I'm not going to have to kill myself next election cycle

So for the last few election cycles I’ve been worried about the candidates. Now this is not just because I disagree with one of the candidates, let’s say Bush for the sake of argument, but really all of them. But this election cycle I don’t think I’m going to have to kill myself or make empty ridiculous threats about moving to another country. Look I was 18 at the time and I thought it was a perfectly feasible option. But this time around, despite all the “bitterness” or whatever, I actually think that deep down these candidates are all fairly reasonable people and so even if someone I don’t necessarily agree with is elected, I think they would do a fine job. Or rather, fine enough that I won’t have to do anything drastic. This is actually something I came to drawing on a lot of reading. I had a temp job where I basically sat around for nearly 7 hours out of any given day, so I had plenty of time to read all the articles written about all the candidates (and this was in November 2007 so it was when there were many candidates). I sat and took the Washington Post survey that helped me pick a candidate (which turned out to not be the one I voted for in the Virginia primary) even though it was a fairly poor questionnaire, but that’s not the point. The point is for the first time I was a model citizen and made an informed decision based on the candidate’s position on the issues. I suppose it’s also story time real quick. Since Virginia doesn’t make you register with a party in order to vote in the primary, my initial plan was to go and vote for John McCain so Mitt Romney wouldn’t win any more delegates. After working at this temp job, which was a campaign-mailing place, I really didn’t like the whole “CEO President” thing. But he dropped out so that never came to pass. But, the day of the Virginia primary there was a bunch of ice on the roads and so after sliding across the parking lot to my car I tried to rush to the polls, but everyone was driving about 15 miles an hour. Anyway, I voted so everything turned out ok.
But, I suppose there is another relevant thing I have been thinking about too, and it is this: all this change that all these candidates are promising is not going to come soon. I mean, yeah we can start working towards all these ideas and policies, and it’s certainly good to have goals to strive towards, but it just seems that all these things will take some time. I just think sometimes people may lose track of that when they get wrapped up in how much better the next president will be than Bush. In fact, I almost think these candidates will have a lot of work to do. A recent Economist article basically puts forth that even though there will be a honeymoon period where the international community will cut the new president some slack, after a rather short period of time, there need to be results. So basically the new president needs to act quickly to keep up the good graces of the international community, based on not being Bush anymore. I’m not sure what that will entail because there is so much to work on, but whatever the next president decides needs to start with repairing a lot of the severed ties from the Bush administration. Even the BBC is getting in on this http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7325658.stm. This article mentions the whole idea that the international community is becoming more open to working with the US. This is very positive in terms of working with the global community, which is something that really needs to be strengthened from now on.