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.

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!

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.”

One of the simplest ways to describe libertarian philosophy is that it stands for shrinking government.  Bush has obviously been one of the most anti-libertarian presidents this country has seen in that regard.  As far as McCain is concerned, he will continue the Bush trend.

In an essay written for the magazine Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, McCain pledges the following (with bolding helpfully supplied by Matt Welch of Reason magazine):

I will increase the size of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps from the currently planned level of roughly 750,000 troops to 900,000 troops. Enhancing recruitment will require more resources and will take time, but it must be done as soon as possible.

Along with more personnel, our military needs additional equipment in order to make up for its recent losses and modernize. We can partially offset some of this additional investment by cutting wasteful spending. But we can also afford to spend more on national defense, which currently consumes less than four cents of every dollar that our economy generates — far less than what we spent during the Cold War. We must also accelerate the transformation of our military, which is still configured to fight enemies that no longer exist.

America needs not simply more soldiers but more soldiers with the skills necessary to help friendly governments and their security forces resist common foes. I will create an Army Advisory Corps with 20,000 soldiers to partner with militaries abroad, and I will increase the number of U.S. personnel available to engage in Special Forces operations, civil affairs activities, military policing, and military intelligence. We also need a nonmilitary deployable police force to train foreign forces and help maintain law and order in places threatened by state collapse.

Today, understanding foreign cultures is not a luxury but a strategic necessity. As president, I will launch a crash program in civilian and military schools to prepare more experts in critical languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, and Pashto. Students at our service academies should be required to study abroad. I will enlarge the military’s Foreign Area Officer program and create a new specialty in strategic interrogation in order to produce more interrogators who can obtain critical knowledge from detainees by using advanced psychological techniques, rather than the kind of abusive tactics properly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

I will set up a new agency patterned after the erstwhile Office of Strategic Services. A modern-day OSS could draw together specialists in unconventional warfare, civil affairs, and psychological warfare; covert-action operators; and experts in anthropology, advertising, and other relevant disciplines from inside and outside government. Like the original OSS, this would be a small, nimble, can-do organization. It would fight terrorist subversion around the world and in cyberspace. It could take risks that our bureaucracies today rarely consider taking — such as deploying infiltrating agents without diplomatic cover in terrorist states and organizations — and play a key role in frontline efforts to rebuild failed states.

As we increase our military capacity, we must also enhance our civilian capacity. As president, I will energize and expand our postconflict reconstruction capabilities so that any military campaign would be complemented by a civilian “surge” that would build the political and economic foundations of peace. To better coordinate our disparate military and civilian operations, I will ask Congress for a civilian follow-on to the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which fostered a culture of joint operations within the military services. The new act would create a framework for civil servants and military forces to train and work together in order to facilitate cooperation in postconflict reconstruction.

We must also revitalize our public diplomacy. In 1998, the Clinton administration and Congress mistakenly agreed to abolish the U.S. Information Agency and move its public diplomacy functions to the State Department. This amounted to unilateral disarmament in the war of ideas. I will work with Congress to create a new independent agency with the sole purpose of getting America’s message to the world — a critical element in combating Islamic extremism and restoring the positive image of our country abroad.

Given that defense spending is largely responsible for the explosion of government in the Bush administration, it is clear that McCain will continue (and expand) the disastrous growth of government that we have seen in the Bush administration.

In the 4th quarter of 2007, individuals in the Army, Navy and Air Force made those branches of the armed services the No. 13, No. 18 and No. 21, contributing industries, respectively. War opponent Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, received the most from donors in the military, collecting at least $212,000 from them. Another war opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, was second with about $94,000.

Senator Obama supports licensing without regard to immigration status

Many people believe that illegal immigrants shouldn’t be “rewarded” with drivers’ licenses. Fair enough: the rule of law is important. There’s also a theory that denying illegal immigrants “benefits” like driver licensing will make the country inhospitable enough that they will leave. This has not borne out, however. Denying illegal immigrants licenses has merely caused unlicensed and untrained driving, with the hit-and-run accidents and higher insurance rates that flow from that.

The major reason, though, why I agree with Senator Obama is because the linking of driver licensing and immigration status is part of the move to convert the driver’s license into a national ID card. Mission-creep at the country’s DMVs is not just causing growth in one of the least-liked bureaucracies. It’s creating the infrastructure for direct regulatory control of individuals by the federal government.

Were immigration status and driver licensing solidly linked nationwide, the driver’s license would not just be a “benefit” of citizenship. It would then clearly be amenable to use as an immigration-control tool — as has already been proposed. Law-abiding, native-born citizens would more and more often be required to show ID. And it would be converted to additional uses. The federal government could condition our access to goods, services, and infrastructure on carrying and presenting a national ID, possession of which the government could make conditional on every regulatory whim that swept past.

We need to restore the driver’s license to its original role — as a license to drive. American citizens should not have to submit or prove their Social Security numbers in order to get licensed. If illegal immigrants “benefit” from that, so be it. It’s more important to protect U.S. citizens’ liberties now and for the future than to “go after” illegal immigrants while reform of our out-of-whack immigration laws languishes.

We are at a critical point in the Presidential campaign, and as lawyers who have been deeply involved in the Guantanamo litigation to preserve the important right to habeas corpus, we are writing to urge you to support Senator Obama.

Some politicians are all talk and no action. But we know from first-hand experience that Senator Obama has demonstrated extraordinary leadership on this critical and controversial issue. When others stood back, Senator Obama helped lead the fight in the Senate against the Administration’s efforts in the Fall of 2006 to strip the courts of jurisdiction, and when we were walking the halls of the Capitol trying to win over enough Senators to beat back the Administration’s bill, Senator Obama made his key staffers and even his offices available to help us. Senator Obama worked with us to count the votes, and he personally lobbied colleagues who worried about the political ramifications of voting to preserve habeas corpus for the men held at Guantanamo.

Radley Balko, senior editor of Reason magazine, has authored a groundbreaking study on the use of paramilitary police tactics.  He has also, on his personal blog, examined the lack of proper accountability for police officers who break the law or overuse force. Through this work, he has highlighted an inordinate number of abuses in Chicago, Illinois.  Here is a short list that does not purport to be exhaustive:

• Chicago police shootings are, for practical purposes, uninvestigated.
• Chicago police were to establish a constant presence on the street in battle dress.
• Chicago police officer assaults elderly man, stays on force, does nothing while fellow police assault bar patrons.
• Chicago resident complains to local newspaper about police harassment, and has her apartment raided three days after the story appears.
• Chicago police abuse cases exceed national average.
• Chicago police officer assaults wheelchair-bound hospital patient, resumes duty after suspension.
• “A prostitute is more likely to have sex with a [Chicago] police officer than to get officially arrested by one.”

The law mandating interrogation videotaping was, unsurprisingly, vigorously opposed by the police, among others.  By fighting for the passage of the interrogation-videotaping law, Obama has proven himself to be not only the only presidential candidate with a basic understanding of the necessity to systemically reduce police abuses, but also one of the only politicians in office with such an understanding.

Speaking personally, this issue is one of the first things that made Obama an appealing candidate to me.  His decision to lead the campaign to get this law passed reveals a deep moral character and a sympathy to heightened oversight of a police force that increasingly sees itself as separate and distinct from “civilians.”  I trust him to use the power of the federal government granted under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to enforce this oversight.  No other candidate has this record.

SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) AUTHORIZATION.—The President is authorized to use the
Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary
and appropriate in order to—
(1) defend the national security of the United States against
the continuing threat posed by Iraq

It is not enough to ask what our next President to do with the war that we have on our hands today. Rather, we must also ask whether our next President will give us a new war. Among the front-ronners, Obama, and Obama alone, has stated the clear and plain truth that there was no national interest at stake in invading Iraq. That we were discussing whether to invade Iraq ought to have contained the answer within the question. I trust in Obama’s judgment to not lead us into any more unnecessary invasions - as if there were ever an invasion that were necessary.

Lincoln Chafee is correct in that “helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.” Failing that, I would settle for not promoting Bush’s helpers to the Presidency.

The Republican Party, as a whole, deservedly has the albatross of the Iraq War hanging around its neck. The Republican Party, as a whole, has been responsible for profligate deficit spending that threatens to ruin our economy. The Republican Party, as a whole, has left the Constitution in tatters as it wears the flag as a cape.

I believe that only the record and rhetoric of Barack Obama presents libertarians with a real option for change.

What is at stake in this election is civil liberties. And Obama has the best, most consistent, and most trustworthy record on those issues of any electable candidate running. I am a particular fan of his government-transparency measures, like his Illinois legislation requiring that all police interrogations be videotaped. It isn’t enough to merely advocate for civil liberties; we need concrete provisions to protect them, with real teeth, and Obama’s got the best record of any serious candidate. I have confidence that an Obama presidency will save habeas corpus, and close Guantanamo. I have confidence that an Obama presidency will bring a humble foreign policy that does not seek to send Americans on pointless foreign adventures. I have no such confidence with any other electable candidate.

But before Obama can become the next President of the United States, he must first be nominated as the candidate for the Democratic Party. As primary season continues, those of you who are able must come out and support Obama in the polls: we need him now.