The Compass

Issue date: 4/15/08 Section: Opinion

The 2008 Presidential Election season is in full swing. Most of the individual state primaries have already occurred and we're now looking towards the party conventions and the general election in November. But who will you vote for?

The news headlines are filled daily with information on the lives of the three main candidates left in the race, McCain, Obama and Clinton. But should we like what we see?

John McCain has won enough delegates to secure the Republican nomination. He seemingly came out of nowhere to win all of the needed delegates. One concern about him though, is his age. The man is 71-years-old. Comparing a photo of President Bush when he began his presidency to how he looks now, it is obvious that the job ages your body faster than normal. Will McCain be able to survive the grueling task of President?

McCain also mentions, in what seems to be every speech, his military service during the Vietnam War. While I do respect him and thank him for his service, he's not winning my sympathy by bragging about his service. He's not going to win the vote doing that, just like Giuliani didn't win the nomination talking about his great work during the Sept. 11 catastrophe.

In relation to the war, Hillary Clinton takes this stand, "Our message to the President is clear. It is time to begin ending this war -- not next year, not next month -- but today." If you are curious as to why she believes this, don't look at her website, because she mentions no kind of reason why she wants to end the war, just the fact that she does want to end it. What about that guy Bill?

Sometimes it's hard to tell who's running for President. He has been giving speeches and campaigning like he was running for another term. He is hoping to put his smooth talking to work to get his wife, who he cheated on, into the White House. Just think, Bill Clinton might be called the "First Gentleman." That's an overstatement.

Barack Obama is running a campaign with the sole theme, "Change we can believe in." Obama pleads with voters on his website. "I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington … I'm asking you to believe in yours." Obama's stand on the war is very similar to Clinton's stand, except that Obama states several reasons about how the war is not achieving the goals President Bush laid down at the beginning of the war. Obama says that he will also begin pulling troops out Iraq immediately when he is elected president.

Both Clinton and Obama have experienced the crowd fainters during their speeches. This is where a "random" person has "fainted" during the speech, allowing Obama or Clinton to stop their speech, show compassion to the individual, and even in some cases, toss a bottle of water to assist the person who fainted while medical personnel try to respond.
All of this is only beginning. Just wait until we actually elect one of them to run out country.

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