Bob Hayes Online

I will be working for a victory for John McCain. I think Obama is a bad leader and would make a terrible President. Nobody who has followed my writing would ever misunderstand that. I hope that McCain is going to win a solid victory in November, and I am praying for an undisputed, clean election.

People with my political beliefs, myself included, made a terrible mistake in the Clinton years. We decided en masse that because he was such a dreadful man, because he was so destructive to the office, that he was no longer our President. That he was illegitimate. That we hated him.

This was a profoundly bad thing for America.

Yes, he was a bad man and he did some terrible things and he was, in fact, profoundly destructive to the office of the Presidency. But we on the right lost sight of something: we were not responsible for what Bill Clinton was. We were responsible for what we were.

Our country is predicated on the idea that we don’t need to have civil wars and hyper-partisan destructive political conflict, because we provide a mechanism for the people to select our leadership. If the people vote for you according to the pre-existing rules, then hey, you’re the leader.

This arrangement is in danger. It was in danger in the 1990s from the right, and it is in danger today from the left. If Obama wins, then it will be the right’s turn to be the ones tearing down the fragile network of customs and beliefs that holds our nation together. I don’t think we should do that. I don’t want to be a part of doing that again. I did it in the 1990s and it was stupid and destructive and wrong of me. I’m sorry about it, but the only thing I can do about it now is to resolve not to do it again.

If Barack Obama wins, reasonably fair, reasonably square, then he will become my President and I will support him. That doesn’t mean I won’t fight him like the devil on all the many, many things he will do that are wrong and bad; I will. That doesn’t mean I won’t criticize him ferociously and with a partisan growl; I will.

But I won’t declare that he is an illegitimate leader.

I won’t undermine him in front of the national leaders that he has to relate to in order to do his job.

I won’t call him President-Select Obama if the Supreme Court has to intervene, again, to keep the electoral machinery moving.

I won’t print up bumper stickers in 2012 saying Re-Unelect Obama.

I won’t, in short, do any of the things that the nauseating anti-Bush left has done in the last eight years. I did that stuff with Clinton, and now that I’ve grown up a little bit, and now that I’ve seen what it looks like when the other side does it to my guy, and now that they’ve held up a mirror, it’s a little bit sickening, and I’m more than a little bit ashamed.

Here’s what it boils down to, folks:

If Obama wins the election, reasonably fair, reasonably square, then he becomes my President and your President.

If McCain wins the election, reasonably fair, reasonably square, then he becomes my President and your President.

This is my pledge, my promise, my what-have-you. It’s written down, in black and white. Call me on it if I renege.

I ask everybody who reads this to do two things if they agree with me.

One, say it loud and say it proud, the winner of the 2008 election is my President, and whether I like him or not, whether I agree with him or not, I’m not going to be a Michael Moore-style flaming gasbag asshat about it.

Two, pass the link along. Send it to your friends, post it on your blog, whatever. It’s important. We are one country, and we have to pull together whether we agree with one another or not.

I anticipate some caterwauling this election from the Democrats again about the Electoral College. Here is part six of an ongoing series on reasons that we still need the Electoral College. Reason The Sixth: It Undermines Claims That The United States Is A Democracy

We are not a direct democracy.

We never have been.  God willing, we never will be.

The Founding Fathers (angel choir) were very wise men.  They recognized, from their extensive knowledge of the histories of the democratic and republican states that had come before us, that direct democracy simply does not work.  People are too selfish, too impulsive, too emotional.  Systems that have embraced an excess of democracy invariably collapse under the weight of socialist bread-and-circuses or turn into dictatorships.  Anyone who has ever tried to get ten co-workers to agree on a place to eat lunch instinctively and immediately understands why democratic governments undergo a constant temptation to just pick a dictator and be done with it; maybe Maximum Leader Stan won’t pick the best restaurant, but at least he’ll pick something and we can eat, for heaven’s sake.

Instead of democracy per se, the Founders (angel choir) recognized that a democratically-selected republic would be somewhat more resistant to the constant temptation of dictatorship, or the siren song of socialism.  The Senate was originally an appointed body (and should be again).  Representatives were directly elected, to give the people a legitimate direct voice.  The President would be selected by an electoral college, whose members would represent the will of the people in each state, but who would have the power to put the kibosh on truly outrageously bad choices. 

A lot of people with very dubious political agendas would like very much for us to be a direct democracy, because they believe (correctly) that their destructive beliefs could be more easily implemented if all they had to do was fool a certain percentage of the population.  The non-democratic aspects of our system, such as the electoral college, represent something of a barrier to such illegitimate aspirations. 

We’re a republic, not a democracy, and our political institutions reflect that spirit of delay, compromise, and the holding at arms-length the political will of the people.  The people’s voice is a trumpet, not a 10,000-watt speaker stack.  It strongly influences and ultimately controls, but does not hold the whip itself. 

That’s the list so far; if I think of new reasons to keep the EC, I’ll post them.

I anticipate some caterwauling this election from the Democrats again about the Electoral College. Here is part five of an ongoing series on reasons that we still need the Electoral College.  (I should link to Gary Gregg of NRO, who is also doing a series on the electoral college, and whose post today hits the same theme as mine.  Copycat.)

Reason The Fifth: It Makes Cultural Extremists Unelectable

There is a cultural divide of some magnitude in this country.  Red-state and blue-state denizens don’t just inhabit different parties, in many ways they inhabit different worlds.  An easy example of that can be found in the reactions to my Why I’m Pro-Life post (those comments are now gone, alas) - red state folks nodding their heads and saying ‘yep’ and blue state folks not understanding where I was coming from at all.  These worldviews and cultural values aren’t right or wrong, necessarily, but they are very different.

I anticipate some caterwauling this election from the Democrats again about the Electoral College. Here is part four of an ongoing series on reasons that we still need the Electoral College. Reason The Fourth: It Enhances The Power Of Minorities

The Electoral College enhances the voice of minority interests in the selection of the President. It isn’t just racial minorities - currently the main beneficiaries of this effect are Southern blacks, Mormons, and the we-like-whores-and-poker libertarians in Nevada. The geographical nature of this enhancement also means that members of a minority group have to take it pretty seriously in order to get the benefit; if the Mormons decide tomorrow that they don’t need to live in a special area and exodus all over the country, poof, there goes their political influence.

It is very easy to formulate a system that protects the influence of minorities, but such systems have the danger of leading to serious factionalism and infighting, as in the proportional-representation nightmares of many European governments. The electoral system provides a voice for these often-disenfranchised groups, while the geographical restriction ensures that the system does not degenerate into a hundred warring factions.

I anticipate some caterwauling this election from the Democrats again about the Electoral College. Here is part two of an ongoing series on reasons that we still need the Electoral College.

Reason The Third: It Reduces The Incentive To Commit Vote Fraud

Many areas of the country are solidly in one political camp or another.  Texas is not in play this year.  Everyone knows what Massachusetts is going to do. 

When a place has one highly dominant party, that party naturally controls all of the voting machinery.  All of the voting judges are of that party; all of the ministerial jobs at the state level are held by people who are members of the party.  This makes voter fraud a lot easier than in a scenario where there the area is hotly contested, and people of both parties are in positions of authority.

Under a popular vote system, there would be a strong incentive for such one-party areas to run up the vote count through fraudulent means.  It’s easy to get away with, and there’s a return on the “investment” - all those lovely additional votes.

The Electoral College serves to check this tendency.  Once a state is in the bag for Candidate X, Candidate X’s partisans in the electoral machinery have no incentive to try and run up the count.  They can settle for their honest victory and not feel any pressure (from the national parties, for example) to come up with more votes somehow.

I anticipate some caterwauling this election from the Democrats again about the Electoral College.  Here is part two of an ongoing series on reasons that we still need the Electoral College.

Reason The Second:  It Requires Candidates To Make Their Pitch To Large Parts Of The Country

The EC forces candidates to craft policies that appeal to large sections of the country, not just to one or two cities.  It also forces them to visit large sections of the country.  If we had a popular vote system, candidates would quite logically spend all of their time in NY, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, LA, and Seattle.  They would do this for the same reason that you rake your leaves into one big pile before bagging them instead of wandering the yard with a sack, bending over to pick up each individual leaf:  transaction costs.  When people are grouped together, it is much easier, faster, and cheaper to pander to them.

Make one stop in NYC and you have access to 10 million voters.  To do the same in rural states you would have to make more like 100 stops, with large distances between each stop.  It’s a lot cheaper per-person to advertise in NYC than it is to advertise in a fifteen-state region.  The electoral college makes those 100 stops a lot more attractive to the candidates, because each stop represents a couple of electoral votes. 

Even if a state doesn’t have many electoral votes, the candidate generally tries to hit it at least once, because if his opponent wins, she gets a small but meaningful boost.  In a popular contest, no such incentive applies.  You don’t really care that your opponent got 90,000 votes in Rhode Island and you only got 80,000; you will make that up with one photo op in Greenwich Village.  The electoral system makes that 10,000 vote margin worth 3 EC votes, and you can’t really afford to just blow off any particular state.  It’s better to forget about running up the score in NYC and start bolstering your support in other parts of the nation.

I anticipate some caterwauling this election from the Democrats again about the Electoral College.  Here is part one of a to-be-ongoing series on reasons that we still need the Electoral College.

Reason The First: Because Otherwise We’d Have Another Civil War

If the voting was done on a direct popular basis, the rural areas of the United States would have no effective voice.  There would be no political point in them remaining in the Union, and they would secede again (and with considerably more justification this time); the cities wouldn’t be able or willing to let them go.  To avoid just that kind of sectionalism, secession, and war, the Founders (angel choir) decided to compromise with a system that gives major populaton centers a large voice, but not an overwhelming one. (And you’ll note that while the South went south anyway, under-representation in the Federal government was not the reason.  So the Founders weren’t perfect, sue ‘em.)

Let’s use one of my colorful homespun analogies.  This one has liquor and prostitutes, so pay attention.  Say you have two men running a boat.  Both of them have skills that are absolutely necessary to operate the boat, and that neither of them can do it alone.  One of them weighs 315 pounds, and the other weighs 85 pounds.  A case could be made that the shipping company should pay the fat man 315/400ths of the salary budget, and the skinny man 85/400ths, because the fat man has to buy a lot more food, his clothes are more expensive, he needs more bourbon to get liquored up, etc.  But if you did that, the skinny man would quit and go find work with another shipping company, and the boat would sink.  The fat man can’t leave; berths for 315-pound seamen are hard to find.  (They keep breaking hammocks.)  So if there’s to be “injustice”, measured by weight:dollar ratios, in the salary arrangement, it is going to end up being at the fat man’s expense.

So the fat man of the cities gets boned in the ear, to an extent, but he IS getting paid, so he doesn’t quit.  He just grumbles once in a while that he’s spending an awful lot of his salary on crates of Snack Ramen while his skinny rural coworker nibbles the occasional sandwich and has a lot more for dockside whoring expenses.  It isn’t FAIR, but it works.  The “fair” alternative wouldn’t.

The likelihood of a civil war scenario may be low, but the costs of it are very high. 

Leftists and some center-leftist “good government” types, in cooperation with some quasi-conservatives, have, successfully, used campaign finance laws to somewhat impede “big money” in politics.  The changes were widely predicted to be unlikely to happen (by me - wrong!), and if they did happen, certain to be routed around by the clever moneymen of the big factions (again me, again - wrong!). 

So sue me.

There does seem to be some friction.  There does seem to be some slowing down and some sluggishness from both parties; some cowboy elements seem to have a lot more control.  The good government types and leftists,  theoretically, should be happy about this, but I’ve about given up trying to completely understand their motivations in this arena.

This has created a market space for genuinely independent advocacy groups to get their message out.  Primarily using the Internet as an incubator for an idea or a cause, these groups can leverage the initial rush into an ongoing voice in the debate.  Swift Boats for Truth is one such, albeit a disreputable example.  (Yes, the people supporting it are ideologues.  This is one thing that ideologues do.)  There are lots of Democratic groups, some more reputable than others.  There are other conservative and libertarian groups.

In time, I would expect that this grassroots-type movement will greatly increase the amount of direct democracy that this country, er, enjoys.  Liberals thinks this will be a good thing for them; I am not nearly so sure.

There are a lot of conservative blogs out there.  There are quite a few liberal ones, too, but the conservative ones seem to have a serious edge in meatiness.  It’s entirely possible that’s just a wishful bias on my part.  This country is not really used to hearing conservative voices in the numbers that our representation in the population would seem to indicate,  (OK, to forestall some objections from the very far left element, it is true that some Americans would consider the current MSM to be “conservative” in many senses.  You are free to think that.  And yeah, there’s Rush.) 

One thing about political voices is this: when you don’t hear the voice of people you perceive to be like you, you tend to hush up about politics.  When you’re the solitary liberal in the sales team, you might feel a little out of place, and reluctant to speak up.  It seems to be true for conservatives as well; the center-right economy prof feels something of an outsider in her circle.  The more voices in your own key that you hear, the better you feel about piping up and singing.  This doesn’t have to automatically be a cacophony between the voices of the different sides; it could be a harmonic experience. 

That said, there are a lot of conservative voices warming up, and their words are true and sweet.  Are we right about everything?  No.  No political philosophy yet conceived on this earth doesn’t contribute something to the debate, however small; no mortal philosophy ever devised will encompass all truth.  Are we right about many things?  Oh my, yes. 

Culture and civic virtue.  A properly and humanely martial tradition, outlook, and bearing.  A respect for education - and a strong belief in its essentially private and family-value-based nature.  A genuine belief in the spiritual, moral, and legal equality of humankind - and compassion for all of humanity.  A belief in the vibrant and vigorous exercise of liberty under law - the idea that freedom is a powerful gift, whose truest expression comes in its voluntary restraint.  At bottom, the idea that a human being is a self-motivated entity - that you can pick yourself up and do with yourself what you will.  Work, think, learn, play - on your own hook, by your own crook.  We believe in a helping hand to people who have fallen down, and need help to get back up.  We believe in a kindly hand to people who have served well, and reached their time of quiet and reflection.  We believe in a culture of life.

Perhaps most importantly - so important that it is rarely said and rarely articulated - we believe that the proper exercise of power in the human sphere is as low as can be accommodated to reality.  That individuals should yield power only grudgingly to communities, communities only grudgingly to regions, and so on.  This does not preclude reaching a state of satisfaction with a particular balance; sometimes a state or a nation is the place where the power should and must be.  We agree that the nation is the proper place for the final investiture of sovereign power; we aggressively disbelieve that larger entities should take this pride of place.  Thus far, and no farther.

If you are unhappy with the state of politics, if, regardless of partisanship or party you despair - then you might take comfort in having some of these things, at least, in common with your compatriots across the aisle.  These aren’t, alas, all consensus values…but some of them are, and all of them are very strongly represented in the literate common population of the United States.

Some of these values are not shared by fairly large groups of people, or they pay lip service to them.  These are not organized groups; it isn’t the Huguenots or the Templars or the Jews scheming to conquer the world.  It’s just some people who don’t share these values.  Some of them are evil, some of them are misguided, some of them are just dumb, some of them are decent people who have taken, from our point of view, a wrong turn.

That’s what politics is for; to hammer out these things without, hopefully, having to kill one another.  Killing one another is boring.  Bullets get pock-marks in the library steps, and you know who’s going to end up paying for it the next time they raise the assessment.  When we despair of politicians, it might do to remember one thing:

As rulers go, they’re a lot better than generals.

We’ve decided to have government run the schools. The education of young people is intimately tied into the transmission of values. This leads us to a serious conflict with the way we have chosen to order our society.

An acquaintance of mine asked me why I was so knee-jerk in my opposition to government regulation.  Upon reflection, I decided that it was because knee-jerk anti-regulationism is the rational position.

Regulation is an evil in and of itself. It may be a required evil, under a certain circumstance. For example, it is a good thing that we have homicide laws. But we are engaging in a trade-off:  we accept the costs of that regulation (including the promotion of moral decrepitude intrinsic to externalizing the regulation instead of expecting everyone to carry “thou shalt not kill” as an internal moral requirement) because of the anticipated higher cost of not having such a regulation (family vendettas, mass slaughter, blood in the streets).

Other times it’s a bit more of a gray area. Is it a good thing to restrict business activity through anti-trust laws? There are arguments to be made on both sides. Whichever side you come down on, there’s still a trade-off being made.

And then there’s the vast area of regulation which are simply a favored group’s use of state power to impose their preferences on others, with no compelling rationale. There is no objective reason to prefer dense-pack housing to sprawled-out housing; some people would prefer to live in dense pack and others would prefer to live in inexpensive tract homes. If environmentalists grab control of the reins of the state they can make developing the latter impossible through regulation, and that kind of regulation is intrinsically evil.  If developers grab control, they can shift the cost of developing infrastructure onto the city; that is also evil.