One of the best articles I’ve read on the election

 

 

Senator Obama is the most spectacularly talented politician of the new generation in America. No wonder that the Daley machine adopted him from the start and started a presidential campaign for him from the moment he was elected to the US senate. However, he has several flaws that would make me refuse to support him even if the opposing candidates did not impress me as much as John McCain and Sarah Palin do. (With respect to Sarah Palin, incidentally, one simple principle will carry you very far: do not believe a single word the mainstream press and television say about her. Not one word. If they tell you that she has dark hair and wears glasses, make sure you check by yourself or read a conservative blog first….)

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it is – I repeat – literally impossible to forecast, from what he has said so far, what [Obama] will actually do. Presidents are elected on character as much as on their platforms. With Obama, it is exactly that aspect of his character which is a blank. To elect him would be an act of faith at best. From most electors, it would be faith that the moderate, unifying, respectful face he has worn through the national election is the one he would take to the White House. For the Kos Kids and others who have brought him to the nomination, it would be exactly the opposite.

That is one immediate reason not to vote Obama. When you do not, repeat, do not, know how a man will perform in a demanding role, you do not give him the keys to the house or the family jewels. Even if the first impact he makes is favourable, and even if the alternative looks bleak. There are many people who think that anything would be better than eight more years of Republicanism. Some of them insist, against all the evidence – I have met them – that John McCain’s destruction of the establishment candidate Mitt Romney, his visible dislike for Romney and Bush II, his record of ignoring the party views whenever he thought right, the violent propaganda aimed at him by the established right – Limbaugh, Coulter and so on – are all a nefarious conspiracy by Karl Rove and other demonic figures to lead us to accept yet another incarnation of the inevitably wicked and dishonest Republican soul. I have stopped trying to convince such people to enter the real world. They will never be convinced that everything is not a nefarious Rovian conspiracy to make them look bad. And this sort of thing is one of the reasons why I hate the party spirit. There has been a lot of talk lately about what the Founders did or did not want, but one thing should be clear: they loathed "faction" and established parties, and they were quite right to do so. When a real party structure emerged over the election of Jefferson, it did so against the wishes of nearly everyone involved. Party spirit blinds people and makes them stupid.

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Now if Obama were not the Democratic Party’s official candidate, no Catholic (or Jew) would dream of voting for him. His support for abortion, the most extreme of any Senator, would make it absolutely impossible to back him. But because he is a Democrat, and because the ancient tribal identification of Dems and Catholics (especially Irish Catholics) is still alive in some minds, and because some people find Republican governance so abhorrent that they believe anything would be better, there still are supposed Catholics who can bring themselves to underline the supposed good things that the end of Republican governance would mean, and neglect the fact that abortion would be double-riveted on the land for ever. Some of them, who do not understand that the doctrine of procreation is at the centre of the whole Catholic doctrine of man, would even be relieved to see the issue closed by edict, and may imagine that the Church would then be forced to accept what it does not like. To these people one can only say that they have not the slightest notion of what Catholicism really means – or, for that matter, human conscience. Any edict in favour of abortion, such as the so-called Free Choice Act, would be as effective in closing the issue as the Dred Scott case. But at any rate the issue for members of the Catholic Church, in communion with the Bishop of Rome, subscribing to the Catholic doctrine, is absolutely simple: you either are a Catholic or an abortion supporter. Tertium non datur.