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. 

Since I think the first amendment means what it says, I think that there should be no limitations of any kind on contributions to political parties, movements, or candidates. If George Soros wants to give Barack Obama $10 million, or $100 million, why shouldn’t he be able to?

Ampersand posts the converse. I disagree.

Every person should support the notion that a woman can be President just as a man can, that I can accept.

But Hillary Clinton specifically? She is grossly unqualified to be the chief executive of the country. No executive experience. No military experience. No private-sector leadership experience. A relatively insubstantial legislative career. She has great political experience and contacts - but that isn’t enough. You don’t have to have all of those things to be qualified for the Presidency, but you have to have something. ”Had sex with Bill Clinton at least once” is not a sufficient resume item; if it were, we’d have had a much larger primary field. She’s never fired a shot in anger, never met a payroll, never built a business enterprise, never led men and women in an organizational capacity. My dad is better qualified - and he isn’t even close to being qualified.

She is better qualified than Obama, that I’ll grant you - but whisper-thin-marginally and mostly due to the biographies of other people. She’s got executive experience the way Kerry had money - none of her own, some illusorily reflected by proxy.

McCain by contrast isn’t terribly well qualified for the office, but he at least has military experience and a lengthy legislative history. Historically that’s enough; I can think of decent presidents who had less. I can’t think of ANY modern President with a resume as thin as hers. Bush would be close, but he edges her across the board.

So I’d be leery of supporting Hillary Clinton’s presumptive right to run for the office. Governor, absolutely. VP, a stretch but perhaps if she were yoked to a strong Presidential candidate. The Big Chair? Hell no.

No matter whether it’s Obama, Clinton, McCain, or even the Huck - some things aren’t going to change. The only one I can see to disagree with is #8 - it is possible that we could make the mistake of abandoning Israel as an ally.

H/T Evangelical Outpost.