The World Series is over, so it's time to discuss the presidential candidates now. Yeah, yeah, I know. The blogs and the news channels have been discussing them all summer. Phooey. I stand in quixotic defiance of the ever lengthening campaign season. Primary season should not begin until after baseball season ends.

As usual, I'm not solidly behind any one candidate yet, but I have scattered thoughts on many of them, in both parties. I'll have to resist the temptation to try to dump all those thoughts into one post — perhaps I'll do one post per candidate. We'll see.

My tentative favorite is Bill Richardson, in that I sense him to be the truest successor to those parts of the Bill Clinton legacy that I cherish. (My quixotry defies the conventional wisdom of who counts as a "real" candidate, too ... for a couple more months anyway.) I also like Barack Obama quite a bit, which means that if the election plays out like everyone says it must, I'll probably end up supporting him against Hillary Clinton.

The only candidate in either party I have a strong opinion of is Rudy Giuliani, who I feel would be worse than George W Bush. I mean that literally: I would rather see Bush re-elected to a third term than Giuliani elected to his first. If voting were strictly a matter of strategically trying to help the country, as opposed to personal expression, I'd say the best thing any voter in either party can do is register as a Republican and vote for anyone who might beat Giuliani. I'd elaborate, but that's a topic for another post (though anyone familiar with my thoughts on the true failings of the Bush presidency can easily guess).

Any further thoughts ought to be prefaced by a general discussion of what I think the president should be. Some veteran readers of Benzene know my political views pretty well, but it's been a long time since I've summarized them. I'm not sure I'd have the discipline to write up a proper summary. Fortunately I don't have to. Way back in July, my buddy Gelmo asked me to participate in a series of interviews about voting patterns for presidential elections. It's not exactly the summary I had in mind, but it's close enough.

I'm not sure what Gelmo is doing with the results. I think excerpts are going to appear in a paper or a book on political attitudes. Anyway, he gave me permission to reprint the entire thing here.

In the general election, I've always preferred the Democratic nominee, some more enthsiastically than others. I liked Bill Clinton a lot in both 1992 and 1996. The other Democratic nominees since I've been of voting age (1984) I haven't much cared for. I strongly supported Gary Hart in 1984 and Howard Dean in 2004.

I've never abstained from voting as a conscious political act, nor as a statement of displeasure with both candidates. I do, however, frequently neglect to vote for more mundane reasons. It's a rational evaluation of the likely significance of my vote balanced against the inconvenience of actually voting. I honestly don't recall which elections I voted in and which I didn't. I usually don't decide whether I'll vote until the day of the election (and even then I don't really "decide"; I just do or don't get around to doing it before the polls close), so my thinking about candidates leading up to the election is the same in either case.

I'd guess the biggest determinant of whether I vote in a given election is how busy I happen to be that day. One time — I'm not sure, but I think it may have been the 2004 general — I didn't vote because I was working in the polling place but my registration was still at my old address, so it would have used up my entire break to drive to the old neighborhood. Second biggest is probably whether I've paid enough attention to any local races to care about them (knowing that my vote is much stronger in a local race with a smaller electorate).

For presidential elections I've never lived in a state which was contested, so I've never had the experience of thinking my presidential vote would matter one bit. I have, however, been in states for several close senatorial and gubernatorial elections. Notably Grigoire-Rossi. (I think that was 2004. If so, I may have missed my vote in that one. I do recall that I decided to support Grigoire only at the last minute.)

[answered at end]

No Republicans who have become major candidates for president have appealed to me on the whole. There have been Republican candidates for lesser office whom I've liked, and some Republican candidates have had certain qualities that I've admired even if I've rejected them on the whole.

Republicans sometimes hold some appeal for me because even though I prefer Democrats on the whole, I don't prefer them on every issue. There are certain things I think the Republicans are better at. Most significantly, although it's no longer the case, prior to the current administration the Republican Party was generally better on fiscal matters. I like balanced budgets, reductions in ineffective entitlement spending, and that sort of thing. That's possibly the single most important issue for me in voting, and yet it has traditionally been a Republican issue. That often pulls me away from Democrats. Of course it's complicated by the fact that rhetoric on the issue doesn't always match reality. (For example, Reagan talked the issue much more than Bush Sr, but I think Bush Sr did a better job on it in reality.) The main reason I supported [Bill] Clinton more enthusiastically than any other Democrat who has won the nomination is because I feel he was sound on economic issues in a way that a lot of Democrats aren't.

Another reason I'm easily swayed from partisanship is that I think the importance of policy and ideological issues is overrated. For me, the main thing that determines whether a president is good or bad is how well he does at administering the gigantic organization that is the federal government. I'm looking for a competent executive, and I really don't care much where he stands on various moral issues and even less on how good he makes us feel in his capacity as figurehead. If I think a candidate is an accomplished executive, that counts for a lot with me. The one time I supported a Republican for major office — Pete Wilson for governor of California in 1994 — it was because I liked his thankless work in restoring health to the state government. The big issue in the news that year was about immigration, and I didn't care one bit about that, but I knew that Wilson had inherited a terrible fiscal situation and a polarized and uncooperative legislature, and he had done a remarkable job to take a potentially disastrous situation and actually clean it up. In my opinion, that's what the governor is hired to do, and I really don't give a damn what he thinks about abortion or illegal aliens.

It's no longer an issue, but in the 1980s I was often asked why I don't become a Republican, since I was clearly more sympathetic with them on the issues I care most about (economic). The reason is that, while I do believe that the most important job of government is to promote economic prosperity, and I do believe that Republicans are generally better at that (in large part by simply getting the government out of the way), I feel that the other half of this job is to see to it that this economic prosperity redounds to all of the citizenry and not just some of it. I just don't see the Republican Party doing that. It's not just that I think they have a worse strategy for achieving the goal (which is how I feel about many Democrats with regard to economic issues); I don't see them accepting it as a legitimate goal of government at all. I see that as a more profound error than misguided policy. That's why I'm content to be a maverick Democrat rather than become a maverick Republican.

I've become much more partisan since 2000. The second Bush administration has been a disaster in so many ways. As late as 2000 I was of the belief that it really didn't matter much who was president. Even if someone I disagreed with were elected, it wouldn't matter, I thought. The system is strong, and no one president can really screw it up. Bush Jr has really changed my mind on that. He's done real damage to the country, and it has had nothing to do with his policy positions (which are often vague and indeterminate anyway.) Bush has damaged the country by undermining the political system itself, and the Republican Congress has been complicit all the way.

In 2006, I wouldn't even consider voting for a Republican for the House or Senate, even if I otherwise would have preferred the candidate. I just thought it was too important to defeat the Republican control of Congress, even if it meant voting for a Democrat I don't like or against a Republican I do. That was a new sentiment for me. I had never been so partisan before.

But really, in terms of my voting I think that any outrage or reaction against Republican failure isn't so much the issue as that all the good things about the Republican Party have faded away. In the 1980s and early 1990s, when they were the minority party, the Republicans were significantly less corrupt and less in bed with special interests than Democrats. That hasn't been true for a long time. Now they aren't better on fiscal issues either. It used to be that I could, as a Democrat, look longingly at Republicans seriously pursuing a balanced budget. Now, bizarre as it seems, the Democrats are the party of fiscal prudence. Bush's budgets have been the worst ever, and that's just counting what's on the books. Behind the smoke and mirrors it's even worse.

So what's left to like about the Republican Party? Not much. As far as I can tell, there's only one issue left where they have any advantage, free trade, and even there it's a close call. The Democratic Party has backslided considerably on trade after Bill Clinton's term ended. Bush has done a terrible job of promoting world trade, but that's just because he's bungled pretty much everything he's tried. The majority of the Republican Party, a significant dissenting minority notwithstanding, does seem to still support the idea, and that's more than I can say about the Democrats.

But that's all they've got left. All the other issues Republicans once had — budgetary restraint, free markets, individual rights, etc — they're all gone.

The fact that I've lived in states that are safely red or blue has affected whether I bother to vote. I don't think the political peer pressure of being surrounded by blue-thinkers pushes me in their direction. (Of course, I suppose everyone would think that.) I have sometimes been in accord with my political surroundings and sometimes contrarian. It might affect how much I speak up, but I don't think it affects my vote.

Not that I'm aware of.

[moved from earlier in interview]

I'm not sure that anyone really matches my patterns. Maybe left-leaning economists.

The standard two-dimensional spectrum that attempts to accommodate voters who don't match either party has one axis for economic issues and another for social. Since I'm an economic "conservative" (ie, pro-market, which is "liberal" by the old labels) and socially liberal supposedly aligns me with libertarians, but I'm not sure that's very accurate either. I've certainly fellow-traveled with libertarians. I'm aware of our commonalities, and in my younger days I identified more closely with them, but ultimately libertarianism doesn't do it for me either. Set aside the fake libertarians, who aren't really libertarian at all but just rich folk who like free markets when it preserves their wealth and quickly change their tune when it doesn't, and the faith-based libertarians who long for a simple formula for every economic question and therefore embrace the fantasy world in which there's no such thing as market failure, and property rights grow on trees without benefit of government enforcement. (Full disclosure: for a brief period in my 20s I was one of the latter.) My problem with libertarians is similar to my problem with Republicans. I think libertarians are in denial about the existence of communal society. Heaven knows I'm an individualist by nature. I'm not a very social creature, and I think it's a good thing when every individual takes responsibility for himself or herself. But there really is such a thing as the common wealth.

As I was writing this, I gradually became aware that I might poach it for an item in Benzene. Is that OK, or do you need your data to be unpublished?

One thing I would mention on Benzene but didn't mention here is foreign policy. It didn't come up in our interview because foreign policy doesn't affect my presidential voting at all. That's because both parties are so far from my views that it hardly matters. Bush's aggressive militarism might seem to have expanded the difference, but I don't think so. Both parties are still imperialist. Bush is just an incompetent oaf about it, but I don't really see that as a policy issue. I don't think Bush's foreign policy goals are that much different from, say, Al Gore's.

That last bit isn't quite true. For the first time in my life there's actually an almost-serious candidate whose foreign policy fairly closely matches mine. But I'll save that discussion for the Ron Paul post.

5:28:45 AM  [permalink]  comment []