Neither McCain nor Obama

"So what are you thinking about November?" my friend asked me on the walk to Chipotle today.

"Well, Obama's going to be the Democratic nominee, and I can't see voting for him," I said. "He's just too liberal on abortion and other issues that mean a lot to me. It would be extremely difficult for me to vote for him knowing how much the next president is going to be able to reshape the Supreme Court, and knowing that the next president is going to have a Democratic Senate. But I liked what he had to say the other day about re-regulating the financial industry, and I think he'd be the best of the bunch on Iraq. Still, that's not enough."

"Why not McCain? You're a Republican."

"Iraq."

"Iraq?"

"Iraq."

"How big a deal is that for you?"

"Pretty big, but I'm not sure how big. Depends on what happens between now and November, I guess."

"So it sounds like you're in a bad place."

"Well, I don't know about 'bad,' but it's hard to even imagine voting for either one. Still, it's a long time till November. We don't even know how bad the economic situation is going to be by then."

Later on, I thought about this piece from philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, declaring his withholding his vote from either Bush or Kerry in 2004 as a positive moral act. Excerpt:

When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither. And when that choice is presented in rival arguments and debates that exclude from public consideration any other set of possibilities, it becomes a duty to withdraw from those arguments and debates, so as to resist the imposition of this false choice by those who have arrogated to themselves the power of framing the alternatives. These are propositions which in the abstract may seem to invite easy agreement. But, when they find application to the coming presidential election, they are likely to be rejected out of hand. For it has become an ingrained piece of received wisdom that voting is one mark of a good citizen, not voting a sign of irresponsibility. But the only vote worth casting in November is a vote that no one will be able to cast, a vote against a system that presents one with a choice between Bush's conservatism and Kerry's liberalism, those two partners in ideological debate, both of whom need the other as a target.

Why should we reject both? Not primarily because they give us wrong answers, but because they answer the wrong questions. What then are the right political questions? One of them is: What do we owe our children? And the answer is that we owe them the best chance that we can give them of protection and fostering from the moment of conception onwards. And we can only achieve that if we give them the best chance that we can both of a flourishing family life, in which the work of their parents is fairly and adequately rewarded, and of an education which will enable them to flourish. These two sentences, if fully spelled out, amount to a politics. It is a politics that requires us to be pro-life, not only in doing whatever is most effective in reducing the number of abortions, but also in providing healthcare for expectant mothers, in facilitating adoptions, in providing aid for single-parent families and for grandparents who have taken parental responsibility for their grandchildren. And it is a politics that requires us to make as a minimal economic demand the provision of meaningful work that provides a fair and adequate wage for every working parent, a wage sufficient to keep a family well above the poverty line.

Follow the link and read the whole thing. Does that make sense to you? Today I find it very difficult to imagine voting for a man who would continue this war indefinitely. And I find it all but impossible to imagine voting for a man who has taken the most extreme pro-choice positions imaginable, and whose Supreme Court appointments would undermine in law things I consider fundamentally important. Like everybody else, I'm accustomed to choosing the less bad candidate for the presidency, but this year the stakes are so, so high.

Anybody else caught between these two unacceptable, or nearly unacceptable, choices? If so, how are you reasoning your way through it? (For me, if Clinton not Obama were the nominee, the choice would be even more appalling, though McCain would look more plausible to my eyes.)