For a few weeks I thought I might vote for John McCain despite McCain-Feingold. But his behavior on the Big Bailout makes that unlikely.
One thing I’ve never liked about McCain is his adoption of Theodore Roosevelt as a role model. I consider Roosevelt an attractive personality but a terrible president.
I’ve read several biographies of TR and have some of them on my bookshelf. But George Will tells a few things about him that I hadn’t known before. Somehow I had not known that his ideology was so collectivist. Will describes it thusly:
TR wanted the body politic to be one body, whose head was the president. He disregarded civil society — the institutions that mediate between individuals and the state, insulating them from dependence and coercion. He had a Rousseauan notion that the individual could become free only through immersion in the collective.
He doesn’t use the word “fascist,” but one can see that proto-fascism was already in the air in the decades before the actual thing arrived.
Will points out that one thing that might save McCain from being as bad as TR is his lack of brain wattage:
He is a kindred spirit of the impulsive Rough Rider, but the visceral McCain is rescued from some of TR’s excesses by not having TR’s overflowing cupboard of ideas.
It’s not that Obama isn’t even worse than McCain. But here’s what will be better than electing Obama’s opponent:
Let Obama become president, but also work to defeat those Republicans in Congress who would be likely to vote with him. Republicans can do more to stop his brand of fascism by standing firm and united in saying no. The left will not enact sweeping collectivist proposals if they don’t have bipartisan support. They know their ideas will fail, and they need Republican sponsors so they will have someone on whom to blame those failures (as is now happening with the failures of the financial system). A principled, committed minority — selected in large part from those who stood firm against the Big Bailout — will do more to stop our country’s descent into oppression than would the election of McCain as a mild alternative to Obama’s extremism.
Don’t believe it? Then look at what a minority of Congresspersons did to stop Hillary’s health care plan.