I Ponder Again How To Cast My (Meaningless) Vote

Even ignoring the fact that John McCain is barking dog mad, I probably owe my support to Barack Obama. Obama did, after all, manage to wrest the Democratic nomination from its presumptive heiress, a woman who has been working tirelessly to return to the White House even while her husband was facing an eviction notice. I am on record (somewhere) that I’d sooner vote for Osama Bin Laden for President than for Hillary Rodham Clinton, and not only because he looks more fetching in a pantsuit.

People decry big money contributions to political campaigns, and the abomination that is McCain-Feinberg aside, it’s silly to argue that free speech isn’t more valuable to those who can afford to buy more of it. And yet, as reason's Matt Welch recently nailed it:

[Is] there a political tic more nauseating, more unintentionally telling, than a stump speecher [sic] wowing the crowd with heartwarming tales about how some poor Iraq vet, or three-job-having pensioner, or one-armed child eating Puppy Chow straight from the bag, pooled together enough pennies with their last usable fingers to donate to a fucking millionaire's political campaign? If any of these stories are remotely true, it says something mildly worrying about the priorities of certain po' folk, but something straight-out monstrous about the egos of politicians who'd rather pocket the 37 cents (and the infinitely more valuable anecdote) than fold the copper back into the helping hand and say "You know what? I've got enough, thanks. Anything I can help you with?"

Make no mistake, folks. Obama would pocket the 37 cents, too. (And, yes, so would McCain.) Still, Obama has done what, let’s be candid, no white male candidate could have done and kept America, at least for now, from the clutches of that harridan from Hell. Surely, the only person in America today who hates Barack Obama more than Hillary Clinton is Bill, who knows first-hand how little time presidents have to keep track of their spouses.

Obama now faces the vexing decision whether to invite Hillary onto the Democratic ticket as the Vice Presidential candidate. This should be a no-brainer: better to have Hillary plotting your defeat for four months than your incapacitation for four years. Don’t kid yourself, if Obama doesn’t give the VP slot to Hillary she will (continue to) work behind the scenes to ensure his defeat. If he cuts her loose now, her rabid supporters will temporarily feel betrayed, but most of them will come back come November unless McCain somehow manages between now and then to morph into a black woman. Specifically, one named Oprah.

That’s no knock on Obama. I don’t personally see him as a token candidate. But many of those who worship at the altar of superficial diversity will surely not pass up the opportunity to vote for an otherwise more-or-less acceptable candidate who is also “a historic first.” Besides, in the cold light of dawn, Hillary’s supporters will swallow hard and realize that, if nothing else, from their point of view Obama is the lesser of two (male) evils.

Which, given how Bush will be leaving the nation after eight painful years, he is. McCain is the Anti-Kant, the candidate of Perpetual War, and a man whose legendary anger (even greater than Hillary’s!) and occasionally aberrant behavior should be raising psychological flags all over the place. Still, the notion of Democrats controlling both the White House and Congress is at least as frightening as Republican control. Maybe, just maybe, even more so.

Look, ceteris paribus, if the government is going to piss away trillions anyway, it might as well piss them away on domestic programs. And Lord knows the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been an abysmal policy failure at the cost not only of trillions of dollars but of far too high a butcher’s bill paid in blood and death. But wars do come to an end and armies of occupation are eventually brought home.

Not so the ever ratcheting advance of the welfare state and the intrusion of the federal government into every nook and cranny of domestic life. The worst thing about the way George Bush has expanded the raw power of the presidency isn’t how he has used that power, bad as that is; it is that no one who follows him in office will relinquish such power willingly. Governments, or more precisely those who at any given point happen to be governing, don’t cede power. No Democratic Congress, so long out of veto-proof power, is likely to even consider the need to “rein in” an Obama Administration. (That is, by the way, about the only really good thing I can think of about a Hillary Clinton Administration – she’d be absolutely guaranteed to alienate even a 100% Democratic Congress within the first 100 days.)

I fear that my only hope at this point is that the Republicans, despite themselves, manage to control one house of Congress next year. It isn’t likely, but otherwise I have to hope we replace an imbecile with a maniac in the Oval Office. Some choice!