The Barbarino in me

Remember Vinnie Barbarino, the John Travolta character on "Welcome Back, Kotter"? His recurring laugh line was, "I'm so confused." I'm feeling mighty Barbarino-ish about the Republican presidential field. In the "Orthodox for Ron Paul" post this morning, I confessed that my interest in Ron Paul's candidacy is primarily based on a lack of enthusiasm (if not outright antagonism) to the rest of the GOP field, and because I particularly like Paul's stance on the war (and by extension, international relations), and on the abuse of executive power. These are positions I would like to see taken up more broadly on the Right, and to the extent Paul's success forwards that goal, I'm for him.

But I can't call myself a Paul supporter (even though if the Texas GOP primary were held today, I'd vote for him, and probably will do so next year in the actual primary) because he's a flawed vessel, in my view. I think he's probably a superlative Congressman, but I doubt he's got the temperament to be president. And I don't understand his position on the gold standard, which strikes me as crankery (though I am willing to be educated). Would the country be in better hands under a President Ron Paul than a President H.R. Clinton? Yes. But that's not the same thing as wanting Paul to be president.

And then there's Huckabee, who appeals to an, ahem, Christianist like me for obvious reasons. I am more progressive about economics than many Republicans, so I've got no basic problem with combining social conservatism with fiscal progressivism (provided that the government pays for its social spending by taxing us today, not pushing the debt off on future generations; this would, I think, cause the electorate to think hard about what kind of social spending we really need). But I don't like his views on the war and on immigration. The war position is a big deal to me because I think the single most dangerous idea embraced by the Bush administration was the fusing of missionary, idealistic Christianity with American manifest destiny -- that is, the idea that God brought America into existence to rid the world of evil. Seems to me that Huckabee is far too close to this than he ought to be.

As for the other candidates, forget it. They're wrong on the war. McCain is the most respectable of the lot, but I simply can't vote for a Republican who would continue the disastrous Bush foreign policy. Period. Which rules the rest of them out. Giuliani is wholly unsuitable, not only for his pro-war views, but also for his social liberalism, and most especially his temperament. Romney I find to be slippery and loosely tethered to any principles other than the advancement of Mitt Romney.

I have such a bad conscience about where I am politically for several reasons. First, it's unusual for me to find myself not only uncommitted to a presidential candidate, but actively repulsed by most of them. The only two I like -- Paul and Huckabee -- are so flawed that I can't get behind either of them with any enthusiasm (as I said below about my Paul protest vote, surely there's something wrong with being for a candidate, but only if he can't really win).

As a conservative, I ought to know better than to let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough, and what bothers me about my cogitations on the presidential race is the feeling that I'm allowing my disgust with the Republican Party and the way it's governed over the past six or seven years to keep me from thinking more realistically and responsibly about the actual political choices facing us in this vale of tears. For me, withholding my presidential vote is, for the first time, a realistic possibility. Is that a responsible position? As I said below, a Paul vote is a protest vote for me, but it's also a vote for a different kind of Republican Party (as would a Huckabee vote be, for different reasons). In either case, the vote wouldn't be wasted, not even as a protest vote, insofar as it represented a vote of no confidence in the current GOP, and registered a desire for fundamental change. I don't think a lot of the Ralph Nader voters in 2000 actually wanted Nader to be president, but rather wanted simply to register their dissent from the Democratic mainstream.

Their idealism elected George W. Bush, and the rest is history. I don't want to be a Nader voter in that sense. But from where I sit, it's hard for me to see a whole lot of difference on the issues that matter most to me this year between the leading GOP figures, and the Democrats. Yes, there's the matter of the Supreme Court. No Republican president could hope to get a properly conservative nominee through the Democratic Senate. Then again, a Republican president would at least be a brake on a liberal nominee, which a Democratic president would certainly get through. Maybe the alienated-conservative rationale for voting GOP for president in '08 is to serve as a restraint on what will be a more Democratic Congress.

But first we've got to get through the primaries. Again, I'm not used to being so conflicted and confused and dispirited by the candidates, not at this late date. How are you who aren't committed to a candidate sorting through the issues and personalities?

UPDATE: Ross says what I've been trying to say, but as usual, with much more clarity. He's interested in Huckabee and Paul, not because he agrees with their policy positions, but because they're pushing the staid party past its worn-out positions and toward some healthy critical thinking. Read the whole post, please. Here's an excerpt:

Without the two of them, you’d have a field whose ideological spectrum runs from Steven Moore to Grover Norquist on domestic policy, and from Michael Ledeen to Norman Podhoretz on foreign affairs. There would be greater party unity, sure, but sometimes unity’s just another word for self-marginalization. I don’t think Huckabee and Paul are the ideal candidates to jolt the GOP out of its ideological rut, but they’re better than nothing.