favorable tax and regulatory climates. …

As much as it pains me to say it, neither Gary Johnson nor Ron Paul is going to be our next President of the United States.  And neither is Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Superman, Jesus, Aaron Rodgers, or the Good Witch of the North.  Our next President will be either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama – pick one.

And remember who comes along for the ride – Biden, Clinton, Geithner, Holder, Panetta, Salazar, Sebelius, Solis, Duncan, LaHood, Chu, Napolitano (the wrong one), Rice,  2 more Supreme Court Justices likely, dozens of federal judges, and the whole fleet of federal prosecutors.  Do you trust your liberty in their hands?  Not me.

The libertarian’s second biggest fear is that Romney won’t do what he says; but our biggest fear is that Obama will.