Voting for a presidential candidate is a little like choosing a spouse.  After months of being courted with big money campaigns and learning about skeletons buried in the closet, you think you’ve seen the best and the worst of the person and you know what you’re really getting.  Sure, it’s been all fancy dinners and passionate debates, not so much the stuff of everyday governing life.  But it feels so real, so right.  The sure smile, the swooning background music.  It’s all so convincing.  So you cast your vote, or take your vows, thinking that those promises made during stump speeches will all come true in your happily ever after.  But then, after the party, the real work begins, and that’s when the candidates’ shine begins to fade.  Promises are forgotten, or worse, broken.  There’s no time need for swooning music anymore.  The day-to-day work takes precedence over courting your favor.  Your candidate hardly remembers who you are and why he needed you so badly just a short time ago.  You’ve taken a gamble, and its not paying off.  But now you’re stuck, at least for four years.

And so what is the point of voting anyhow, you ask?  Why bother, if you’re bound to end up wrong, or disappointed?  Because, your heart replies, ‘tis better to have lobbied and lost than never to have known the thrill of representation at all.  That candidate might not have kept his promises, but he was your candidate, and at least for a moment, he spoke for you, took your side, stood for your rights.  And if we didn’t get to vote, had no democracy, there would be no one to stand for you, lousily or at all.  And so, you do the best with what you have.  You choose from the available pool of candidates, basing your decision on too little real information in too brief a time.  You try to look past the glitzy events, the baby-kissing and hand-shaking, and look into the eyes, deeply.  And you take the plunge.  You mark that little bubble, drop the ballot in the box, and hope.  Hope that this time, you got a good one.

And either way, you know that it was your choice, your freedom of choice, your inalienable right to vote that you exercised for better or for worse.  And that’s a good thing, no matter what the candidate does to betray you in the end.  Because, in some countries, marriages are still arranged.