The Election that Could have Been

I see little difference between Obama and Romney, especially in the area of foreign policy.  I've never been an Obama supporter.  I heard loud and clear in '08 when he said he wanted to send more troops to Afghanistan.  Not only did he do that, he also increased drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, and signed the NDAA, which gives the President of the United States the authority to indefinitley detain U.S. citizens without trial.  Romney would certainly be no better, and on economics and social issues, he would be far worse.  So what is the alternative?  There are many third parties running this year, and all of them have better foreign policies than Obama and Romney, the left wing and libertarian candidates also being better on social issues.  But this is not the election that had to happen.  There were many other challengers in both primaries.  Ron Paul, for all his economic conservatism, is much better on foreign policy than Obama, proposing an immediate end to the wars as well as the closure of all U.S. bases overseas.  If the election had been Ron Paul vs. Obama, everything would have been on it's heals.  Ron Paul's foreign policy would have made Obama look like a total warmonger.  Peaceful liberals would have had to decide whether to vote for the peaceful conservative or the warmongering liberal, or to still go ahead and vote for a peaceful leftist third party candidate.  There were also challengers to Obama in the primary.  Both Dary G. Richardson and John Wolfe Jr. had much better foreign policies than Obama and opposed the wars, with Richardson supporting an immediate end to the Afghanistan conflict.  John Wolfe Jr. supports a single payer medicare for all plan.  Despite Wolfe's left of Obama policies, only conservative media would give him the time of day, and that was only to make the Democrats and Obama look bad, essentially to embarrass the Democrats and reveal that a John Doe candidate could potentially upstage Obama in Arkansas.  Wolfe didn't win the Arkansas primary, but he did get 42% of the vote, the most a Democratic primary challenger to an incumbent president ever has since Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter in 1980.  If Richardson or Wolfe had been the Democratic nominee running against Ron Paul as a Republican, it would have been a truly just process, with economic issues being in the front and center.  Two candidates with morals and principles who oppose wars of aggression battling for the soul of America, whether we will be a truly progressive nation, or a truly conservative libertarian nation.  Instead, we have two neoconservative corporatist candidates seeing who can outspend each other on ads and who can look more like the "tough guy".  Ultra nationalism is tearing this country apart, with Americans only caring about themselves, ignoring the plight of civilians overseas who suffer daily due to U.S. imperialism.  I would hope to one day see a true debate of the progressive and conservative agendas without warmongering in the mix, a pure battle of ideology, not two sides of the same battered coin.  Until then, I will look to third parties.  As it stands now, the two major parties are beyond repair.