the other Greg Childers Wrote:Third parties may make you feel good with your protest vote, but they'll never win. They spend too much time and money running for an office they'll never win instead of running for city councils and state legislatures where they might win and actually gain some momentum.
Actually, this is where the libertarians are a bit better off than other third party movements. They actually are a party (at least sort of) instead of a cult around one individual (Perot, Nader), they actually do field fairly complete slates of candidates, and they've actually won a few of those elections. I don't know whether Barr will actually materialize as someone who can get a larger share of the vote or not. But if he does get the name recognition, I'm guessing that he might pull a larger than usual number of down-ballot candidates through to wins. And that could be a huge step forward.
I despise what President Bush has done in office. I don't necessarily think he lied about Iraq (since I think that's more a function of the uncertainty which I'm well aware exists about intelligence estimates), but he DID lie about shrinking the size of the federal government and about getting us out of the nation-building business. And don't tell me that 9/11 is to blame for either of those. Excluding Homeland Security related items, the rest of the federal budget STILL grew at the fastest eight-year rate in history.
I don't see McCain as Bush's third term. I see some real differences between the two, and I like the fact that he's more of a centrist, but he tends to be more conservative on issues where I'm more liberal and more liberal on issues where I'm more conservative. So in the end I'm not that excited.
If Hillary were going to be Bill's third term, then she'd be my favorite in a heartbeat. But I don't think Hillary 1 would be Bill 3, not to mention that I don't think Hillary will get the dem nomination. At the end of the day, I'd probably be happier if we were getting ready for Bill 5 than for any of the options that ARE available.
I do think Obama will be elected, and I think that if he carries out his campaign promises he will be an unmitigated disaster. He's looking to add $300 billion in spending to a budget that is already way under water. Even if he ends the Iraq war (which he may well find out that he can't really do), things will still be way upside down. To close the budget gap, he's looking at increasing taxes in ways that will drive investment (and the jobs that go with it) away from the US. What's really scary to me is that polls indicate the strongest dem ticket would be for him to pick Johnny the Ambulance Chaser as his running mate. If that happens, not only will US investment be running overseas, but the supply of incoming foreign investement will dry up too. When those jobs go away, our trade balance will get worse and the dollar will get weaker. The three things that scare investment (and jobs that go with it, and export sales that those jobs produce) away from the US now are (1) high corporate taxes compared to other countries (plus high capital gains and dividend taxes), (2) the threat of losses from lottery-type tort litigation, and (3) uncertainty over environmental costs and restrictions. Obama/Edwards is the worst nightmare for anyone trying to overcome those concerns. The best thing I've heard Obama say is that he'd go into Pakistan to get bin Laden; Bush should have done that before even thinking about Iraq. Unfortunately, doing that now runs the risk of pi$$ing off China (which has historically supported Pakistan vs. India based on the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend argument). Do that, and if China decides to eat their losses and dump their US government debt, the dollar becomes the Argentine peso. How does the US economy look then? The saving grace may be that a bunch of the democrats who won in 2006, and the three that have turned over republican seats in by-elections this year, are the kinds of conservative democrats who allied with republicans to vote down a lot of really crazy stuff a generation ago. Many of them are as far from Nanci Pelosi ideologically as Arnold Schwartzenegger is from Pat Robertson on the republican side. Without them, the supermajority votes aren't there, and at the end of the day that might put enough of a brake on Obama to keep things from totally cratering.
That leaves Barr, and that's where my vote will go, barring some huge unexpected event between now and November. He's not the perfect libertarian, not by any means. But he might be able to turn the libertarians' traditional 1-2% of the vote to 7-10%, and that would have huge positive implications for the future. That's more than I can see accomplishing by voting for anyone else.
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Rupert Murdoch predicts landslide for Democrats
