Rossputin.com: Rational Thinking About Our World

A couple of days ago, former Senator Rick Santorum wrote a piece in which he endorsed John McCain despite reservations about him. After some thought, I can't get myself to agree...

As a libertarian-leaning Republican, I share Rick Santorum’s early concerns about the idea of John McCain as our next president. And I appreciate his realizations about the risks that a President Obama or President Clinton might pose to the nation. But despite those accurate points, and despite there being no possibility of my voting for either of the leftist candidates of the Democratic Party, I can not convince myself to pull the lever for McCain in November.

It is true that there would be some substantial differences between John McCain and either Democrat, for example on taxes, but it’s hard to get excited about those differences. On economic issues, John McCain’s self-admitted lack of understanding makes it far from certain that he will want to govern in a way which truly respects free markets, particularly given his disdain for a free market in political ideas. And on several other issues, a combination of personality, vested interest, and political realities may cause the differences to be less than we might expect.

On economics, McCain finally realized the benefits of the Bush tax cuts, despite originally opposing them with Democrat-like class-warfare rhetoric. In the past two weeks, he changed his view on another issue by now supporting a taxpayer bailout of people facing foreclosure. When Barack Obama says that McCain finally arrived at the correct position on a issue, I know that someone has flip-flopped away from liberty and free markets and toward socialism. Here are two examples of economic issues where McCain has changed his mind, once toward free markets and once away from them. This lack of fundamental economic grounding is to be expected by someone with so little understanding of the topic, and is something to be feared.

There is a laundry list of issues on which conservatives continue to disagree with John McCain, not least of which is “global warming”, an issue that is the equal of health care in terms of domestic importance and probably poses a greater risk to our economy in terms of the damage that the wrong “solution” could cause. Indeed, the measures proposed by Al Gore and friends are little short of “shut down the economy”. And just as we get more and more data pointing toward the climate change alarmists being wrong (the oceans are cooling, arctic ice is thickening, we’ve just had one of the coldest and snowiest winters in years, etc.), McCain joins the “the debate is over” crowd. On this truly critical issue for our economy, McCain may only be marginally better than a Democrat.

The biggest selling point for John McCain is that he will be far less likely to surrender in Iraq or against radical Islam overall than either Democrat would be. While that is clearly true philosophically, I believe that the situation on the ground would be very likely to constrain any president from dangerous precipitous action. Even a Democrat will probably not be able to pull troops out as rapidly as they’re promising to their MoveOn.org party base. However, if there is any compelling reason to support McCain, however, this is it.

Senator Santorum also places major emphasis on the number of political appointments the next president will make, and of course many of us focus on likely vacancies in the Supreme Court, especially after such travesties as Kelo and Hamdan. But John McCain has demonstrated a contempt for the First Amendment which is nearly unmatched in Congress, at least on his side of the aisle. McCain-Feingold is a frontal assault on political speech, the type of speech that the Founders were most intent on protecting.

When I asked John McCain whether he had any second thoughts about McCain-Feingold, he replied that he supported increased regulation of 527s rather than showing any realization of the deeply anti-American nature of the law which bears his name. Given this feeling, why should we not believe that McCain would attempt to nominate Supreme Court justices who will uphold McCain’s devastating legacy? And how could we believe that anybody who would accept McCain-Feingold would be a “strict constructionist” in other areas if he or she were unable to strictly construe the plain language of the First Amendment that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech”? “No law” does not mean “some laws, as long as they help incumbents”.

Some might argue that not voting for McCain is just too great a risk to accept. I disagree. If the GOP wants to nominate someone with only marginally greater respect for the Constitution than a Democrat, I can not in good conscience support him. I’ll vote Libertarian (again), even though I’m a registered Republican, and hope that the Democrats don’t destroy the country before the Republicans learn that they must return to being the party of liberty and limited government, of James Madison, and Ronald Reagan. At least if a Democrat governs like a Democrat, we know who to blame.