On its face my comment seems to agree with your statements of fact, although it does suggest a value disagreement: that I like local optima while you are saying "boo local optima."

I do think you are wrong, but I don't have any idea of whether you are stupid. It seems plausible to me that we share enough values that if you knew what I think I know about history you would like democracy better certainly than some unnamed alternative.

What seems most likely to me is that you are naive and enjoy the feeling that you have found a clever solution that most people cannot see, that you enjoy that feeling so much that your threshold for checking the validity of he clever solution is unreasonably low. I only delve this far into my guesses about who or what you are since you bring it up by inferring that I think you are stupid.

In any case, to pick just a few of the top reasons I voted and am pleased that the local optimum we achieved is higher than we would have achieved if things had come out differently,

1) the "starve the beast" mentality is probably very wasteful. You never see (seems to me) successful private companies taking that approach at managing their priorities: when they are pursuing something they do what enemies of gov't spending would call "throwing money at the problem." While I am sure there are many better overall policy baskets than the two on offer in the presidential race this year, I am not a fan of underfunding. I think fewer things will be underfunded under Obama than under Romney.

2) national medical policy in the US is an expensive dog's breakfast. I think we converge on something better faster by keeping Romnbama Care and having the gov't work on improving it than by sending us back to the previous dog's breakfast which was essentially as expensive, but which left a lot more people uncovered.

If Romney had won I might still have posted "I voted. We achieved a local optimum." I would have been less energized to make that post because the local optimum under Romney would, under my values, been a bit lower than the one we are going to get under Obama.