Apologia pro vita sua: As the 2008 presidential campaign winds down, we reach the final point of reflection for those few remaining undecided voters – and, indeed, for those of us who have decided but perhaps wish to reexamine our reasoning once more. Given the lateness of the hour (figuratively speaking), I feel obligated to offer up an explanation for how I will vote next Tuesday. Many of you have heard me express my frustration and anger over the direction the Republican campaign has taken in past few months, and I cannot express strongly enough my condemnation for certain tactical choices. However, I will still vote for John McCain on Election Day. Given this disconnect – and given my love for long, wordy articles that nobody wants to read – I feel it necessary to offer up a description and explanation of my logic.
For all of my dismay over the events of the last eight years, I am still a fundamentally conservative person. I still believe strongly in the basic Republican values of smaller government, lower taxes, lower spending, strong national defense, encouraging small business, and a general desire to stay out of the way of ordinary folks. I’m not sure Reagan’s axiom that “government is the problem” is still accurate; but the old statement that the government that governs best is the government that governs least sure is. One can argue about whether or not these values, as I have written them, are still what Republicanism is all about these days – I happen to think that they are, or at the least certainly ought to be. John McCain – for all his faults – is closer to these values than Barack Obama.
I will admit that I like Barack Obama. There is a wonderful line from the 1961 classic film Judgment at Nuremberg – one of the judges on the tribunal asks Spencer Tracy’s character where he falls politically. Tracy responds “Me? I’m a rock-ribbed Republican… who thought Franklin Roosevelt was a great man.” That’s kind of how I’ve always felt about Barack Obama – I don’t agree with him on much, but I think he’s an excellent man who will make a very good president. He represents something fresh and new, and it is hard to overlook the history-in-the-making aspects of his campaign, too.
That having been said, John McCain is much, much closer to me on the issues than Obama. This isn’t to say that I agree with everything McCain wants to do – his proposal to kick Russia out of the G-8 would be laughable if it weren’t so terrifying, and his health-care plan is, um, non-existent. Nor does it mean that I disagree with everything Obama is proposing – I’m a fan of his internationalist views on foreign policy in particular. It merely means that I think that the underlying principles of conservatism and the principles I believe in would be better achieved by a McCain administration than by an Obama administration.
No assessment of the McCain campaign would be complete without a discussion of his vice-presidential candidate. I’m solidly in the Frum/Sullivan/Parker/Buckley camp – the Palin choice was a disaster. Not only is she completely unqualified to be President of the United States, but she represents most of what is wrong with the Republican Party today – anti-intellectual, aggressive to those who disagree with us, ignoring the consequences of our actions past next week, questioning the patriotism of our opponents, perpetuating an us-against-them mentality, making decisions from the gut instead of from logic, encouraging the lunatic fringe of the party to greater heights, and freely squandering whatever goodwill the party once had in the name of victory. Victory, it is true, is the goal – but even should victory be within our grasp, it would surely be a pyrrhic one.
And yet. And yet. And yet. Even with all that, even with the poor choices the campaign has made and the tactics I find distasteful, I still cannot find it in myself to abandon this man. I still have great faith in John McCain. I believe he is a better man than all this. He is wiser than he seems at this moment, an excellent senator, a man of principle who once refused release from a hellish prison camp because his comrades would not be brought out with him. He is a man who would make an excellent president and would be a great leader for this country in all aspects – morally, intellectually, and politically.
If the polls are correct, next week Barack Obama will be elected the 44th President of the United States. I will not be voting for him. Two-thirds of people my own age and two-thirds of people in my home state will vote differently from me. So will a majority of the American people. I understand that. I respect that. I think we have been given an extraordinary choice in this election – for the first time in decades, we have been blessed with two truly excellent choices. I will be voting for John McCain. Although he may not win, and although he is not the popular choice, he is a candidate whom I can still be proud of.
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I'm not going to argue that you should vote against McCain, but in light of what you've said, I do think you should spend some time considering what voting means for you. Your reason, as I understand it, boils down to faith you have in the man himself, despite "disastrous" policies he's endorsed, a vice-president who contradicts most of the values that attract you to the Republican party, and a campaign that suggests how easily the man will push aside his integrity to win the support of the more extreme elements of the party. It sounds to me as though you expect your vote to endorse an ideal that the actual candidate will further distance the party from. There are conservative Republicans who have argued that the party needs to lose this election if it's ever going to regain its grasp on the values that defined it two decades ago. I don't know that I would say that it needs to lose, but I do think it likely that a victory now would entrench some of the worst tendencies of the last decade, not only because it would put Sarah Palin's Rovish, bear-baiting, lowest-common-denominator approach in the White House, but also because the way McCain has conducted his campaign gives us no reason to suppose that he'll curb those tendencies and direct the party (much less the nation) back to the ideals you hold dear. Put your ideals aside for the duration of the election; for the moment, there's only the candidate and what his actions demonstrate he will represent.
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