Samizdata

I just found out about this good news in Pennsylvania:

The lawsuit, filed by a Republican Party official in Cumberland County, PA, sought to remove Barr’s name from the ballot—contrary to promises made by John McCain during his first bid for the presidency after then Texas Governor George Bush tried to have McCain blocked from the New York primary ballot. “I would never consider, ever consider,” McCain said during his 2000 campaign, “allowing a supporter of mine to challenge [an opponent’s] right to be on the ballot in all 50 states.”

McCain went on to call such tactics, “Stalinist politics.”

“We’re happy that the Pennsylvania courts recognized the absurd nature of the Republican’s lawsuit,” says Russell Verney, Barr’s campaign manager. “It was very hypocritical of McCain to allow one of his agents to try to block a legitimate candidate like Congressman Bob Barr from the ballot. Fortunately, these hypocritical tactics of McCain’s agents failed.”

The court ruled that the Libertarian Party and the Libertarian Party of Pennsylvania “simply took reasonable action to abide by the Election Code while furthering its legitimate interest.”

This is particularly heartening to me as I vote absentee in Pennsylvania.

Here is a small conjecture concerning the claim that secret racism may be causing US pollsters to overestimate Barack Obama’s true support, which I have most recently been reading about in this article.

Party elders also believe the Obama camp is in denial about warnings from Democratic pollsters that his true standing is four to six points lower than that in published polls because of hidden racism from voters – something that would put him a long way behind Mr McCain.

Maybe the concealment is real, and maybe some of what is being concealed is indeed racism, but maybe some of it is something else. What if a lot of people secretly oppose Obama being the President for good non-racist reasons, but fear of getting involved in arguments which will involve them being accused of racism, even just thought to be racists, by annoying pollsters? Although not Obama supporters, such people just say “I will vote Obama” to avoid even the hint of such unpleasantness. They will not be voting Obama, because they think he is a vacuous windbag, from Chicago, too thin, dodgy on Iraq, or because they don’t care for Biden, whatever. They will be voting for McCain for similarly varied reasons, other than McCain’s mere whiteness. But they fear that the pollsters they are talking to might suspect otherwise, and who needs that grief?

For that to make sense, it is necessary to believe that people care what stupid strangers think of them. But surely, at least some do. I certainly care, a bit, what people whom I hardly rate at all think of me. I don’t like being cursed for my lack of generosity by drunkards in the street, or shouted at by people who are clearly rather unstable, or denounced for bumping into someone by someone who actually bumped into me. I don’t like it when a mere fleeting expression on the face of such a person even suggests such critical thoughts on their part.

None of this matters to me very much. Such slights are very quickly forgotten But then again, nor would lying about my true voting intentions to some annoying pollster in what is, after all, supposed to be a secret ballot.

Remember that merely replying that “most people” would never think like this is no answer, although a sadly frequent error when all that is being surmised is that a few people might be persuaded to act differently by an oddity in their environment, although not a majority, and certainly not everybody. This is a surmised marginal effect, influencing a few but ignored by most, like a small change in the price of a chocolate bar. To dismiss what I am suggesting, you would have to believe either that nobody thinks thus, or that there are other concerns – what concerns? – that might cancel out such tendencies.

Just a thought. No link, because I have not seen anyone else say such a thing, although I’m sure plenty have. If not, I am sure that some have thought this.

More US election speculations from me here, which has links to more. I am flattered that the mighty Guido Fawkes thought this piece worth linking to in his Seen Elsewhere section, although blink and you would miss that, because Guido sees a lot.

UDATED UPDATE Sunday evening. The link chaos of the final paragraph is now all corrected. Posting errors by me have been cleaned up and my own blog is now back in business. Apologies for all the confusion, and apologies also for spelling apologies wrongly in the previous version of this update.

Bob Barr and Wayne Allen Root have offered the LP Vice-Presidential slot to Ron Paul.

The question is: “Will he take it?”

If I were a betting man, I’d give it 1 in 4, but the very thought of bringing all those Paul supporters over to our side is enough to set a Libertarian’s heart a flutter!

I see that Gordon Brown has come out in favour of Mr Obama winning the White House.

For Mr McCain, this must be a hopeful sign. As Guido Fawkes likes to point out, Gordon “Profiles in Courage” Brown has a track record of cursing any cause he attaches himself to.

Of course, I can see why Brown might relate to The One. Both of them have never done a stroke of work outside of politics in their lives.

Bob Bidinotto has an excellent appraisal of John McCain. It should serve as a corrective to some of the hopes that people may have about him after his – in my view – wise choice of Sarah Palin as his VP choice.

John McCain is a decent man of great character, with a wonderful sense of life and a courageous spirit. But he is no intellectual and certainly no philosopher; ideologically, he is very much a mixed bag. He is governed by his feelings, which are shaped in turn by his personal code — the code of national service, of “Country First.” Just as his notion of “selfishness” falsely packages legitimate self-interest with narcissistic self-indulgence, so too does his notion of “Country First” falsely package legitimate patriotism and “free enterprise” with the idea of individual sacrifice to the state.

In this incoherence, John McCain perfectly embodies the fundamental contradiction at the heart of American society: the clash between its conventional morality of self-sacrifice, and its political-economic system of individualism and profit-oriented capitalism. The fact that so many conservatives also try to square the circle of these logically incompatible premises means that McCain’s candidacy is dragging the Republican Party significantly to the left in its basic philosophy.

I can also recommend Matt Welch’s recent book about McCain. For all that the senator from Arizona might like to claim the mantle of a maverick, he is not quite that, and Welch points out that McCain is a different animal in certain respects from his Arizona predecessor, Barry Goldwater.

That is not to say that there is a not much to admire about McCain, especially his obvious courage under captivity. But like Bob I really worry about McCain’s version of “national greatness conservatism”. Any politician that takes Teddy Roosevelt as a political idol should be treated warily. Roosevelt inflicted the monstrosity of anti-trust on the US, for example.

Bob comes to this conclusion:

On individualist philosophical grounds, then, we are left with the choice of supporting either a profoundly flawed representative of America’s founding premises, or of supporting a candidate whose philosophy and every policy proposal are profoundly at odds with those premises. For me, that is no choice at all. (I leave aside the Libertarian candidacy of Bob Barr, who has zero chance of being elected; the only meaningful choice is between McCain and Obama.)