Hold the Republican Party Accountable When You Vote

To amplify something I wrote in the post below, I want to quote Francis Fukuyama's endorsement of Barack Obama from The American Conservative magazine.

I’m voting for Barack Obama this November for a very simple reason. It is hard to imagine a more disastrous presidency than that of George W. Bush. It was bad enough that he launched an unnecessary war and undermined the standing of the United States throughout the world in his first term. But in the waning days of his administration, he is presiding over a collapse of the American financial system and broader economy that will have consequences for years to come. As a general rule, democracies don’t work well if voters do not hold political parties accountable for failure. While John McCain is trying desperately to pretend that he never had anything to do with the Republican Party, I think it would a travesty to reward the Republicans for failure on such a grand scale.

I think this is behind The Economist's endorsement of Obama as well.

The same is true for Harris County, particularly when you look at its criminal justice system. There are many good, dedicated people working in this system, but this is also the system that was lead by Chuck Rosenthal, permitted the Ibarra brothers fiasco to happen (that cost the County over two million dollars), turned a blind eye to the criminally incompetent Harris County Crime Lab (which after being shut down in 2000, investigated at a cost of $5.2 million, and rebuilt and restaffed from scratch, had to have its DNA lab closed again this year), and was the locus of many other scandals, large and small. As Fukuyama says, the party that held power during this reign of incompetence and corruption should be held accountable.