Pure bs pounding swing voters! (Gently)

Earlier today, it was sometime around noon, I was at my local lunchtime haunt. (sorry, no gratuitous plug -- soup was on the cold side today) I was sitting next to my erstwhile junior high school shop teacher. We were discussing the finer points of woodworking - now his vocation since he retired a few years ago, and a favorite pastime of your humble author - when Bush appeared on the TV. The TV was tuned to CNN. This life-long GOPer, and I suspect closet authoritarian started bashing Bush.

His grousing was over Bush's lack of real funding for No Child Left Behind and subsequent asking for Congress for an additional 75 billion dollars to fight a war that he now sees as unnecessary caused me to grin just a bit. I asked him what he thought about Bush's overall job handling as Commander-in-Chief. He quickly retorted, "if only Clark(Gen. Wesley Clark) was a Republican."

Sensing vulnerability I asked him, "what difference does it make what party a candidate is in, if you agree with their agenda?"

He honestly replied, "none."

I then proceeded to ask him if he would vote for Bush in 2004. He replied, "there is no way in hell I am going to vote for that [expletive removed]. I'd sooner vote for Dean."

This was too good to be true. I queried further, "what about a Dean/Clark or Clark/Dean ticket?"

We then chatted a bit about Bush's ties to mega-corporations and how money, while always a part of politics, has been brought to a new level in the past few years.

He then proclaimed quite unexpectedly, "I'm voting for Clark in the primary."

I asked him about his decades of devotion to the GOP and how he felt about being betrayed by Bush. He responded, "all these guys are bought and paid for by the time they reach Governor, or Senator, much less President. Clark doesn't owe anybody anything."

I just had to ask about the general election -- in NH we can vote, in any election, and immediately register with another party -- so I asked him, "Norm, are you really going to leave the GOP in November, or are you just angry for the moment?"

He laughed a bit, and said that he hadn't actually said that he was going to vote Democrat in the general election.

"Fair enough." I said. "Let's say the election was held tomorrow, would you vote for the Democratic nominee?"

"Tomorrow?" he asked, with a raised brow. "Yeah, I would. Absolutely," he averred, as he took an enormous bite out of his ham on rye.

I'll keep working on Norm. You have to know this guy. At one point when I brought up the fact that no WMD had been found in Iraq, he quickly rebuked me with, "So?"

We then had the discussion that I'm sure millions of Americans have had, regarding the Bush Administration's constantly shifting rationale for war. At this point, June or July of last year he was an ardent Bush supporter. How quickly things can change.