Below The Beltway

I’ve written more than once about the relative merits of Bob Barr over John McCain, but Andrew Sullivan, who can probably be classed among the libertarian-leaning conservative crowd has been a big fan of Barack Obama the past few months:

The conflicts that any libertarian-conservative feels in backing Obama in part to punish what the Bush Republicans have done at home and abroad are real enough.

It is indeed depressing to know that Obama backed the farm bill, will raise my taxes even more, has no intention of tackling entitlement spending, etc. And Barr may become an attractive proposition for Obamacons for these reasons. McCain’s fiscal policy is, alas, no more likely to reduce the debt and will almost certainly increase it more than Obama over four years. He is also beholden to many of the forces on the far right that dismay so many of us small-government, individual freedom types. But I’m not an ideologue, and maybe an Obama presidency would galvanize reform on the right in ways impossible under McCain.

I enjoy reading Sullivan because he’s usually pretty smart, but this is really just so much nonsense, and it strikes me as the same sort of stuff that we saw from him in 2004 when he went head-over-heels for John Kerry largely based on George Bush’s stance on gay rights issues.

If you really are a small government, pro-market libertarian conservative and you’re faced with a choice between an unreconstructed pro-government liberal like Barack Obama and a fairly decent libertarian conservative like Bob Barr, it would seem to me that the choice would be blindingly obvious.

Barr in a heartbeat.

Yes, it’s true that I voted for Barack Obama in the Virginia Primary, but as I said back then, that was for a very specific reason:

Issues aside, I have come to the conclusion that the worst thing that has happened to this country has been the fact that we’ve been living in a Bush-Clinton-Bush dynasty for the past 20 years. The first Bush Administration wasn’t all that bad, and George H.W. Bush was, faults aside, a relatively decent person. But you wouldn’t have known that from the rhetoric thrown at him from both the left and the right. Then, when Bill & Hillary Clinton came to power in 1993 — and, make no mistake, these two have always been a team — the political atmosphere in this country changed, and it changed for the worse.

It wasn’t all the Clintons either, almost from the day the Clinton Administration came into office there was this element of the right whose opposition to the President was nothing short of venomous. There were allegations that Bill Clinton was involved in drug-running (remember Mena anyone ?), that Vince Foster had been murdered, that Bill had an illegitimate black child, even that the Clinton Administration administered the Oklahoma City bombing. It was the era of the militas, and black helicopter conspiracy theories, and the Y2K nonsense.

And it was the era when the Contract for America died on the altar of the Lewinsky scandal and ill-considered impeachment hearings.

The mission in February was to stop Hillary Clinton, not just because of what she believed in but because of who she was and what she represented in American politics. That mission has been accomplished notwithstanding the fact that the former First Lady continues her Potemkin Village like campaign. As it happened, the easiest way to do that in February was to support Barack Obama. If someone else had been her primary rival on February 12th, I would have voted for them for the same reasons — the Clintons needed to be stopped.

That mission has been accomplished, although the consequences of their defeat for their party and the nation remain to be seen.

But now we’re talking about the General Election and putting Barack Obama in the White House would be as dumb an idea as putting John McCain in the White House, albeit for different reasons. If you believe in individual liberty and small government, there really isn’t any intellectually honest way to support either of these guys.

I do agree with Andrew on one point, there have been some successes this campaign season worth mentioning:

[T]he defeat of Giulaini’s neofascist tendencies, Romney’s callow theoconservatism and Huckabee’s Christianist schtick has been a huge gain. And the defeat of the Clintons an even bigger one.

And to think that a year ago we all thought we’d have to choose between Rudy Giuliani and the Hildabeast.