Fair enough.

“I agree that anyone who has turned against Bush in the last eight years but then votes for McCain because of Palin deserves whatever McCain gives him.”

I was thinking that if someone swallowed Bush they can’t gag at McCain and claim to be consistent, but I guess your version works as well.

“If you vote for a candidate, you are giving him exactly a blank check, since that is how the candidate will interpret your support. Voting for one or the other of them is a small act of empowerment. Whatever your reasons or reservations when you vote, you will be partly responsible for the policies that your candidate enacts.”

You’re right. A vote for McCain or any other candidate will be taken as a blank check. If you want to withhold your vote from one or both parties to show you disapproval, fine. I may do the same.

But I wouldn’t assume that there is some alternative ideology out there that gets right what the major party candidates get wrong, or some movement that can change policy without making a bigger mess of things.

My concern was with distinguishing the real “trap” of conning oneself into supporting parties and candidates whose policies one disagrees with from the reality that not everything is possible in politics, but I do see that emotions cloud people’s minds and convince them to do things they otherwise wouldn’t.

It’s way too late to play that card. If you voted for George Bush it’s hard to complain about McCain now. If you thought Bush would bring us a “more modest” foreign policy and were surprised by the result, it’s hard to see how you could be any more disappointed or deceived by McCain, and those who support Bush in spite of his immigration policy can’t complain much about McCain’s.

Options that looked open ten or twenty years ago don’t appear to be available now, at least as far as conservatism is concerned, so voters pick between the available alternatives. Of course, one ought to do this with one’s eyes open and with no illusions about the candidates — and without illusions about other options which in reality aren’t open to us or which wouldn’t really improve things.

Part of having one’s eye’s open is recognizing that one isn’t giving a blank check to McCain (or Obama). That a vote for him doesn’t mean down-the-line support of every position he’s taken.

But is there any other pathway by which a Palin-like figure can be brought to the national stage at this point in time? Her admirers are drunk on hope at the moment because her surprise elevation came at a time when they thought they were quite powerless.

http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2008/09/03/positive-polarization/

Of course. But we’re not having a policy election, as you noted earlier in the year, we’re having a biography election, with two candidates so defined by their biographies, and now, a VP candidate defined by her biography. There wasn’t the remotest possibility that it was going to be anything else.

“superficial and absolutely irrational” could almost be the tag line for mass democracy as such, but as Howard said above, the atmospherics of this choice, this speech, this person is as flawless a political move as I have ever seen. I think I have to move myself from predicting that Obama will win to thinking that I don’t have a clue. I will say (as Rod Dreher did yesterday) that if the McCain camp is smart they’ll park Palin in Ohio and Pennsylvania (and Michigan, if they want to swing for the fences) for the next two months. She will own those states, especially Ohio.

Daniel, however, downplays atmospherics and symbolism more than he should do. The Presidency has a quasi-royal function that goes beyond the concerns of the wonkisphere. I, too, fear McCain’s stances on things like foreign policy and immigration, but like the uncouth Westerners shocking the Yankee élite at Jackson’s inauguration, the entry of this clever ex-fishwife into the Naval Observatory and the Senate chair will be an historic moment, with repercussions that no one can predict.

I suppose he could drop dead after inauguration day and we could wind up with Mrs. Deeds as President. I’ll give Howard that – that a Palin presidency is less scary than a McCain Administration (and Obama is not a whole lot better), that is if we allowed “Sarah to be Sarah.”

It is hard to imagine a more magnificent gesture Mr. McCain could have made than by his unexpected choice of Sarah Palin as running mate.

McCain serves and always has served the interests of those elites….

Not when he chose Mrs. Palin, he didn’t.

Does her small-town ethos impress you and inspire some identification with her?

In a word, yes.

Howard