Tomorrow, voters in the United States will go to the polls (well those who can, anyway) in an historic Presidential election. It will be historic for a number of reasons, chief among them the fact that the United States will elect its first ever black President in Barack Obama. It is no secret that the vast majority of Canadians prefer the presumptive winner over John McCain. In fact, most Canadians prefer Obama over domestic political leaders (including Prime Minister Harper). It is also no secret that most politically progressive Canadians support Obama over the Republican candidate. So it might come as a surprise that I, a left-leaning Canadian, would not be voting for Obama if I had the opportunity to do so. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t vote for McCain either. I would probably just stay at home or else support a third party candidate.

But, Isn’t Obama Better than McCain?

In my opinion, Barack Obama is a vastly superior candidate to John McCain in terms of public policy and other factors. However, as I have argued in the past, I believe in casting a ballot for a candidate I support rather than voting against a candidate I oppose. And although Obama would be a much better President than John McCain, his policy positions are simply too far from my own values for me to justify hypothetically voting for him.

Obama is perceived as a relatively leftist (or “liberal” to use Americaspeak) candidate. Within the American political culture, this is an accurate description of his politics. However, America has one of the most right-wing political cultures in the world. By comparison, Canada has a political culture that is relatively progressive (if we compare all industrial democracies in the world, Canada is on the centre-right while America is on the far right).

Consider for a moment that Barack Obama is opposed to same sex marriage. The majority of Canadians, including a growing percentage of Conservatives, are supportive of same sex marriage. To oppose same sex marriage rights is considered one of the most socially conservative positions a candidate can take.

Obama is also opposed to universal single-payer health care. Although Obama’s health care reforms would bring down the cost of private insurance, his proposals fall well short of the near-comprehensive public health care systems that are a staple of virtually every other industrial democracy in the world.

Obama has stated that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided”, later clarifying that he meant “a system in which everybody has access to the extraordinary religious sites in Old Jerusalem but that Israel has a legitimate claim on that city”. Of course, any proposal in which a future Palestinian state does not control at least part of the city is a complete non-starter in any Israel-Palestine peace negotiations.

TS and the Vast Socialist Conspiracy framed the socialist perspective on Obama quite eloquently:

The important question to be asked now is just how much change a President Obama will bring. On too much, he is simply a reiteration of the status quo ante in American politics: unqualified support for Israel, opposition to marriage equality, bellicose attitudes toward Cuba and Venezuela, the orthodoxy of capitalism. Not that I expected anything different from him. Let’s face facts. Even a left-wing Democrat would be, at best, a centrist Liberal in Canada. Horatio Alger-ism and class misidentification have produced a phenomenally distorted public perception of class in American society, American society is deeply inculcated with a Pavlovian hostility to socialism, despite the fact that socialism would produce better lives and more true freedom for a great majority of the population. The American political spectrum is so skewed to the right that a depressing number of Americans actually believe that Obama is a socialist. To their credit, many do not, but in a country where “liberal” is a slur (despite the country being deeply liberal in the classical sense), it is hardly surprising that so many react with snarling hostility to the cry of “socialism.”

This more or less sums up the way I feel about Obama. I am delighted that the reign of George W. Bush is coming to an end, and I believe that Americans will be the better for it. But if I were an American, I still would not vote for Barack Obama. He is too far to the poltical right to reflect my political values and ideas. And since I don’t believe in voting for someone simply to prevent an even worse person from winning, I could not vote for Obama in good conscience. I can’t say whether or not I would support a third party candidate; frankly, I don’t know enough about any of them to make that judgment. However, I can say with confidence that if I could vote for Barack Obama tomorrow, I wouldn’t.