Election 2008: Experience versus Judgment?

The Independent Institute in Oakland, CA, has an original and interesting view of this debate!

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Both Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin have been criticized for their "inexperience." In his latest op-ed, Independent Institute Senior Fellow Ivan Eland argues that experience should not be a determining factor in the selection of national political leaders. Richard Nixon and James Buchanan, for example, had lots of experience before becoming president, yet neither was a good president, according to Eland. In contrast, Chester Arthur was a good president despite having previously held only two mid-level jobs in New York and being vice president for a mere six months when the assassination of James Garfield thrust him into the Oval Office.

John McCain, although a more experienced candidate than Obama, has shown poor judgment on several matters of foreign policy, according to Eland, including calling for greater U.S. involvement in Iraq and advocating Georgia's entry into NATO--a move that could draw the United States into a military confrontation with Russia.

On the other hand, Obama, writes Eland, "was against invading Iraq from the start, has astutely championed withdrawing U.S. combat forces during what is likely to be a temporary lull in violence, and was much more measured about the conflict in Georgia, which threatened no vital U.S. strategic interests." McCain, Eland concludes, has too much experience in getting co-opted into making bad judgments from serving too long in Washington's military-industrial-congressional complex.

"A President Needs Good Judgment Rather than Experience," by Ivan Eland (9/8/08) Spanish Translation

The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed (Updated Edition), by Ivan Eland

Center on Peace & Liberty (Ivan Eland, Director)

The Three Ways to Pick a Candidate

There are three basic issues you can use to help you choose  a leader:  

1. Their ideology: What their philosophy of government is, what they  think the government's proper role is, and where they draw the line.  There can be a very significant difference here, but it's hard stuff.  Also, the two main parties in the US (and mostly elsewhere) are  primarily the Politicians' Parties whose ideology is limited mainly to  getting elected and reelected.

So if you're stuck with politicians, you can try:

2. Their character: If you can't get the other guy on their vision of  government, maybe you can get them on personality? Whether they are  stiff (Nixon) or at ease (Obama), whether they fool around, whether they are corrupt, -- and  best of all -- whether they are hypocrites, the number-one favorite of  all political campaigns and of the press: Palin doesn't believe in sex  education in school and look - her kid gets pregnant, which shows she  can't control her kids (who can?) and that her ideas don't work in the  real world. That's why the Demos are jumping on this -- not because  they would do any better, or because they really think sex education and condoms in  schools would make a terrific dent in the teen pregnancy rate (studies are mixed), but because it makes Palin look  foolish. Zing!  

3. Their competence: Would they once in office be able to actually run  things and get people to do what they want? This is a combination of basic competence (ability to get things done at all), plus their influence over the political process in Washington. For an example of the latter, Obama amuses us with promises to "go over the  budget line by line" and eliminate waste and unworkable programs; in reality, as being  a Senator he knows full well, he'd  run into the Congressional buzzsaw protecting special interests. (Unless of course the entire  Congress is Democratic, and then you can eliminate "waste" easiliy since that, as all know, is championed  only by Republicans!). 

Hillary ran into this early with  questions by ultraconservatives about whether, as a woman mind you,  she'd be competent to run the government and put her finger on the big  red button. Well, they don't wonder about that any more, but instead are  scared of her. (Belatedly, after she lost the nomination, there were  articles about how poorly she ran her campaign compared to Obama, whose  campaign machine ran like -- well, like a machine. I found that a far more interesting comparison.)  

The variant on this is the Experience quibble, which gets very muddy  indeed. Obama doesn't have much "experience" and neither does Palin --  presumably, the only person with experience for this job is a past  President, wouldn't you think? 

Then you get into the question of *what  kind* of experience -- legislative, or executive? Is a Senator or a  Governor better suited, experience-wise? Of course, when neither has been  in higher office more than 4 years, nobody can claim they have  experience enough with a straight face -- can they?  So as a campaign, you zig and zag among these three methods of deciding  on a candidate, pickiug your strength and their weakness, and forgiving  your guy/gal for their weakness but being very unforgiving of the other  gal/guy's weakness.  Which wouldn't be so bad if the voters, who know better, used any kind  of sophistication in making their decisions.  

The great thing about being a Libertarian is that the second and third  issues don't mean bupkus to us. We're voting for our candidate's  ideology -- his vision of how the country *ought* to be run. We don't  care if he's *actually* competent to be President -- he never will be!  He hasn't got a prayer, so who cares? What an enormous relief!

Nor do we care about his morals or  hypocrisy or character -- like I say, he's never going to win an  election, so we vote for him strictly as a powerful symbol of our  ideological beliefs about right government. It's quite relaxing not to  have to worry about any of this, or pay much attention to the noise at  the major-party level.  

And it's quite depressing to know full well that no matter which pair of  major-party candidates gets elected, we're just as screwed -- the  details may vary slightly, but the trendlines are just bad, bad, bad, because their ideologies mean they will choose bad options, push for solutions that don't solve anythng, and never, never learn from their mistakes.

But then, we voters don't either, so why should they?

 mac 

Dave Barry nails Obama Speech: "Read from stone tablets...!"

Dave Barry, of all people, nailed Barack Obama's acceptance speech at the DMC last week:

"...Barack Obama's now-legendary acceptance speech, which he read from stone tablets, in which he promised theAmerican public that if elected he would give them peace, jobs, healthcare, national security, energy independence, good schools, a clean enviroment, reduced government waste, lower taxes, the head of Osama bin Laden, giant underwater cities, time travel, and a magic flying zebra named 'Sparkle' for every American pre-schooler regardless of income level."

As I was listening to Barack speak, I became increasingly uncomfortable, and Barry has explained: Barack was basically promising the sun, the moon, and the skies -- and much of what he was promising was impossible to deliver, or really really hard to deliver even partially, or would be shockingly expensive to deliver even partially, or were simply fever dreams. 

Of course, that's the point: When politicians promise voters things in exchange for votes, they are just throwing pie up into the sky -- they have *no* idea how they could conceivably deliver the goods, even if all the opposition party went home and turned the whole government over to the speaker's own party.  

Paraphrasing, for example: "We are going to find and stop Osama bin Laden" -- how are you going to do that?? 

"We are going to deliver affordable, high-quality health care to every American" -- by government decree? 

The same government that screwed up when the hurricane ran over New Orleans? 

The same goverment whose every military campaign, military weapons project, major highway project, and major bridge project runs shockingly over budget? 

The same government whose waste and inefficiency is the stuff of legend? 

The same government that runs the DMV and the Post Office, the Army, the food stamps program, that monitors the health and quality of our food and our air and our purchases, that tells us how to live our lives and how to love one another and can't even keep the streets of our metro areas safe? 

That government?

Or is Obama going to bring in a backup government from the next county over?

Politicians would like you to think the solutions to these mindboggling, gigantic problems are just a matter of *political will* -- if we just *cared* enough, if we'd just be willing to make *sacrifices*, if we had courage, and if we could just vote for me and vote against the other political party--the one that is filled with people of ill will, who hate poor people and want to see the elderly die on the streets, who are all fat cats and brutes -- yes! All would be delivered to you! At no cost to you! We'll make the fat cats pay for it! The fat cats who are funding my campaign! The fat cats who pay lobbyists millions to meet with your Congressperson regularly! We'll go over the budget line by line and eliminate waste and get rid of programs that don't work anymore -- the programs that are sacred turf for this or that Congressional District -- yeah, I'll just slice 'em out.

If you believe even *one word* of that to be even close to true, you are a fool. Experience, history, human nature, and common sense are lost on you. As Dave Barry points out, Obama has promised us every good thing every Democrat has ever promised in the past fifty years. And of course McCain will pull out his laundry list of good things conservatives want, and promise them that at long last they'll get them. 

And we'll both believe them and vote for them on the one hand, while expressing our fake cynicism on the other. 

When governments take on every task, every challenge, promise everything at a cost of nothing, they not only play us for fools, they set up the entire government for failure. If you really DID care about the success of our government, you would be VERY careful what you let the politicians dump on its back. 

Plainly, the pols don't care -- they live for the moment, for the election. 

But you voters are supposed to care about the long term. 

Wake up, people!

What's wrong with gay marriage, asks Cecil?

"Gay men and lesbians are often portrayed as subverting the social order. But what are they trying to do? Join the military! Get married! Fix u the house na draise kids! In short, build the kind of world the religious rght dreams of... "

Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope column, Jan 28, 2000

Obama's pick of Biden as VP... Tough tradeoffs for Obama!

On this stuff--the controversy over whether Barack Obama should have picked an old politico like Joe Biden as his VP partner--I am lucky I can watch from the
sidelines since I vote Libertarian, which saves me a lot of grief,
especially of the "least bad choice" variety (or as one wit put it, "the
evil of two lessers").

But from the sidelines, Obama had a balancing act here: Another Change
person like himself would be young and not fully tainted and thus
vulnerable to McCain attacks on lack fo experience that have proven (to
my actual surprise) effective recently. Biden takes that club away from
McCain. McCain can call Obama a hypocrite for choosing an old warhorse
(like McCain) but the foreign-affairs club and the inexperience club are
both out of reach now.

Since Biden is practically McCain's twin on everythign that McCain has
been pushing, he does a good job of neutralizing McCain's most powerful
messages. Biden's wild-card big mouth will be a ticking bomb for months,
but on the other hand his wit and tendency to say naughty things might
give him something of a 'by' among voters who hate politicians and
politics. It will annoy those who wanted a clean break from politics as
usual (boy, will it!) but the Obama supporters can always argue that
Biden is a savvy political-campaign chess move that puts the "old-boy
network" guy in the secondary, VP position, whereas on the Republican
side the Old Boy guy is the top dog. If you want any hope of change,
there is only one choice.

Other than becoming discouraged and staying home, of course. Which is
always the ongoing danger when your campaign relies heavily on arousing
the youth vote or the disaffected vote--they become discouraged easily
and give up. Obama's gift of oratory will have to do a lot of heavy
lifting for the next couple of months....

Libertarians Hunting Wabbit at Demo Convention.

Good quote from Reason Magazine's ongoing blogging coverage of the Democratic National Convention (Aug 08);

"Reason [Magazine] is a political magazine of ideas, with deeply skeptical, independent-skewing readers who have some specific fears about both a John McCain presidency and a Barack Obama restoration. Since the Democratic flock will be collected in one place, it's an excellent week for hunting wabbit. "

See http://www.reason.com/convention2008/ for more interesting and more sarcastic coverage than you'll get from the rest of the media....

Ron Paul to Push Libertarian-Minded Republican Candidates

[I think this is a good idea -- I think an even better idea is to make the Libertarians into a liberty-minded pressure group instead of a political party! -- mac]

Ron Paul Launches Campaign for Liberty

From The Cato Institute

"The governor and other prominent Texas Republicans were supposed to take center stage at the opening of the party's state convention, but Ron Paul may have stolen the show," The Dallas Morning News reports. "Paul himself stirred passion among delegates and others when he held a late-night rally to announce he was officially ending his presidential run. He's forming 'Campaign for Liberty' to continue to spread his message and support Libertarian-leaning candidates across the country."

In "The Libertarian Voter," David Boaz, Cato executive vice president and author of The Politics of Freedom, writes: "Recent polls suggest that 10 to 20 percent of Americans hold 'fiscally conservative, socially liberal' or libertarian views. Indeed, libertarians are a bigger share of the electorate than the much-discussed 'soccer moms,' and they are increasingly a swing vote.

"Libertarian voters have often given 70 percent or more of their votes to Republican candidates, including George W. Bush in 2000. But after six years of war, wiretapping and welfare-state social spending, libertarians gave barely half their votes to Republican candidates in 2006. The swing was even larger in Senate races. It seems clear that a lot of the centrist, moderate, and independent voters who swung to the Democrats in 2006 were libertarian leaners."