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[WARNING]This article is Phoenix Quinn level length. If you don’t want to deal with it, skip the very end for the summation.[/WARNING]

Mood Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUiWIBiVH4U
Evening America,

I find myself in a bit of a unique position coming into the next election. You see, I’ve been hanging around eRep for the past week or so, trying to see if the game would be able to hold my attention given the gradual differences between the time that I left, and the present. As I’ve been gathering my bearings, and acclimating into the admittedly not all that different eUSA, I found myself in a rather peculiar position.

You see, I don’t really remember a time in the country where I, as an eCitizen, didn’t have a stake in who won the Presidential spot. Whether I was a supporter of one person in my respective political party, or directly incentivized through the appointment to some position or other, each month I was rooting for one side to win.

This time, I don’t have that same feeling. When I came back to eRep, I remembered John Largo. There were a handful of times where we would indirectly reference each other in Presidential Daily Briefings, but we had never worked together in any department. In addition to that, due to his disdain for IRC, I never really had any social interaction with him either. My feelings toward him were those of mild familiar indifference. I knew of him, and of some his positive and negative actions, but everything seemed to even out towards a total neutrality of opinion. If he was elected President, I wouldn’t really have cared all that much one week ago.

On the other hand, I basically had no idea who DMJohnston even was. I recognized his name, but had no recollection of his personality or deeds. Perhaps that was due to some brief interactions in IRC, but it seems his rise to political fame directly correlated with the time wherein I had left the game, resulting in another state of gradual indifference. President or pauper, it made no difference to me. Over the course of the last week or so, I have had one or two interactions with him on IRC, which made me think he was a rather sociable, and approachable member of the community.

Overall, I seem to have a bit of a social understanding of DMJ, while I have a bit of a professional understanding of John Largo. This places me, as I stated before, in a rather interesting position. I highly enjoy writing articles, it is pretty much the only thing that kept me in eRepublik, and I think I have found a bit of an interesting idea for you all to consider. I am an old player, who’s understanding of current events is moderate, but not expansive. I have no access to the governmental information that I once did, and am placed in a position where the arguments for each candidate are the one’s given to everybody. For lack of a better analogy, I am placed on an even playing field.



Over the past week, I have read each and every Presidential article put out there. I have watched each candidate, and gathered opinions about them. I hold no position in either cabinet, nor did I even vote in a party primary. With that in mind, I want to make my article stand out from the ~10 we’ve seen in the top 5 over the past three or four days. I want to present you with, to the best of my ability, a neutral comparison of the my opinions for each candidate, followed by an endorsement.

On John Largo


Experience
My initial opinion of John is that he is clearly the more experienced overall candidate. There are, obviously, positives and negatives to this sort of attribute. The obvious positive is that the more experienced candidate simply has more information with which to work with, and should, in theory, make better decisions. The problem though, lies in where the experience itself lies. While undoubtedly John has had access to the PDB records, it appears that he has not held a major executive position since April of 2013. Thus, the declaration of Largo being the more experienced candidate should be clarified to mean that he has had the most game experience, by a significantly longer lifespan than DMJ. To be fair, Largo has had a substantial amount of Congressional experience, as well as some recent Party experience in the past month. While congressional spots don’t usually merit a lot of activity, as you can get through them by merely signing in periodically, high level party positions usually do have a fair amount of responsibilities.

Overall, I feel as though Largo has shifted his intentions away from Executive positions altogether. Generally speaking, a candidate separate from the executive for a period may not be a bad thing, if either of the following statements are true; 1) The executive is ineffective or 2) The candidate is advocating for a well thought out deviation from the status quo. That leads me to John’s platform.


Platform
This is where I have a substantial issue with John. For those that have not yet seen it, you can read the entire platform here. As we all know, everyone campaigns on change. Even if we’re in a state of relative prosperity, everyone wants to be the person to change things and leave their mark on the executive. The problem is, amongst the four prongs of Largo’s platform, there is either little change, or the change is poorly thought out.

1: The USAF Budgeting
This is actually not a change from the status quo, but a change from his previous platform, wherein he promised to fund the USAF. While I was not around during that time, I actually feel as though the initial promise of using personal funds as a campaign promise is actually an incredibly bad precedent. So in my opinion, this is a good change, but not a national change.

2: Public PDBs
This is, sort of, an actual change. Instead of PDB’s being released a certain number of months after their term, Largo wants to make them public. On Largo’s article, I stated the case as to why this would not result in the effect that he wished, but received no response. The problem with making PDB’s public is that members of the cabinet are politicians themselves. As politicians, sometimes you have to make politically unpopular choices, or field unpopular opinions, for the good of the country. At the very least, playing devil’s advocate for a popular policy can, in many situations, make that policy even better.

The problem now is that as a result of public PDBs, members of the cabinet will resort to using the IRC channel instead of the PDB, because they have those political incentives. This, in effect, limits the national records we have of administrations, and makes one of the most effective organizational tools we have significantly weaker. Now, you could say that if the PDB was so effective, people would use it regardless of the political backlash of unpopular opinion, but considering the fact that many people are motivated to take highly work intensive executive positions by the fact that the work they complete there will be able to propel them to higher positions, you must then recognize that the political incentives at many times do outweigh job performance.

3: Militia Cooperation
So, working alongside militias is always a good thing. And I think that any president who understands that the carrot is better than the stick is one that will be generally more effective at garnering militia cooperation, and making us more effective at coordinating damage. The question then becomes, is this an actual change? Admittedly, I am not in the leadership of any MUs right now, so my understanding of the situation is will pale in comparison to many others. However, I find the statement that the eUS government thinks "If you are not the Official MU then you are nothing," to be fairly strange. Problematically, Largo doesn’t provide a course of action as to how this will be solved, so I’m unsure as to what changes will be made. In the current Status Quo, members of these militias are given deputy positions in the National Security Council, meaning they are definitely included in the process. I would also be inclined to argue that the statement by John is, thus, hyperbolic, considering the obvious fact that if the eUS government thought these militias were nothing, they would not be giving them a voice at the table that helps decide our priorities.

However, what I actually found a bit funny is the fact that unless Largo intends on adding a number of other Deputy NSCs, he is actually far less inclusive of these MU’s in the NSC system than the status quo. If we look at his cabinet it has two deputy NSCs, as opposed to the five we have right now. Admittedly, members of some of these MUs operate in other cabinet positions, such as Cubby being placed as the MU battle coordinator, but even with that addition, the amount of MU representation appears to be lesser than the previous month. While it is possible the ‘MU battle system’ is going to be a way of following through on this promise, we have yet to hear anything about this system.

4: Inclusion
John references ‘groups of Americans that are left out of the current system.’ I’m assuming that he is referring to the Black Sheep Party, and in this respect, he is fulfilling his promise. In his cabinet, John includes Henry William French and Haselrig in deputy positions. In addition to those two candidates, he also includes PilotPhil in another deputy position, a fairly unknown player within the Socialist Freedom Party. Technically speaking, another member of the SFP, Jude Connors, is also in a position. However, considering he is in both cabinets, and has held positions before, I feel as though he does not fit the theme of this promise in the way that the previous three definitely do. Overall, opening up deputy positions to new players is a necessary step in keeping the community alive, and I give John a significant positive for giving these people a shot to work under tested and true Secretaries, and potentially take up the positions themselves.

On DMJohnston


Experience
In fairly stark contrast to John, DMJ seems to have a substantial executive streak, being that he has served quite a number of consecutive terms as the Secretary of Defense. This also has a few positives, and a few negatives. The positive is the fact that someone who has been recently active is also more likely to be in the current loop. One thing that’s important to understand about being a CP is that you only have thirty days. Any amount of time spent at the beginning, even one or two days, wasted on setup or getting up to date on the systems in place, is a substantial portion of your term. On the other hand, someone who has been constantly active with the executive is also less likely to be open to changes in that system. At that point, you have to evaluate the effectiveness of the current administration. This is not as much of a negative if the administration is effective, but if it is ineffective, it presents a significant impediment.

In addition to the executive experience, it seems DMJ has a major claim to experience through the Party President position. However, DMJ is a multiple term Party President, while John has only had a limited exposure to high level party positions in the last month, thus giving DMJ an advantage there. On the same point, both candidates seem to have fairly substantial congressional experience. Thus, the comparative leads to a general assumption that DMJ is the significantly more experienced Executive candidate, while Largo can claim to be a more experienced general player.


Platform
As someone who puts a lot of value in the amount of preparation a Presidential candidate has before being elected, platforms are a bit of an important issue for me. DMJ combines his cabinet choices with his plans, so you can see most of them here. While I think there is room for improvement on the scale, and elaboration of these ideas, the information presented seems to be acceptable.

1: Expansion of Pacifica
The first issue I have with this part of the platform is the lack of specificity. Thankfully, DMJ elaborated on some of the target countries, including China and the RoC in the Press Conference, which mitigates that issue. The rest of this part of the plan seems fairly reasonable. The expansion of our current alliance seems to be a generally agreeable platform, and if John were to mention it, I’m sure his intentions will be along the same lines. However, I find this to be a significant edge to DMJ. John Largo, throughout his entire campaign, has not provided any information about foreign policy. Considering the fact that we appear to be in the opening stages of a new alliance, I find the lack of clarification to be a major negative for Largo, and a major positive for DMJ, since he found it fit to address it first within the platform.

2: Regional Diplomats
When I first read about this plan, I actually thought it to be a fairly unnecessary change. DMJ wants to switch the ambassadorial program over to a regionally based system, rather than an individual country based system. The benefits argued were twofold; Regional cooperation and individual ambassador accountability. While I find the idea of regional cooperation increasing to be a tenuous logical link at best, I am actually inclined to agree with the idea of individual benefits. The major issue with the ambassadorial program is consistently retaining active ambassadors, and the change to the program should help mitigate that by requiring fewer members in the department, and giving them more work to do. As a former Director of Ambassadorial Affairs, I find this plan to be mostly a good idea, even if the effects of it should be minimal.

3: Effective Defense Spending
DMJ says that he has been able to cut down on Defense spending, and wants to support some of his own programs. However, he doesn’t really reference any plan for making sure the cuts continue, or any changes really. This isn’t a huge negative, since there probably doesn’t need to be major changes in the department at the moment, but I don’t think it’s something he really gets points for.

4: NSC based Private Militia Cooperation
Everyone understands that working together is good. MUs should be treated well, not terribly, we’ll get more damage out of it, ect ect. The critique I have of this, though, is the same I had for Largo. Unless there are about to be a number of new NSC deputies announced, this month will present a decrease in MU cooperation compared to the previous month. It is totally possible that these people will be added, and might already be added without the editing of the cabinet list, but that is not something we have been informed of. The additional notion that a position will be dedicated primarily to communication is a good change, and is probably similar to the idea that John had in mind with the creation of an MU battle coordinator.

5: Public Press Conferences
The first thought I had about this was that it would be absolute hell for whichever poor media deputy gets stuck with the job of rounding up all of the information, making sure it’s cool to be declassified, and then posting it on the forum. However, I think the idea has merit, and is actually a better version of what John wishes to do with entirely public PDBs. In this way, you have the best of both worlds. The public will be informed about the average going-ons of the executive, while the PDB can still remain a place that people can speak their minds without fear of retribution, as well as posting fairly secret information. Admittedly, the PDB is already a place of not-so-secret deliberations, considering every deputy has access to it, meaning somewhere between 20-30 people on any given month, but the comparative is still in place. There seems to be not much risk if this sort of plan were to fail, as opposed to the alternative PDB option.


Decision and Endorsement
Note: You’ll probably notice that I declined to comment on the cabinets of each candidate. That is because they are the usual mixture of political appointments, and good active people that will do their jobs. It would also make this article stupidly long if I were to evaluate each one of them, and I’m sure I’ve already consumed enough of your time.

At the end of my deliberations, I found myself leaning towards DMJohnston. I felt as though he presented more of an actual plan, in contrast to the ideal based platform John put forward. In addition to that, I felt as though DMJ had a bit more of a metagame presence. Admittedly, this might not be as much of an issue for some other citizens, especially one’s that don’t partake in the metagame. However, things such as the Press Conference allowed for a lot of much needed clarification on DMJs platform, which I was unable to get from John, even through the article comments that I had posted in the past.

At the end of the day, there will always be people that enjoy the metagame more than the game, and vice versa. The question should not be, “which is better?” but rather, “which candidate appeals to both sides?” In that sense, I have a significant issue with the way that John plays the game. I have yet to see John in IRC at any point in the last two weeks that I have played. Despite your personal opinion, activity in IRC channels is vital for cabinet cooperation, international cooperation, and just community building between a very significant portion of the community. John has not been coy about his dislike for the program, and I have no doubt he will put aside some of that dislike in order to facilitate the duties he has. I fear only for the minimalist approach that forms as a result of that dislike. When you dislike IRC, you will generally spend a minimal amount of time on it. That means less activity, less cooperation, and generally less accessibility, which is a major issue when we’re dealing with a President.

Lastly, I have to take a bit of a moral stance. Even if I believed John to be a better candidate than DMJ, recent events would convince me to think otherwise. Today, I read John’s final campaign article. For those of you who didn’t know, in the eUS, the person who wins the first six hours is almost certainly the one who wins the Presidency. In addition to surmising his endorsements, John made an offer to give tanks to every citizen who voted for him in the first hour of the election. This is nothing less than sheer bribery on the part of John Largo. Our elections have been, in the past, muddied by the use of vote buying, and it has never generated a positive effect. I do not believe it is just to stand by someone who will stoop to that level, and for that reason, amongst the others I have considered over the past week, I endorse DMJohnston for President of the eUnited States.

Civil Anarchy
Just your average eCitizen