Who to vote against?

Sometimes you have a candidate who you dislike so much that your support goes to "anyone but...". For 2004, many Democrats supported "ABB" (Anyone But Bush). As they approached the primaries four years ago there was a strong Anyone But Dean movement.

As far as I'm concerned, there are several candidates on both sides who could qualify for this. And that's not counting people like Ron Paul who have no chance.

I don't like any of the three Democrat front-runners. They all made a giant step to the left and I think that they would hurt the country in several ways.

For much of the election Obama was my anyone but candidate. Every time he makes a statement on foreign policy it causes an international incident. The most recent one was when he implied that he would ban the import of toys from China. Both China and the toy manufacturers (it would take them years to move production elsewhere and they would be bankrupt before then) objected and Obama had to retract his statement.

Recently, Edwards started making a special effort. If you are a believer in economics then you have to view his entire campaign as a run against American prosperity. Thirty years ago economists thought that it was impossible to keep unemployment and inflation below 5% but it has been like that most of the last decade. A lot of this comes from foreign trade and American exports are rising fast - over 15% annually. Edwards would like to kick off a new round of trade wars. While he's at it, he wants to punish anyone (except trial lawyers) who have high earnings. All of this sounds great to unions but will hurt the rest of us.

On top of that, today he started a bidding war on how many troops he would withdraw from Iraq and how fast. His newest bid is that he would pull everyone except an embassy guard. He doesn't even want to continue training Iraqi troops.(His wife added that he might be willing to have them trained in some other country.)

Over on the Republican side, I'm torn between McCain and Huckabee. McCain scares me. He is on record as saying that campaign finance reform is more important than free speech and has tried to implement the Kyoto treaty unilaterally several times.

On the other hand, the more I see of Huckabee the less I like him. He is a compassionate conservative which is pretty close to a big-government Democrat who is anti-abortion. His main appeal is that he is a better Christian than Romney. I hate having a religious test for candidates. This will doom Republicans to permanent minority status.

Plus, Huckabee is outright mean. His ads are mean. He made a big deal of pulling his newest, meanest ads from TV but he still showed them to reporters while surrounded by anti-Romney posters.

I've seen some complaints from social conservatives saying that they are tired of waiting their turn. This puzzles me since Bush's credentials as a social conservative still seem to be in order. He certainly wasn't a fiscal conservative.

I'm sure that as the campaign progresses other candidates will give me reason to vote against them but that's the pair at the top of my list right now.