Libertarians for Obama

In today’s Washington Post, George Will writes

Obama’s choice of a running mate will be the first important decision he makes with the whole country watching, so it will be a momentous act of self-definition. If he chooses her, it will be an act of self-diminishment, especially now that some of her acolytes are aggressively suggesting that some unwritten rule of American politics stipulates that anyone who finishes a strong second in the nomination contest is entitled to second place on the ticket.

Well, it’s kinda, sorta written:

In every case, after the choice of the President, the person having the greatest number of votes of the electors shall be the Vice President.

It took less than twenty years to realize that’s a bad idea.  It doesn’t make much sense for the person taking over for the President should he or she leave office to represent an unelected shift in the executive (nor does it make much sense for the Vice President to break a tie in the Senate so that the President can veto the resulting bill), though.

Of course, Obama and Clinton’s views on government transparency wildly differ (as some have pointed out, the difficulty of vetting Bill rules out Hillary as the VP), so the fact that we abandoned the written rule is all the more for the better, and comports nicely to Obama picking someone with similar views for government transparency: something along the lines of what he did the day after clinching the nomination.

William’s just this guy, you know?

Now that the nomination’s wrapped up and we all know who the candidates are in the general election, I’m going to be more active in blogging about why Obama is the bee’s knees and McCain is the loser snoozer (it’s a bad rhyme; deal with it).

Hope you enjoy!

I’m certainly not the first libertarian who has voiced his or her support for Obama’s candidacy.

Here are some other arguments I’ve come across:

#1: Obama recognizes “the the free market as a useful means of promoting social justice, rather than an obstacle to it.”  “Obama instinctively supports free trade and grasps the universe of possibilities that globalisation opens up, and seamlessly integrates it into his ‘audacity of hope’ theme.”  “Obama’s belief in freedom in labour markets and freedom in capital markets, sets him apart from the Republican field as well as the Democrats.”

#2: “I’ve long followed Barack Obama’s campaign, but it was his ‘there will be no yes men’ comment, (repeated at the last debate,) that sealed it for me. ‘I want somebody who can be an outstanding president, should something happen to me. I want somebody who’s got integrity and I want somebody who has independence. I want somebody who will tell me when they disagree with me… I don’t like having a lot of ‘yes’ people around me who are just telling me what I want to hear all the time. That’s part of what happened with George Bush. He surrounded himself with people who were of the same mind. As a consequence, once he started making mistakes on things like Iraq, they just kept on saying it was going OK, when it wasn’t.’”  “[T]his a man that taught constitutional law at University Chicago – free market HQ. He’s at least familiar, if not in agreement, with classically liberal arguments.”

#3: “Obama (tentatively) opposed the Iraqi War back in 2003, when it was a politically unpopular position to take. It was a principled decision, based upon how our invasion could and did backfire. For this reason alone, Obama deserves credibility and support.”

#4 (translated from German): “May one support Obama as a libertarian?  Recalling the abolitionist inheritance of our movement, which names such as Thoreau, Spooner and Tucker stand for, my answer, with which I do not stand completely alone, reads completely clearly: YES!”

#5: “[O]f the three people who realistically still have a shot at the White House, he’s the only one I agree with on even a fraction of issues. He’s made some real noise about criminal justice reform, is at least amenable to reforming the drug laws. And though I have some fundamental disagreements with him on the proper role of government, he isn’t a bullshit artist, and seems genuinely amenable to new ideas. He isn’t wed to ideology. And of course, he has promised to end the war.”