The Annoyed Man wrote:I echo what tboesche said. That is what I meant when I posted this thread about the ACORN platform and Obama's being inextricably wedded to it.
McCain was not my first pick for the GOP nomination, but the fact is that he wound up getting it. Like tboesche said, it's going to be either McCain or Obama in the White House. There is no other choice with a realistic chance of getting elected. Right now today, if the most recent polls are to be believed, McCain is barely even in the battle ground states, and behind in almost every other state. However, that is actually an improvement for him from just a week ago. In other words, things appear to be shifting in his direction as the last days of the campaign wind down. Even so, at best McCain would win by the very slimmest of margins; whereas an Obama win could potentially be a blowout.
As I said in the other thread:While I was never a Barr supporter, I am more conservative than McCain, and like I said above, he would not have been my first choice. BUT... he is the only one currently in the race who has even a prayer of defeating Obama - and it is absolutely critical that Obama be defeated.Think of this before casting your vote for anybody else except McCain/Palin. Obama supports and is driven by the ACORN agenda. This document proves that ACORN is a socialist organization. Therefore, Obama supports and is driven by a socialist agenda. That will drive his budgetary plans, his tax plans, his healthcare plans, his Supreme Court nominations, his assaults on your gun rights, your freedom of speech, ALL of it. If you are a conservative or libertarian whose conscience and heart may not reside with McCain/Palin because they are not conservative/libertarian enough, this platform below is what you will be helping to bring about if you vote for anyone else next month. If Obama/ACORN win, may God help us all, because we are going to badly need it.
Barr doesn't have a snowball's chance of getting elected. Period. If you cast your vote for Barr (or any other third party candidate), the net effect will be to take a vote away from McCain. That net deduction has the mathematical effect of putting Obama up by one vote. That's just the cold hard math of it. Putting Obama up by one vote takes you one vote further away from what you want out of government. If you want to know how that will impact you, go read my thread which I linked above.
On the other hand, if you vote for McCain, you will get at least a small part of what you want, and you will have contributed to staving off the catastrophe that an Obama victory would mean. Even former Democrat presidential candidate George McGovern thinks Obama is too liberal. McGovern, by the way, is undergoing his own conversion to libertarianism.
Your vote, my vote, anybody's vote, is more than just an expression of political conscience. It has real and measurable consequences. Those consequences are expressed in the changes to the nation following any presidential election. If you like Obama's vision for the nation, and agree with his plan for achieving it, go ahead and vote him. Neither Barr's nor McCain's platforms are the same as Obama's. However, your vote for Barr's platform will have the consequence of promoting Obama's. Being realistic, there aren't enough libertarian votes in the state of Texas to swing the state's electoral votes away from either Obama or McCain and toward Barr. There just aren't. But let's assume that 10% of the state's voters are libertarians... ...the race between republican and democrat voters is tighter than that. Right now, RealClearPolitics.com quotes Rasmussen as showing McCain up by 9% in the state. If all libertarians and disaffected republicans go vote for Barr or some other third party candidate, Obama probably wins Texas - and there went that pro-gun majority you were counting on to make it safe for you personally to vote for Barr. However, as of today, RealClearPolitics.com shows Obama up by 7.6% nationally. If that holds, then Obama wins by a landslide.
In politics as in other endeavors, the law of unintended consequences applies. There is no escaping it, and it is unrealistic to think that you can. You may not intend an Obama win, but if enough disaffected conservatives vote third party instead of Republican this year, an Obama win will nevertheless be the consequence. The responsibility for that consequence will lie squarely on the shoulders of those who voted for either Obama directly, or for a third party candidate, and not upon the shoulders of those who acknowledged the political realities, held their noses, and voted for the win.
What you are proposing isn't a strategy, it's a protest. Strategies are actually calculated to win. Voting for Barr isn't calculating to win. The reality is that voting for Barr is voting for the spoiler. I am pleading with you to reconsider.
Absolutely correct!