Competing Visions for America's Soul.....

[sjfcontrol]

TAM, you should really write a blog. I'm always struck by your reasoned, articulate, and well thought out posts here and you could easily be an opinion maker with a larger audience.

TAM is so good, that if he blogged all the time, he'd have a radio show in no time, too!

Maybe he could substitute for Rush!!

[Slowplay]

Now, it is perfectly acceptable for a libertarian candidate with measurable support to negotiate with other party leaders for platform concessions in exchange for the post primary support of the libertarian candidate. But it has been my observation that there is a faction within that group of libertarians who think that negotiation means "my way or the highway," and they can't see past their immediate instant gratification to the damage they'll do if they cannot accept compromises. Politics IS compromise. It is the essence of compromise. Politics is the process by which compromise is achieved. Nobody gets everything they want, but everybody gets at least something they want.....except the anarchist.

While I normally always agree with TAM, I don't completely agree that "politics is compromise". Politics is about winning. Governing often involves some degree of compromise to get enough of you "side" to vote/act to advance your agenda, but you can't get in a position to have that inconsequential compromise unless you have won in the first place.

Now you could say politicians compromise the truth to win (get elected), but winning is the name of the game. After the 2008 elections, the dems had the White House, the House, and a supermajority in the Senate. How much did they compromise? They didn't have to because they won big in 2008.

I understand the context in which there should be compromise to court libertarian voters to avoid another 1992, but the objective should be to highlight the existing similarities with libertarian positions (smaller, less intrusive govt w/ fiscal restraint), not to broaden positions trying to placate libertarians that may just vote for their guy anyway.

The ideal of compromise in politics can lead to "death by a thousand cuts". Winning should be the first priority in politics to allow your political agenda to be advanced. This quote by Ronald Reagan always reminds me how conservatives should be ever vigilant and not be cajoled or pressured into compromising at the cost of abandoning core principles:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

[The Annoyed Man]

Of course winning is the goal of the party, but my point is that both parties send people to DC, and once they get there the sausage making begins....the compromise, if you will. And if you don't think the Founders compromised on anything, you'd be dead wrong. They fought and argued and intellectually tussled until they had arrived at the wording they could ALL live with for the Constitution. That's compromise.

Yes, I want Romney to win. Liberals want Obama to win. But when it comes to third parties—consisting primarily of the Libertarian party on the right and the Green party on the left—their candidates simply never will win. They cannot win. There just aren't enough voters in the nation who agree with their message. It doesn't matter if the third party platforms are right or wrong because it's a numbers game. So, the effect of Green party voters is to siphon votes away from the Democrats, and the effect of Libertarian party voters is to siphon votes away from the republican party. I say this because IF the democrat party were 100% ideologically "pure" enough on the left, green party voters would have never left it; and if the republican party were 100% ideologically pure enough on the right, libertarian voters would have never left it.

So here's what that means for those voters who cannot settle for anything except the 100% ideologically pure:

• In any election where there is a significant margin between the two major party candidates, third party voters are irrelevant....which actually, I think is kind of sad.
• In any election where the margin between the two major party candidates is tight, the candidate who will win is the one who can convince the third party fringe voters at his end of the spectrum to set aside their convictions at least in part, to ensure the election of the least undesirable candidate.
• So in that particular situation, third party voters have a shot at relevance, because they can sink or save a major party candidate.
• If they are wise, they will use that power to extract concessions from the candidate they will be supporting, but without that support, they can have no rational expectation of concessions.
• In such an election, the effect of the third party voter's vote, if he does not agree to vote for the major party candidate is to help the other major party's candidate.

There isn't a paid professional political analyst in the country that will disagree with that analysis. Why? Because we've had third parties forever, and we've got over 200 years of voting data to look at to determine their effect on elections. Over and over and over and over again, the net effect of the third party voter's vote is to act as a spoiler for the party which is ideologically closer to their position than it hurts the party which is furthest from their position. That's a fact that is indisputable. If one doesn't want to believe it, then one should stop believing in history. This isn't the victors rewriting the history, because the analysis is shared by professionals on both sides of the ideological divide and there's two centuries of data.

So when a third party voter says they can't see any difference between Obama and Romney, you'll hear the exact same statement from hard core leftists in the Green party, and hard core libertarians in the Libertarian Party. They can't both be right unless one condition is met: and that would be that there is little or no ideological difference between the Green party and the Libertarian party. While both have a strong undercurrent of anarchism, there isn't anybody with half a brain who would agree that they are the same. Therefore when either side says they see no difference between Obama and Romney, it is because they are either willfully blind to it because it isn't convenient to their petulance, or they are congenitally stupid. I don't believe for a moment that Libertarians are congenitally stupid. Not for a minute. So when a voter tells me that in an election that is SO important that its outcome will determine whether we either A) convert the nation over to a european style socialist democracy, or B) get back on track and return to our capitalist free-market republic roots, I have to wonder if that voter really understands what's at stake. If they're OK with (A) so long as their precious ideological purity is not violated, then I cannot understand how they reconcile their sense of patriotism with that fact. Why? Because a patriot would not assist in the dismantling of his nation's foundational economic principles. Since I don't think that Libertarians are necessarily unpatriotic, I can only conclude that they need to wake up and smell the coffee......because the brutally darwinian process of politics makes no allowance for frivolity, and we are at one of those once in a generation crossroads of history where we cannot afford willful pride.

I really really wish I had the words to get people to see this. But, there is hope for the nation. I ran across the following two articles:

A Romney first: over 40% of youth vote back him
August 15, 2012 | 9:19 am
http://washingtonexaminer.com/a-romney- ... CxpZWOe78-

For the first time since he began running for president, Republican Mitt Romney has the support of over 40 percent of America's youth vote, a troubling sign for President Obama who built his 2008 victory with the overwhelming support of younger, idealistic voters.

Pollster John Zogby of JZ Analytics told Secrets Tuesday that Romney received 41 percent in his weekend poll of 1,117 likely voters, for the first time crossing the 40 percent mark. What's more, he said that Romney is the only Republican of those who competed in the primaries to score so high among 18-29 year olds.

"This is the first time I am seeing Romney's numbers this high among 18-29 year olds," said Zogby. "This could be trouble for Obama who needs every young voter he can get."

The young may turn out to be the salvation of the nation if too many of us old-heads can't agree to support the clearly better choice that is Romney.

Poll: Obama leads among non-voters
By KEVIN CIRILLI | 8/15/12 3:31 PM EDT
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/08 ... z23gEe635L

Stay-at-home nonvoters are more likely to support President Barack Obama than Mitt Romney, according to a new USA Today/Suffolk University poll out today.
Eighty million Americans — 40 percent of the possible eligible electorate — won’t vote this Election Day. And 59 percent of them say there’s no point, since nothing ever gets done and politicians continue to make empty promises, according to the poll.

It should come as no surprise that Obama enjoys more support among the shiftless than Romney does, but this also tends to support the prevailing view that democrats are registered in greater numbers than republicans, but republicans turn out in greater percentages to vote, and that's what has kept the elections fairly close over the decades. But with the drafting of Paul Ryan for VP, the conservative base has become very energized and will likely turn out in even higher numbers than normal. With growing democrat apathy exemplified by the panic at Obama's campaign headquarters in Chicago over the small turnouts at rallies for Obama/Biden compared to the pretty big turnouts at Romney/Ryan rallies, things are looking a little better. It will still be very tight, but we have a chance. I'd hate like heck for third party voters to sabotage that.

According to today's Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_ ... cking_poll:

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows Mitt Romney attracting support from 47% of voters nationwide, while President Obama earns the vote from 43%. Four percent (4%) prefer some other candidate, and seven percent (7%) are undecided. Romney’s lead is a bit larger when leaners are included.

In Ohio, the candidates are tied at 45% each. Ohio remains one of 12 states with 156 Electoral Voters that are either Toss-Ups or Leaners in the Rasmussen Reports Electoral College Projections.

Initial voter reaction to Romney's new running mate Paul Ryan is modestly positive. Fifty percent (50%) have a favorable opinion of him. He is seen as politically conservative by seven-out-of-10 voters which places him as far to the right as Obama is to the political left. Political analyst Michael Barone notes that the selection of Ryan puts the nation’s entitlement crisis at the center of this year’s campaign.

I don't know if it is statistically significant or not, but yesterday's result was also 47% for Romney, while Obama was 1% higher yesterday than today, at 44%, and undecideds were down at 4% compared to today's 7%, with "some other candidate" still at 4%. I'm wondering if Obama lost 1% to the undecideds who are now giving Romney/Ryan a look after the media blitz that Ryan has had, with all the attendent opportunities to cast this election in Ryan's terms. It will be interesting to track that "undecided" percentage to see what happens. A 1% decrease in Obama support may not be significant, but a 3% increase in undecideds is.

[Slowplay]

Of course the framers compromised, but they were establishing the "rules of the game," ...the system of power at the federal level. Notice that Article V make changes to what they established a very high hurdle. So, they did not want changes to the federal goverment's power to be a matter of compromise, it had to be overwhelming, substantive agreement.

Now there was a time that the limits on federal power were understood and generally respected (granted, those in power have a tendency to like it and want more). Do you really think the current courts would require a constitutional amendment for the federal goverment to make products illegal (18th Amendment). We're in a very different time where the federal government has vastly greater power than the framers intended. The stakes for winning power at the federal level could not be much higher than what they are today. Recent acts by the executive branch demonstrate the subversion of Constitutional limits - done for the purpose of expanding the voting base...to stay in power. No compromise necessary there.

I agree with most everything else you've mentioned but have noticed many third party voters are single-issue folks (and not always voters). Unfortunately, many of the self-proclaimed libertarian folks I've encountered seem to have legalization as their main tenet. I would not count on them voting for Romney or even voting. Also, we can't help those that are so in love with their bus that never has a chance of getting anywhere, if they can't jump over to a bus that actually has a chance at making it to the desired destination. Some people enjoy being on that perpetual bus ride. For this election, I don't think there are enough of the third-party folks to make a difference. We don't have a Ross Perot running this time. Also, the results in Wisconsin give me hope that the left's machine might not be capable of overcoming grass-roots voters (even if voter ID laws are blocked).