Screw it; I'm voting for McCain

You know, I've had just about enough of all this party in-fighting.  I'm sick to death of Obama's preacher and Clinton's Ferraro.  I don't like Tony McPeak calling Bill Clinton a McCarthyite, and I've had just about enough of James Carville's charge that Bill Richardson is some modern-day Judas Iscariot. Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson are wholly loathesome for their open declarations that Obama can't beat John McCain, and for David Axelrod to so much as intimate that Hillary Clinton's vote on Iraq somehow lead to the death of Benazir Bhutto is enough to make me vomit.

So, after all this time as a Democrat (since my first vote in 1976) and all my time on this site (October 2003), I've decided that neither of these campagins deserve my vote.  

I'm voting for John McCain.  And don't try to talk me out of it.

Now you may ask:

Why, GOTV?  Why would a life-long Democrat ever vote for a Republican, especially one as loathesome as John McCain?

 
Well, it's not because I believe in his policies.  

He wants to extend the war and he backed down on his stance on torture.  He thought for a while that the religious right were a bunch of hate mongers, but now realizes just how warm and generous that crowd can be.  He's anti-affirmative action, anti-choice, and anti-gay rights.  He's pro-corporations, pro-life, and pro-death penalty.  He wants to lower taxes on the hyper-rich, restrict access to the courts for individuals, nominate conservative judges, and bring prayer into schools.  While he's not opposed to gay marriage on the federal level, he thinks it's just fine for states to ban the practice. He's pro-NAFTA, pro-GATT, pro-CAFTA, and pro-MFN for China.  He voted for almost every Bush appointee of any consequence.

He's got no real plan to fix the health care crisis, but believes that we have a Social Security crisis.  He also thinks privatization is the way to fix it.  He's got no real plan to fix Iraq, but he's patient enough to believe that we probably can come up with one in the next 100 years.  He sees Iran as a land of even more opportunities.  

And though he has precious little to recommend him, I cannot help but think that anything I can do to avoid sullying my precious vote or despoiling my progressive voting record with a vote either naïve and unelectable Barack Obama or the immoral vote stealer Hillary Clinton has got to be worth it.  

But again you may ask:

Why, GOTV?  Why not just abstain from voting for president; you know, just leave that line blank on your ballot?

Well, let me tell you.  My problem is that I don't have the luxury of living in a state that doesn't matter; you know, states such as Utah, Idaho, Massachusetts, Illinois, or Virginia.  I can't just withold my vote and "get away with it."  I live in Michigan, a Democratic-leaning swing state of late, but given the primary mess, one that might just go for my man McCain.  My choice in this election may actually help tip some electoral votes one way or the other.  And that's just the point: none of this mamby-pamby petulence of simply refusing to vote for Obama or Clinton.  I want my protest vote to have real impact!  

See, I don't simply want to be pius about this as some people have been; I don't merely want to make some self-satisfying grandious statement about how, in pathetic sadness, I cannot bring myself to chose the lesser of two evils.  I don't want to be merely sanctimonious about this; I want to be downright strategically evil.  Merely withholding my vote would do nothing but make me feel good about not supporting the campaign of one those two tragically flawed Democrats.  Actually voting--nay, actually voting  and campaigning--for McCain as a means to demonstrate that the process of a political campaign is more important than the policies that candidate seeks to implement is what's at the root of this democracy thing.  

In a year where it would otherwise be unthinkable that this country would reaffirm the Bush legacy by voting in John McCain to succeed him, unless Obama and most especially Clinton straighten up and fly right, I want to do just that.  I want to wake up on Wednesday, November 5, 2008, and read in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Nation, and from Josh Marshall, John Cole, and Chuck Todd that John McCain, John Fucking McCain beat us, and beat our asses good because Democrats were too damn holy to vote in the general elction for whatever Democratic candidate they opposed the primary. Yeah, and I want them all to say just how it was, in the case Hillary Clinton's loss to McCain, that one of the hotbeds of discontent, one of the sparks that lit the anti-Clinton flame that spread throughout the country, was struck right here on this website.  Just think how good that would make us feel.

Wouldn't that teach 'em to mess with us?  Wouldn't that tell our 2012 candidates/nominee that she or he had damn well not only stand for what we believe in, but also that her or his campaign had damn well better not piss us off to the extent that we'll have to withhold our votes, or as I advocate, vote for yet another Republican?  

I mean, Shit, ain't they ever going to get the message?

                                                                    _____________


Look, folks, let's be candid for a minute.  In November we're going to be voting for a political official--nothing more.  Yes, he or she will by definition be the most powerful political official on the planet.  But, in the end, whomever it is we elect, that person will be, by then,  so severely compromised and indebted that to claim such a high level of purity in your vote, in order to elect yet another person who can never live up to that level of purity, is positively absurd.  

This is a vote in a political election, not one for the elevation of some modern-day Aquinas to sainthood.

So can we now stow the high-toned rhetoric and threats of puritanical political abandonment, and get on with surviving this primary season and electing a Democrat--whomever it turns out to be--to office?