Quiet Declarations

Here’s a thought experiment for you: let’s imagine the Republicans had a large majority in the House and a personally popular president in office, and that they controlled 60 seats in the Senate.  Let us further assume that Republicans were on the verge of passing legislation that would enact a 17% flat tax, eliminate the capital gains tax and most corporate taxes, and end most of the regulatory apparatus on the health industry.  After clearing the House and Senate, the bill is nearing the end of reconciliation when suddenly Republicans are shocked by a surprise upset in Utah that throws Orrin Hatch’s seat — held by the GOP pretty much for eternity — into Democratic hands, scuttling the entire legislative agenda.

Regardless of how you normally vote, if you vehemently opposed the Republicans’ agenda in this example, how would you feel right now?

Seems to me the Brown victory is this, in reverse.

Everything California gubernatorial hopeful Meg Whitman says the Golden State is correct — too bad that, all added up, what she wants to improve is going to enrage every enriched interest group in the state.

Gene’s op-ed describes the effect of a president who is willing and able to use the bully pulpit:

Today’s president is a constitutional monstrosity: a national talk-show host with nuclear weapons. When the president dominates the airwaves, promising to cure all manner of economic and social ills, that leads the public to expect a presidential rescue plan for anything that ails the body politic.

The predictable result is an executive branch that rides roughshod over congressional prerogatives. The mortgage bailout Obama announced last week is a case in point, since the bulk of the plan, which has enormous repercussions for the U.S. economy, is being enacted without any action by Congress. A less vocal, less omnipresent president might help us right the constitutional balance of powers.

For more on this subject, read Going Public, which chronicles the rise of executive office power through effective use of the media and direct appeals to the public.

From Reason:

One of the axioms of American democracy is that we are a government of laws, not of men. But as Steve Chapman writes, the Democrats in the U.S. Senate may ignore the rule of law and indulge their own preferences by rejecting Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s lawful selection of Roland Burris to fill the senate seat left vacant by President-elect Barack Obama.

Steve Chapman’s article lays it out pretty clearly, and I’d be hard pressed to disagree.  Blagojevich is reprehensible at best, criminal at worst.  But he hasn’t been convicted yet, and he certainly hasn’t been removed from office.  The governor seems to have every right to make the appointment provided that he does so before being impeached, and if the Senate doesn’t like it their only lawful recourse seems to be to try and impeach Burris upon arrival.

Sure, I think vacancies ought to be filled by special election rather than appointment.  In addition to being more democratic, it would decrease this business of appointing a bunch of Senate colleagues to cabinet positions, then letting people who couldn’t get elected in their own right, e.g. Burris, Michael Bennet, Caroline Kennedy, get appointed to the vacancies and later run as incumbents.  But that’s not current Illinois law, and unless the Supreme Court can find some reason to rule the law unconstitutional I’m pretty sure we can’t ignore it.  (In fact, as Chapman points out, the Court specifically drew the opposite conclusion!)

I put a more interesting question to you: let’s say it was conclusively proven after the appointment that Blagojevich had effectively sold the seat, but we couldn’t prove the appointed senator had anything to do with it.  Would there be grounds for impeaching the senator?

I was on vacation for three weeks across the presidential election and consequently sort of cheated myself out of my normal post-election ruminations, so I’ll now make up for it with a serious of disjointed thoughts about the election and beyond.  Hope you can forgive the off-the-cuff and extremely irrelevant timing of my remarks.

-I was very glad to see that there aren’t a bunch of secret racists waiting to surface and tank black presidential candidates on racial grounds after all.  Or there are, but because of [insert unprovable hypothesis here] they didn’t impact this election, and we’ll be talking about them again the next time it looks like a prominent black candidate might lose.  (Except in Tennessee, Arkansas, and northeast Louisiana, where the polling data suggests that either the secret racists actually did surface or the Democrats really really pissed off just this region somehow.)  It’s also great that we know there aren’t a bunch of secret reverse racists out there who surfaced to vote in favor of a black presidential candidate on racial grounds – I know this because I learned in college student orientation that there’s no such thing as reverse racism.

-Ironically, if the Post is correct, the success of the surge actually hurt McCain because Iraq became less newsworthy, which contributed to a shift of attention toward the economy.

-Presidential debates are not really debates.  The purpose of presidential debates is to look presidential.  The answers to the questions themselves are incidental bordering on irrelevant, as long as you don’t say something catastrophic.  He who does not believe this has too much faith in the American public.

-The best line in McCain’s concession speech was the part about running the most “challenged” campaign he can remember.  I liked very very few of McCain’s policies, but even so, I can’t help but wonder what the election would have looked like if you control for the three Rs: race, recession, and revenge.  I agree with the pundits who contend the most surprising thing about the race was how close it was relative to what the GOP had going against them.  Of the McCain postmortems I read, I think I liked Charles Krauthammer’s the best.  And no, I don’t think any other Republican candidate would have fared better… although Romney might have made it interesting.  Once recession fears were ignited Romney would have been assailed for his involvement in investment banking, but he probably would have at least assembled a better campaign staff and managed them more competently than hindsight suggests McCain did.

-I am quite pleased to see an Obama presidency for two main reasons.  First, I’m tired of hearing about how every crappy Republican policy shows what happens when you let the free market work, and I’m looking forward to moving from covertly anti-market policies to explicitly anti-market policies so we can have a real debate about the role of markets for a change.  Second, it’s impossible to persuade people of the systemic nature of problems with government when they can just blame the same party over and over again; examples of corruption and idiocy from both parties are required to effectively make the point, and now there’s an increased opportunity for that to occur.  This is not an argument in favor of gridlock or of punishing the incumbents, by the way — if anything, it’s an argument in favor of what’s going to make me happier in political discussions for the next four years.

-Okay, okay, I should at least let you know how I really feel about the election, since I tend to give the pundits and voters a hard time but I really haven’t said too much about Obama one way or another this season.  Ilya Somin’s election postmortem is probably the closest approximation to my own views that I’ve read thus far.  I simply don’t have any feelings about “change” one way or another because, as anyone who has read my blog knows, my general lack of faith in government transcends parties or candidates — rather like Will Wilkinson’s, among others.  But, if I were a “pro-hope” voter, I imagine that this comes pretty close to how I’d feel.

-Speaking of faith: for some reason, people who have a strong faith in their candidate have a hard time accepting the reality that candidates do what it takes to get elected.  I highly recommend the movie Recount, a star-studded documentary of the 2000 Florida ballot counting.  It’s striking to watch just how vicious both sides were — which makes perfect sense when you consider how high the stakes are in a presidential election.  In 2008 McCain went negative, regardless of his personal beliefs on the action, because he believed he needed to go negative to have a shot at winning.  Obama opted out of federal campaign funding, which says nothing about his beliefs on the matter and everything about whether he thought it would help him win.  Obama’s leftist base is now somewhat concerned that his cabinet appointments reflect a more centrist governing stance than they thought, which reflects nothing other than the election is over and he’s now doing what is either personally or politically expedient.  It’s the simple truth: politicians do what it takes to win, because only the victor gets the spoils.

-Immediately following the election, much was written about the possibility of a Democratic mandate.  Of course there’s a Democratic mandate, or at least a honeymoon.  That’s what you get when you win, regardless of your margin.  Although, notwithstanding the obvious symbolic importance of electing a black president, the outcome of the race wasn’t that monumental in historical context.  The more interesting question is whether the election tells us something about whether the American public is moving in a more conservative or (please excuse the improper use of this term) progressive direction — here’s Yglesias vs. McArdle on the point.  It’s not clear to me how much voters actually mentally matched GOP values with conservative values and made their voting decision based on said identification.  I’m much more likely to believe that voters got fatigued or pissed off with the GOP in general, and that data associating votes for Obama with broadly progressive policies contain mostly lagging or inconclusive indicators.  For one brief return-to-principles argument, read David Boaz.

-I’ll cite Matt again for his post calling out the Cato scholars for their lack of evidence supporting the need to return to libertarian principles.  I respect his point, but I contend that his rebuttal — people voted for Obama because they wanted someone who could help them — is essentially meaningless.  People usually vote for the candidate they think can best help them or help the country, but that’s not particularly well correlated with whose policies can actually help the voters or the country.  If voters had elected McCain because of an overwhelming concern for national security, progressive pundits probably wouldn’t be arguing that the country is moving in a more conservative direction.  They’d more likely argue that McCain’s sound bytes misrepresented the issues, or that the people don’t understand that McCain’s security policies could actually make the country less safe.

-Orin Kerr nails one of the more certain aspects of this election: the new ground rules for executive power and judicial appointments.

-I’m increasingly fascinated by the shift of the uber-rich toward the Democratic Party, as you can see in data posted by Will.  Demonizing the rich has got to be the easiest conceivable campaign message, but demonizing the rich and still getting their votes?  I don’t see why every party doesn’t adopt this strategy!

-And what of the GOP now?  P.J. O’Rourke says they may as well pack it in!  I actually think the fade-into-temporary-irrelevance prediction is entirely plausible, unless Republicans can figure out how to be more inclusive.  They have now completely lost New England and virtually lost the Great Lakes region, they’re in danger of losing the Mountain West, and their current policy positions are hostile to every expanding cultural demographic except possibly for Mormons.  George Will’s contends that the polls suggest the road back from minority to majority party isn’t as harsh as I’ve painted it.  Michael Scherer has a good story about what different strategists think the GOP needs.  But after reading many articles on this topic, what I’ve become most convinced of is that there’s nothing even close to a consensus, which might actually turn out worse for Republicans (in the short run) than arriving at the wrong consensus.

-I object to the supposed distinction between ideology and intellectualism that has lead many liberals to criticize conservatives for being… well, stupid.  I agree that reflexive ideology is a terrible way to respond to tough questions, and I for one consider myself far too pragmatic to support a strictly ideological line of argumentation.  Moreover, I completely agree that too many Republicans “have come to think of reason, evidence, and scholarship as necessarily flawed, to be reviled as an enemy” and find this both despicable and destructive.  But it’s simply not true that real intellectuals are all about reason and that said reason is divorced from ideology.  The GOP’s resurgence from 1972 to 1994 was very clearly driven by a coherent ideological message backed by serious intellectuals.  Moreover, while ideology shouldn’t trump reason, everyone has their lens and serious policy debates aren’t going to be able to jettison ideology.  The GOP absolutely needs to figure out what happened to conservatism’s serious thinkers, but it might also help if Krugman and Co. would can the “all the facts support all my clearly reasoned and non-ideological policies” act, because it’s pretty ridiculous, not to mention it lends credibility to the “elitist prick” accusations.

-Finally, in my opinion here’s the most interesting Big Political Unknown of 2009: will the Democrats in the House kill Obama’s momentum?  The two things that struck me the most about Bush’s method of one-party rule were his staunch unwillingness to fracture his coalition by vetoing a GOP bill and the extent to which he took basically all the heat for everything Congress did regardless of his level of involvement.  The evidence so far suggests that Obama has a very good PR strategy and may be able to distance himself from some of the insane proposals that are likely to come out of the House, but I believe this could be a real challenge for him.

All right, that’s probably enough random political opinions to satisfy an end-of-year election post; now back to focusing on the present.

I’m late to the game on this, but I did want to comment on the Times editorial arguing to abolish the Electoral College.  I’m sure there are better ways than the Electoral College for choosing a president, but choosing the winner of the national popular vote is not one of them.

I concur that voter ignorance is no longer a good reason, if it ever was, to have electors choose the president.  This is not really a testimony to voter intelligence, but rather a concession that once the lengthy nomination process has narrowed the field I doubt that any group of 538 voters could do a better job than any other group of 538 voters in figuring out who would make the better president.

However, I disagree strongly with the idea that the candidate with the most votes ought ipso facto become president.  It was clearly always in the Framers’ intention to give weight to states as regions even if they have smaller populations.  The strategy was not to punish California’s citizens by giving Wyoming a greater per-capita proportion of the Electoral College, but rather to give Wyoming a fighting chance at having its issues represented.  Think the farm bills are pandering?  Without the Electoral College, we’d be spending all our discretionary funding on public transportation and utilities in the 30 largest cities.  Maybe that’s what the good people want, but we should at least recognize politics as we know it will change.  But okay, let’s say that you don’t really care about federalism and the popular vote is your cup of tea.  Fine, but if you dismantle the Electoral College you may as well dismantle the Senate while you’re at it, since they exist for the same purpose: to disproportionately represent states as regions.

One compromise I would support is to have states allocate their congressional electoral votes based on the popular votes in particular congressional districts rather than the statewide vote, with the two votes representing senators allocated for the statewide popular vote.  So Wyoming’s three electoral votes would still go to the statewide popular vote winner since Wyoming only has one congressional district, but 53 of California’s 55 electoral votes would be allocated based on the winners of the popular votes in congressional districts, with the remaining two going to the statewide popular vote winner.  This would certainly encourage campaigning in particular regions that are currently being ignored, while still respecting the influence of states.  Downside: gerrymandering would get a heck of a lot more aggressive, although a little sunlight might do the issue some good.

Some argue this discussion is moot, since there are enough small states to block any constitutional change to the electoral process.  However, legislative changes such as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact are perfectly constitutional, since states can award electoral votes in any manner they choose.  How states determine their electors is very much in play in this ongoing debate.

Four years ago I blogged up a storm before, during, and after the election.  This year will be different, because I am on vacation.  I’m out of DC and won’t get to experience the [joy/agony] of [victory/defeat] with my a city full of polticos who will no doubt be [gloating/crying] for [weeks/months] about how the world is going to be [saved/destroyed] [in spite of/thanks to] those [evil/moronic] guys on the other side of the aisle.

So instead, here’s a disjointed series of my final election-related thoughts, and then I’m going to go enjoy me some great outdoors.

Heresy #1.  This is not the most important election of our lifetimes.  I suppose it might be the most important presidential election of a generation if you define generation very narrowly.  But with the benefit of historical perspective, we can look at 1964, 1968, and 1980 all as more defining than I expect this election to be, and my guess is I haven’t yet seen what I will ultimately consider the most important election of my lifetime.  There’s simply not enough difference between the two major candidates to make that case, at least not until we see what the next four years actually bring.

Heresy #2. There is no “change” candidate, and there is no “maverick.”  Remember when you got all bent out of shape about the expansion of executive power?  Think anybody’s gonna worry about curbing executive power in the next adminstration?  You know those healthcare and energy plans McCain and Obama have?  Think they’re gonna look anything like how they look today after 535 congressmen have their way with them?  Remember when you got all bent out of shape about that war?  Think either candidate is going to strongly defy the advice of the generals on the ground?  Sure there is some difference between the candidates, and of course the issues may change, but in four years we’re going to yet again learn (or more likely, yet again observe and ignore) a very important lesson: you don’t change Washington, it changes you.

Heresy #3.  I have serious, serious problems with populism and elitism.  Populism is way worse, in my view, because although individuals are generally resourceful and resilient when it comes to their own affairs, they are really really dumb when it comes to making choices for others.  Few serious people prefer a democracy over a republic, and with good reason.  This would seem to be a case to support a candidate who was some kind of demigod, who we could all trust to understand the world around us better than our feeble attempts to grasp it.  Except that I have a problem with elitism too.  I believe a trained monkey could execute the actual duties conferred on the chief executive as per the Constitution — and in fact, a trained monkey would be a pretty awesome president because Congress would take back all the governing authority that overreaching presidents have stolen from it over the years.  This would actually seem like a pretty good case to support a President Palin… except that she’s a populist, the likes of whom I hated on in my previous point.  So never mind.

Heresy #4.  Although I am pro-change, I’ve decided I am anti-hope.  Being pro-change means you want things to be different, and it amazes me that a candidate can actually win an presidency pretty much by using the word “change” over and over again.  Best.  Marketing.  Ever.  But I’m anti-hope, because I believe the emotional tide of public opinion can be very dangerous, and all else equal I think people ought to be generally skeptical of any government but especially skeptical of one armed with the power of hope.  Too much hope for government means too much faith in government which rarely makes us better off.

Heresy #5.  I love negative ads.  (Since I’m anti-hope, this shouldn’t be altogether surprising.)  Vanderbilt political science professor John Geer is all over this with his research, by the way — negative ads are the ones that actually tell you stuff about the candidates’ records.  If we’re going to have laws regulating political ads, there oughta be one requiring that all ads be negative so we can get down to the red meat.  Plus, really crappy negative ads are way funnier than really crappy positive ones.

Heresy #6: I think my new favorite voter is the single-issue voter.  I used to think this voter wasn’t sufficiently nuanced to grasp the important differences in the specific policies, temperament, leadership style, etc. but I recently changed my mind.  The single-issue voter is where it’s at, because they know what’s important to them and they stick to their guns (or if you prefer, religion, stance on abortion, position on the war, or general ideological bent) and they don’t keep changing their most important issue depending on who they’re talking to.  And a real single-issue voter picks their candidate without regard for party, which is rare and worthy of respect.  Conversely, a fake single issue voter says an issue matters and then picks something else when a party they don’t like adopts it, which is crap.

Heresy #7: I think my least favorite voter is the bait-and-switch voter – which probably includes most voters.  By bait-and-switch, I mean essentially choosing a candidate to support for particular conscious or subconscious reasons, and then picking up alternate justifications as they go along. Example: people who say “I was considering voting for [McCain/Obama] until I heard about [position/incident] but now there’s just no way I can support them.” Sure, this happens sometimes with truly undecided voters, but 90% of the people who do this are not really undecided and are just experimenting with retroactive justifications in order to try and win debates at the bar.

Heresy #8.  Truly undecided voters are possibly the most clever voters of all, but they are probably morons.  And I say this having spent nearly the entire election as one of them.  What’s left to say about either of the candidates?  Undecideds are in many cases voters who are leaning in a direction but are afraid of or unwilling to reveal that they made a decision, for any number of plausible reasons.  The rest of the undecideds — the truly wishy-washy – are putting way too much mental energy into this thing.  Each of you only has one freakin’ vote, and you’ll probably cancel each other out in most cases anyway.  One caviat: you have to be able to justify your vote in bar room conversations for years to come, so maybe it does matter that much for intensely selfish reasons.  But you undecideds who don’t get into bar room conversations, I don’t know what you’re all worked up about.

Heresy #9.  Building on the previous point, I think which candidate’s supporters/opponents a voter has to put up with on a daily basis matters more to his or her life than any action by the candidates themselves.  Some people are bandwagon voters: they don’t want to contradict the group they have to interact with, and they don’t want to have a target on their back if they vote differently than their social group and things turn out badly.  My preferences, on the other hand, are decidedly contrarian: the more vocal or annoying a group gets, the less I want to support their guy.  The problem with this position is that like most people, I have to understand that my opinions are highly subject to the people I hang around with and the political makeup of my region, which means than even though this is a particularly salient rationale it’s also sort of a tragic one.

Heresy #10.  I wish we wouldn’t pressure people to vote.  I’d rather voting were more like driving: virtually all citizens of a certain age are legally allowed, and most people do, but we don’t rebuke people who have a decent reason for not driving and we do admonish people who suck at it.   I’m not saying we should take away anyone’s voting rights, but it does seem dumb to try and bully or chastize people who don’t feel informed, engaged, opinionated, or affected enough to vote otherwise, or who are conscientious objectors.  If the state of our freedom was really such that we would lose the right to vote if we chose not to exercise it, I suspect this would be the least of our worries.

Finally — yes, I voted, so those of you who believe I am going to hell, the gas chambers, or the gulag for considering otherwise can breathe a sigh of relief.  I submitted my absentee ballot for the state of Tennessee.  I am not voting in a swing state, and although I am increasingly sympathetic to certain arguments against voting, I happen to like knowing what people are going through when they vote and I do enjoy exercising my right to do so.  For arguments for or against voting, including some interesting stuff about voting libertarian, or not voting at all, go read through the this recent exchange at Volokh.

I hope you all have a very pleasant election day, free of shouting or gloating or crying.  Expect large font sizes in the newspaper headlines tomorrow.  I’m off to enjoy the rest of my vacation.

Okay, I don’t normally care for Charles Krauthammer, but his two McCain endorsements are definitely entertaining.  The first one pulls no punches, and the second one is downright LOL-worthy.

I will be jumping on the pre-election “final take” bandwagon very soon.  And no, it will not include an endorsement.

I was searching this morning for a history of presidential endorsements by major U.S. newspapers, and it was a surprisingly difficult search.   Since I’m obviously not going to visit the library and locate them on microfilm, as a cheap substitute here’s a very brief summary of my findings (with sources linked):

Chicago Tribune (est. 1847): “In 2004, the Tribune endorsed President Bush for re-election, a decision consistent with its longstanding support for the Republican Party. On October 17, 2008, the paper made an endorsement that the paper admitted “makes some history for the Chicago Tribune.” For the first time in its 161-year history, the Chicago Tribune endorsed a Democratic Party’s nominee for president with its backing of Barack Obama’s election bid.  The Tribune has previously backed independent candidates. In 1872, it supported Horace Greeley, a former Republican Party newspaper editor, and in 1912 the paper endorsed Theodore Roosevelt, who ran on the Progressive Party slate against Republican President William Howard Taft.”

The New York Times (est. 1851): “After supporting the Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower for his two terms, the paper settled into a pattern of Democratic presidential endorsements.”

Los Angeles Times (est. 1881): “For many years, the Times was unique among major American newspapers in that it refused to endorse any candidate for president. Its endorsement of Richard Nixon’s reelection bid in 1972 caused a furor in the newsroom due to the Chandlers’ longstanding relationship with Nixon. As a result, the paper did not issue a presidential endorsement for 36 years, until it endorsed Barack Obama in 2008.”

The Wall Street Journal (est. 1882): ”The Journal hasn’t endorsed a Presidential candidate since Herbert Hoover, preferring instead to praise or assail the candidates’ ideas.”

Washington Post (est. 1887): “[T]he paper long had a policy of not making endorsements for presidential candidates. However, since at least 2000 the Washington Post has endorsed presidential candidates…. There have also been times when the Post has specifically chosen not to endorse any candidate, such as in 1988 when it refused to endorse then Governor Michael Dukakis or then Vice President George H.W. Bush…. On October 17, 2008, the Washington Post endorsed Barack Obama for President of the United States.”

This is awesome.  I am fully supportive of The Onion’s quest to aggregate onto its website every good one-line joke ever conceived.

Because my friends know I work with libertarians, they are always asking me “who are libertarians voting for?”  This is a stupid question — libertarians are first and foremost principled individualists, and if anyone could figure out how to get them to vote together they would control Washington.

So what I usually do instead is lay out the leading arguments I’ve heard for why libertarians might vote in particular ways.  Here are the contenders:

Libertarians for Obama.  One argument I’ve heard is that Obama and McCain are both overwhelmingly bad on spending, but Obama is an extremely strong civil libertarian, so erosion of our civil liberties is something you don’t have to worry as much about in an Obama administration.  The most common argument I’ve heard is that, while the Democratic Party is never going to be sympathetic to libertarians, a few years in the wilderness is a necessary evil to convince the GOP to start paying attention to economic conservatives again.  For more, see Terry Michael, who offers some points I didn’t make but ignores my second argument completely.

Libertarians for McCain.  The best argument here for libertarians is that divided government, a.k.a. gridlock, is still the best way to prevent or slow new spending increases.  The second best agument is that, for all his faults, McCain is still far more likely to support free trade and less likely to increase entitlement spending than Obama or pretty much any candidate the Democrats would run.  If you’re a libertarian who wants to vote for a major party candidate and your biggest issues are free trade and blocking new entitlement spending, McCain’s going to be your guy regardless of his faults.  For more, see Matt Welch.

Libertarians for Barr.  Most people are surprised to discover how few libertarians vote for the Libertarian Party candidate.  News flash: “small-l” libertarians aren’t oblivious to the fact that most LP candidates are insanely unrealistic — just think about the kind of person who’s likely to be a convention delegate.  But libertarians who vote are really into voting on principle, and the Libertarian Party candidate is typically closest to supporting core libertarian principles.  It’s also worth noting that Bob Barr, a former Georgia congressman, is probably the most sensible candidate the LP has run since 1980 so may view this as a good time to try and improve the LP’s national standing.

Libertarians for [Insert 3rd Party Here].  I didn’t start hearing this argument much until after the Libertarian National Convention.  Many hardcore libertarians who would have voted for the LP candidate aren’t voting for Barr because they believe his GOP background and his former support of the Drug War incidate that he’s not libertarian enough (or at all, according to some).  A few others who were planning to vote for Barr changed their minds after he boycotted a Ron Paul “unity” conference in which Paul said he would support any 3rd party candidate (Paul later endorsed Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin).

Libertarians for Non-Voting.  Few libertarians sit out because they’re lazy.  In fact, since the media ignores libertarians completely, you’re likely to be extremely well-read or politically engaged just to understand what a libertarian is, let alone to be one.  But libertarians also tend to be an extremely emperical bunch, and they know that as the number of voters increases, the statistical likelihood of their vote counting decreases to virtually nil.  So although I believe most libertarians do vote, they will nearly all tell you they only vote on principle or to feel engaged in the process, not because their vote matters.  And by the way, exclaiming “but the party you hate the most will get elected if you don’t vote!” isn’t exactly a compelling argument given the above reasoning.  For more (wonkiness), see Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem.  For an opposing argument, see Glen Whitman.

For the Obama fans out there who are hyperventilating about all the non-Obama choices libertarians are considering, I’ll make one last observation.  In the wake of the financial crisis, I’ve spoken with a number of libertarians whose positions have changed from genuinely undecided to indifferent.  Their reasoning is that they really don’t want to support a candidate who would implement massive spending increases, but the likelihood of massive spending increases in a new administration has now decreased significantly.  This is probably good for Obama, given that having promised everything to everyone at taxpayers’ expense has been his most significant obstacle to winning libertarian voters or deterring them from voting for McCain.

Washingtonian’s After Hours Blog lists DC area vice-presidential debate viewing parties.  I’ll be watching it later because of a work conflict, but here’s the blurb about the one closest to my house:

Summers Restaurant will be divided into two sections to please both parties. Republicans will be tuned in to Fox News, while the Dems will watch the debate on CNN.

Honestly, this doesn’t seem like as great of an idea to me as it must have sounded to the restaurant manager.

Well duh, Obama’s not going to run a 50-state strategy.  He’s not going to accept federal campaign funding when he’s raising $60 million a month.  He’s not going to avoid negative campaigning.  He’s not going to overemphasize policy specifics that can be picked apart by opponents.  He’s going to promise unrealistic changes like educating every child and affordable healthcare for everyone and energy independence in 10 years.

And what’s McCain going to do?  With a few tactical and policy differences, pretty much the same thing.  This is called a campaign, and what amazes me about the rhetoric is how many people think the tactics are supposed to be different just because “change” is written in big letters on campaign posters.

One of my substantive realizations since coming to Washington is that Washington is Washington, and the only reason I ever believed the contrary is because I was naïve and uninformed.  You can change what specific topics get discussed in Washington, but you can’t change the way Washington works.  Is there anyone out there who thinks that you can, and if so, what is your evidence?  Who has ever gotten anything done in Washington that hasn’t done so through a conventional political machine?

Not sure what to make of this chart, other than it probably reinforces my stereotypes….

Arnold tells it like it is:

To me, political campaigns are not sacred events, to be eagerly anticipated and avidly followed. They are brutal assaults on reason. I look forward to election season about as much as a gulf coast resident looks forward to hurricane season.

He then explains a few truths upon which all voters should reflect.