|
November 2008
Vol. 22, No. 10
Voters' Guide
The Case for Obama
Choosing among those who seek the presidency is not necessarily an easy task for the intelligent libertarian. Liberty's editors do their best to help.
Bruce Ramsey is a journalist in Seattle.
Barack Obama is not a libertarian, and Bob Barr, the nominee of the Libertarian Party, is. The libertarian case for Obama has to begin with strategic voting: one does not waste one’s vote on self-expression but casts it for the greater good, as if one vote could determine the outcome.
The libertarian case for Obama, then, is not a tub of enthusiasm. It is negative: that he is not John McCain.
McCain has his points. From a free-market and self-reliance point of view, McCain’s rhetoric and voting record are better than Obama’s. McCain is famously anti-pork and is for retaining the relatively low Bush tax rates on ordinary income and capital gains. Obama promises to raise them. McCain is an enemy of the ethanol witchcraft. Obama is for it. McCain would preserve a greater space for private medicine. McCain is a relative free trader. According to the Cato Institute, McCain has voted in favor of trade 86% of the time, and Obama 31%.
Why, then Obama? War, the bringer of death, taxes, and restraints upon liberty.
McCain was for starting a war with Iraq. Obama was against it. When the occupation went bad, Obama talked about taking soldiers out. McCain talked about bringing them in. McCain, having been a prisoner, was sensitive to the issue of torture, and that is to his credit. But a vote for McCain is a validation of Bush on war and the other things, financial, legal, and cultural, that come with war. And on this issue, McCain is worse than Bush. Military service has defined McCain’s heritage and his life. His moral touchstone is honor. He’s got war written all over him.
That is why some libertarians will cast their vote this year for the nominee of a party that libertarians do not usually support.
One such made the news in February: Scott Flanders, CEO of Freedom Newspapers, owners of the Orange County Register. Flanders publicly disagreed with the Register’s libertarian adviser, Ayn Rand scholar Tibor Machan, who said he expected to support the Libertarian nominee. Flanders, who had voted for Libertarian Ed Clark in 1980, Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992, and Republicans otherwise, announced his support for Obama because of the war.
He was not alone. Megan McArdle, libertarian blogger at the Atlantic, wrote on August 20 that she was “wavering between [Obama] and Bob Barr” but two days later wrote, “I’ll probably vote for Obama.” Her explanation expresses the feeling of many libertarians:
I am not excited about this election. I do not believe that my vote is going to immanentize the eschaton. I do not think that I am engaged in a titanic battle, in which the forces of good must beat back the cosmic evil that threatens to engulf us all. I think I’m deciding which of two politicians to hand a lot of power I don’t want either of them to have.
Some libertarians said they preferred Obama but might not go so far as to vote for him. One was David Friedman, law professor at Santa Clara University and contributing editor of Liberty, who wrote on his blog on May 7:
McCain strikes me as a nationalist, likely to be comfortable with retaining and even expanding on the increases in executive authority claimed by Bush. He is also the one pro-war candidate . . . Perhaps I am too optimistic about Obama, but I do not think he is going to turn out to be an orthodox liberal.
Friedman noted a hopeful difference between Obama and Hillary Clinton: Clinton wanted the government to require every American to buy health insurance, and Obama did not.
Friedman also noted that Obama had taught at the University of Chicago — the place where Friedman’s father had led a worldwide movement of free-market economics — and that Obama’s chief economics advisor is Austan Goolsbee, a Chicago man. Goolsbee isn’t quite Milton Friedman, but he is a believer in markets.
On August 24, The New York Times Magazine picked up the same theme in David Leonhardt’s long piece on Obama’s economics. Leonhardt noted the Chicago connection, and wrote: “By surrounding himself with economists, however, Obama was also making a decision with ideological consequences. Far more than many other policy advisers, economists believe in the power of markets.”
To Fortune magazine, Obama had said: “I am a pro-growth guy, and I’m a pro-market guy. And I always have been. What I do get frustrated with is an economy that is out of balance, that rewards a very few — with rewards that are all out of proportion to their actual success.”
A libertarian who might be expected to support Obama is Brink Lindsey, the Cato Institute research director who argued in the New Republic (Dec. 4, 2006) that the libertarian-conservative alliance was dead and that libertarians ought to consider “a new progressive fusionism” with the Left.
I asked Lindsey where he stood on the election, mindful that the folks at Cato, with a 501(c)(3) tax exemption, would be cautious about endorsements. He replied (speaking for himself, not Cato):
I think McCain is terrible on foreign policy, and Obama is terrible on spending and regulatory issues. But since the president generally has much greater influence over foreign affairs than he does on domestic policy, I give the edge to Obama. Furthermore, my sense of fundamental democratic accountability says that when the party in power messes up royally, it should be thrown out on its ear. For Republicans to be rewarded with another term in the White House after eight years of Bush seems really wrong to me. So put me down as preferring Obama to McCain, but I can’t come close to calling myself an Obama supporter.
Gene Healy, a vice president at Cato, author of “The Cult of the Presidency” (2008) and a contributing editor of Liberty, gave this answer:
I’m certainly not for Obama. I generally vote for people who can’t possibly win; that way I don’t have to feel guilty for what they do when they’re in office. After our recent experience with a “conservative” president who launched the greatest expansion of the welfare state since LBJ, I find it hard to take seriously the notion that libertarians need to line up behind another Republican in order to save the country from looming socialism. Particularly when that Republican is a bellicose TR-worshiper and the dream candidate for the National Greatness Conservatives who’ve done so much damage to the country over the last seven years. . . . Obama’s public positions on war and executive power — even after the recent flip-flop on wiretapping — are preferable to McCain’s from a libertarian perspective. But Bush’s positions on spending and nation building were better than Gore’s in 2000, so who can predict?
Perhaps the best argument for Obama is found in the snarky bumper sticker currently offered for sale at CafePress.com: “Obama ’08: Get Disappointed by Someone New.”
Here is my take on it. I argued in Liberty (“Our Allies, the Conservatives,” December 2006), that libertarians will never fit on the Left. Since then, the “Ron Paul Revolution” happened on the Right, and made more of a splash than I thought was possible. But libertarians are not strong enough, which is why Paul lost.
In any coalition, if the weaker party is to have influence, it has to be willing to leave. Most of the time it will not do that; it will support people it doesn’t totally agree with, in exchange for their support on some things, and the hope of greater influence in the long run. But it always has to be willing to walk out. If it won’t, then it is nothing more than the majority’s poodle.
In the presidential race, 2004 was a time to walk out. I could not vote Republican. Four years later, I still can’t.
Why? Because in 2004 the Republicans won. Had they lost, they might have changed. But they won. Their war was validated. The neocon ascendancy in the Republican Party was affirmed.
If libertarians are to have any influence on the Right, the neocon-led coalition (and not all Bush voters are neocons) has to be defeated. This already started to happen in the midterm elections of 2006, when the Republicans lost the Senate and the House. But the party hasn’t gotten the message that war is an election-loser. The party still has the White House, and it has nominated a neocon-backed military man to keep it. If McCain wins, the neocons win and the “War on Terror” continues under a leader who promises victory at all costs. On foreign policy, Republicans need to rethink what they think. And for that to happen, the Republican nominee has to lose.
And that means, as surely as Aardvark comes before Zoology, that Barack Obama has to win.
And that is the case for Obama.
|
|