Deciding whom to vote for

Election Day still means something to me, because I did not request an absentee ballot this year, and I'm not one of the people who already voted.

I know the adage about voting "early and often." It's in the very air, because the minions of one major party have taken that to heart, starting with fraudulent voter registration, proceeding through wilful failure to verify the legitimacy of donors, and ending, inevitably, with accusations that the people who cry foul at transparent attempts to subvert our republic are trying to "suppress the vote."

In this election, as in every other I've been old enough to vote in, party apparatchiks applaud "motor voter" initiatives, cry crocodile tears at the plight of the downtrodden, and offer sound-bite outrage at the tone of campaigns. What's new in the dog's breakfast this year is the widespread failure of journalists in big media to investigate their favorite ticket at anything deeper than a "Morning Show" level. Accordingly, only a stone would be unsympathetic to frustration with our two-party system.

A few cycles ago, I did actually vote for a third-party candidate (it was the Constitution Party, thank you very much), but I won't be doing that this year, because I am skeptical of the coalition-building so often proposed as an alternative to "Donkelphant" dominance. If parliamentary forms of government were all they're cracked up to be, then European countries wouldn't have to change governments as frequently as they do.

So much for prelude. The question now is whom to vote for. May I suggest that voting criteria this time around can be reduced to three things?

My list includes abortion, economics, and foreign policy, in that order.

I make no apology for putting abortion at the top of the list, or standing on my little soap box sounding like a single-issue voter. Single-issue voting has gotten a bad rap from people who dismiss anyone else's cause as a "special interest." To answer those critics, I sometimes paraphrase the wisdom of "Dash" from The Incredibles. If every interest is a special interest, then there's no such thing as special. People unmoved by that reasoning are invited to look again at Deuteronomy 30:11-20, which of course is one of several places where scripture suggests that ultimately, "single-issue voting" is all there is.

Down here in the muck that's supposed to help make us saints, let me add that bipartisanship is overrated.

The separation of powers mechanisms in our perfectly-adequate form of government not only presume a degree of partisanship; they depend on it. That a lapdog press and a generation of Oprah Winfrey audiences have forgotten that lesson doesn't mean the rest of us should.

So then, abortion: When you have to pick your battles, you should at least pick good ones. Vocal support for the stunningly misnamed "Freedom of Choice" act and one-hundred-percent ratings from NARAL are automatic disqualifiers for the Oval Office in my book. Fortunately, only one candidate for president is saddled with such baggage, not to mention "mystery votes" against multiple versions of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, and a running mate who compounds confusion about the tenets of his own faith with garrulous confidence that hairsplitting over trimesters in a pregnancy is good law (Somebody should tell Joe Biden that Roe and its companion case, both classic examples of judicial overreach, do not restrict abortion. Moreover, even the Supreme Court no longer thinks in trimester terms, what with advances in ultrasound technology having put the lie to the "it's just a clump of cells" argument.)

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus understands the rationale for single-issue voting, as he made clear while showing why the Democratic candidate for president (about whom there are still many unresolved questions) does not begin to grasp how the uniquely American hope of a novus order seclorum depends on freedom of religion.

The obvious objection from Obama supporters has little force. Obama taught constitutional law. Big deal. What his supporters seldom acknowledge is that it's possible to teach constitutional law without believing a word of it, and without recognizing the mutually supportive relationship between our founding documents. That's a serious defect in understanding for someone who wants to preside over the only country in the world that has founding documents.

Anyone of good will who accepts that abortion is undesirable must then avoid what theologians call "formal cooperation with evil"-- and one does not avoid evil policy by serenading executives who endorse it with the Marine Band playing "Hail to the Chief."

I do not mean to say that the Republican ticket has a spotless pro-life record. Senator McCain is entirely too accommodating of embryonic stem cell research, for example. He also missed a chance to back Rep. Ron Paul's "Sanctity of Life" Act (H.R. 2597), when his public support would have been welcome.

But pro-lifers conflicted about choosing Republican over Democrat for the odd reason that the Republicans aren't pro-life enough are trying to make the perfect the enemy of the good, and homey don't play that way, not least because he's noticed that the Republican VP nominee is also the bright and feisty mother of a child with Down Syndrome.

Christians in my own church and elsewhere have been urged to pray for a pro-life outcome "no matter which candidate wins." Heartfelt advice like that goes a long way toward preserving tax-exempt status in a litigious society, but let's not kid ourselves: a pro-life outcome with the Republican ticket is a good bet, while a pro-life outcome in the aftermath of an Obama/Biden victory requires a miracle of the kind that slapped Saul upside the head on the road to Damascus.

About the economic case for voting one ticket rather than the other, I have less to say. But other people have noticed that we're not hearing much about Obama pushing tax cuts for Americans making "less than $250,000" anymore, and that's because the number has been quietly revised downward. Last I looked, it was in the neighborhood of $120,000, and the forecast for staying there looked iffy.

A related point: He who wants to take a scalpel to the federal budget (allegedly and improbably perusing it "line by line") cannot with that technique pay for the long list of costly initiatives he has proposed, as even CBS news and the Associated Press now admit. Worse, the candidate who raked in more contributions from lobbyists for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than all but two fellow Democrats who've held office much longer thinks that taking a sledge hammer to the budget would be a bad thing.

Barack Obama flashes support for his candidacy from Warren Buffet as though it were a credential, but I don't see that as any more positive than guys like George Soros and Mark Cuban funneling their own fortunes into left-wing causes, or Melinda Gates using her husband's Microsoft money to ship condoms to Africa in a misguided attempt to stop the spread of AIDS that way. Smart investors know how to profit even from heavily-regulated markets, and sometimes forget how much of their wealth depends on freedoms that they take for granted after their first ten million dollars.

Then there is this curious fact: How often have the CEO of Federal Express, the Governor of California, and the President of France agreed with each other? Each of them considers the Democratic candidate out of his depth.

Speaking of France, foreign policy never became the hot topic that John McCain had hoped it would be, but I'm contrarian enough to think that it still counts as a net plus for the Republican ticket. World leaders see through the palaver from the Democrats. If a profile this past spring in The American Prospect is to be believed, legions of Obama advisers think that "national security depends in large part on dignity promotion."

That bumper-stickerism is vague and expensive. We're told in the same essay that Senator Obama's politics "deal with root causes," but there's no evidence offered for that, and much to support the thesis that he presumes too much. Barack Obama is a bundle of contradictions who suffers from transnational instincts in a parochial world. Worse, a six-term senatorial benchwarmer known for bragging about his own "expertise" is the guy who is supposed to give an Obama administration some foreign policy heft.

Does that sound harsh? Consider Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama, which was markedly short on specifics. Or consider the "endorsement from al-Qaeda" given to John McCain in light of the endorsement from Hezbollah that Obama got-- and note that one endorsement must be put in quotation marks because it was ironic, but the other doesn't merit the same punctuation, because Hezbollah was just being candid.

"Root causes" as bandied about by Obama's legion of advisers are rhetorical flourishes used to accessorize their own views. I seem to remember that the educational grants that Obama approved while serving on foundation boards in Chicago were also supposed to deal with root causes, but the serious coin he redistributed then had no appreciable effect on student test scores, as intrepid publications like City Journal have taken pains to point out.

The main Democratic criticism of John McCain is that he represents more of the warmongering same relative to George W. Bush. People who say that aren't being fair to Bush. Nobody's fair to President Bush these days. Nevertheless, the same critics would be hard-pressed to explain why McCain led the effort to normalize American relations with Vietnam, or why his attitude toward Pakistan is more moderate than Obama's (check the debate transcripts for details).

John McCain is deeply flawed-- more gadfly than maverick. But he's also a serious and plausible candidate. In a lifetime of campaigning, Barack Obama has not shown that his own flaws are leavened with anything like the same plausibility, and no wonder, because readiness to assume varsity-level leadership only comes by dint of experience that he just doesn't have (and to judge by his impatient ambition, doesn't want to have).

When you embrace messiah schtick, bow more to discourse than to first principles, hide old-school grievance-mongering behind an affable exterior, and assume that as a person of mixed-race heritage, you automatically know more about how to facilitate consensus than anyone else in the room, it doesn't mean that you've got game. It means that something's wrong. Obama hasn't paid his dues; he just wants to redistribute yours.

Well, homey don't play that way, either. Abortion, foreign policy, and economics all point to the Republican ticket as the better choice. If those words seem boring or divisive, it might help to think of their elegant eighteenth-century analogs: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Democratic ticket would injure every one of those things, and by design, whereas if McCain and Palin mess the same things, it won't be because their hearts weren't in the right place or their heads weren't screwed on properly.