If nothing else, tonight’s debate made clear the extent to which the systematic exclusion of third-party candidates from our national political system is a travesty. On a whole host of issues – abortion, education, gun rights, excessive taxation, wasteful spending, government spying, and the limits of executive power – Bob Barr was consistently clearer and more direct than either of the candidates sitting on the stage in Hempstead, and when his 90 minutes were done he left no doubt as to his qualifications for the presidency. If higher spending, ever-increasing federal deficits, and the untrammelled growth of wasteful government agencies are your kind of thing, then go ahead and vote for McCain or Obama; if, however, you’re the sort who goes in for federalism, lower taxes, a respect for the Constitution, and individual liberty, then you’d do well to look elsewhere. There was only one authentically conservative candidate taking part in that discussion tonight, and he’s the one who talks about “liberty”, and whose voice the other two didn’t have to hear.
Take Obama’s incessant talk of “investment”, for instance, which McCain in his mavericky wisdom somehow managed not to pick up on: it’s a blatant euphemism for spending, and as I noted in my liveblog it’s a front for exactly the kind of thinking that got us into our current economic debacle. What Obama wants to do – on health care, education, teacher training, national “defense”, and all the rest – is make an investment with money that we don’t have, with the promise that it will turn a profit down the line. Never mind that in a great number of these cases – like early childhood and college education, for example, not to mention the cost of maintaining our empire abroad – there is every reason to think that the investment won’t pay off: we’ve got to invest, dammit, and the federal government has got to make the investment for you or otherwise you might do something stupid like keep the money for yourself. That’s theft, plain and simple, and it absolutely reeks of the very worst sort of paternalism.
That McCain was unable to bring any of this to light, but instead had to go on and on about hatchets and scalpels and the plight of Joe the plumber, says what needs to be said about the sorry state of the Republican Party. It’s hard to deny that on certain issues – drug policy, say, or military spending or even civil liberties – Bob Barr tends to have a hard time making good on his “I didn’t leave the GOP; the GOP left me” routine: but on taxation and spending he’s hardly moved an inch, and it was deeply satisfying to watch him sit there and mock McCain’s claim to “conservatism” time and time again. The same goes when it comes to the selection of Supreme Court justices or the need to limit executive power – and on the latter of those issues, it’s worth noting that Barr was perfectly comfortable in talking about impeachment, which is something that Obama and most of his Democratic colleagues have been strikingly unwilling to do.
Does the man have a chance? Of course not. Should he have one? Could he have, if the system weren’t so blatantly rigged against him? Yes, and perhaps – though Obama is the sort of politician who doesn’t come along that often. But there’s no getting around the fact that that so long as our political system keeps managing to marginalize figures like Bob Barr while giving hours of free air time to the John McCains and Barack Obamas of the world, very little is going to change in the way things run in Washington. We the voters can continue to acquiesce in that arrangement by voting for the candidates that the major parties set before us, or we can agitate loudly for something different and take steps to realize it by casting our votes elsewhere. The biggest losers in the debate tonight were the ones who weren’t faced with a choice.
Filed under: conservatism, education, government/law, libertarianism, media/culture, politics, taxation
So I absolutely agree that the current political system in the U.S. is extremely unfavorable to third-party candidates like Barr.
But the very factors that make a third-party candidate like Barr unelectable are the factors that give him the freedom to be clear and direct. He doesn’t have to try to appeal to a wide variety of warring constituencies, so he can lay out a coherent and principled position. The intellectual fogginess and equivocation you see even the major candidates (including the obviously very smart ones like Obama) is not a bug but a feature of the system within which they are operating. Barr can be direct because he knows he can’t win. That’s not to slam Barr, just to point out it’s not really fair to compare his performance with McCain’s and Obama’s in this way.
I agree, Peter, though it seems to me that the major party candidates would be able to get away with a lot less of their B.S. if they had to share space with candidates who were offering something different. Obama would never have pressed McCain about, e.g., how his supposed “constructionism” squares with the free speech restrictions in McCain-Feingold or how his claim to want to shrink the size of government is empty in the face of the fact that he wants to, well, grow it, nor would McCain ever have pressed Obama on how the right to privacy permits abortion but doesn’t disallow domestic spying, etc. – but if they’d been up against a candidate who didn’t feel bound by those same rules, then the rules would have begun to change, and they’d have been pressed to be much more transparent and articulate then they need to be when both they and their MSM questions are coming at things squarely from the mushy middle. Doesn’t that seem reasonable?
Yes that seems entirely reasonable. In fact I like that way of putting the case better than the original. Emphasizing that people who would never vote for someone like Barr might have something to gain from having him put pressure on the candidates they would consider voting for to get beyond the boilerplate might, practically speaking, the best way to get widespread support for the idea.
Oops, there should be a “be” in that last sentence.
I say that we follow the lead of Peter’s homeland and adopt a multi-party parliamentary system! If nothing else, watching sessions might be more amusing than watching the House, sans Jim Traficant.
[...] Posted on 16 October 2008 by nathancontramundi John, in the comment box of his post-debate post: [I]t seems to me that the major party candidates would be able to get away with a lot less of [...]