Picking up on my comment about NRO’s interview with Bob Barr, James Joyner makes this point about voting for third-party candidates who have no realistic chance of actually becoming President:
Clearly, some sizable portion of the Republican base is less than thrilled with McCain as their nominee. Ironically, in this context, they face this choice partly because the social conservative vote was split among many candidates, most prominently Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, allowing the “moderate” McCain to win.
Regardless, however, only McCain and Obama are plausible winners in November. Barring tragic circumstances, one of them will be our next president. It’s therefore irrelevant if one would actually prefer some third alternative.
The only way it makes sense, then, to vote for a Bob Barr or Alan Keyes or Ralph Nader or some other person who will not be our next president is if you honestly have no preference whatsoever as to whether McCain or Obama prevails. Otherwise, even if it’s a 1 percent, hold-your-nose difference, you should vote for that guy.
You know, I’ve done the hold-my-nose thing for two Presidential elections in a row now. I voted for George W. Bush in 2000 because I thought he would make a better President than Al Gore. Heck I even agreed with him on some things; ironically considering how things turned out, one of those things was his stated antipathy for the Clinton Administration’s “nation building” policy in places like Bosnia. I voted for Bush again in 2004 because, notwithstanding the fact that Iraq was clearly not going well even by then, I thought we’d have better luck internationally with a Republican at the helm than with a milquetoast Democrat like John Kerry.
This year, while there are some ideological differences between Obama and McCain, I find myself not really caring which one of them wins in the end, because I’m convinced that they’ll both screw up — screw up in different ways, of course, but a screw up is still a screw up. The size of government will increase under a President McCain just as it will under a President Obama — both because McCain would still be faced with Democratic majorities in Congress and because Congressional Republicans have proven themselves to be utterly spineless when it comes to fiscal conservatism.
Jerry Pournelle has thoughts along the same lines:
I have a number of letters about McCain and why we ought to vote Libertarian and “Send a message.” I understand the argument.
The fact is that the Democrats will control Congress. If they also control the White House, we will have a series of legislative packages that will make the Great Society look like a libertarian government. In opposition the Republicans rediscover their principles; it’s power they haven’t been able to handle since Newt Gingrich was Speaker.
The country is in trouble. We have forgotten our founding principles, and we move inexorably toward a European style socialist state, with the only winners being an enormous bureaucracy. This will accelerate the economic decline.
The argument is to give the Democrats their head, and pick up the pieces after the inevitable crash. I think that overlooks the resilience of tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect regimes. We haven’t seen much in the way of reforms in Europe. The Democrats will create new bureaucracies that can never be dismantled: an example is the Department of Education. Reagan came into office determined to abolish it. Now it owns US education, and No Child Left Behind is entrenched. The Iron Law of Bureaucracy is inexorable.
True, but what is there to convince me that McCain wouldn’t be complict in Democratic efforts to expand the Federal Government in the same way the George Bush has been ? Heck, you can make the argument that things were actually worse fiscally in Washington when the Republicans controlled Congress from 2001-2007, so why should I or any other Americans think that a Republican President, specifically one named John McCain, will do any better ?
Yes, there are differences between Obama and McCain. Foreign policy is an obvious one, as is health care. But there are also plenty of similarities.
Moreover, as James notes, this lesser-of-two-evils idea only really matters if you live in one of the handful of states that will be competitive this fall. A protest vote in Ohio might mean something, a protest vote in Utah would be like a grain of sand in the desert. But it’s more than that; even if Virginia is competitive in the fall, which seems possible given recent polls, the odds that my one vote will decide the state’s 13 electoral votes is unlikely to say the least.
Therefore this year, for once, I don’t have a problem voting my principles regardless of the consequences.
