Lieberman still very much in the running

Byron York—another of the small minority of regular posters at the Corner who can be described as adults—gives his take on the GOP veepstakes. He makes it clear that, if McCain felt free to choose his running mate based purely on his own preferences, he would pick Lieberman or Ridge. Do it, McCain! Make my day. Make manifest and undeniable what I have been saying all year, that the nomination—and, worse, the election—of McCain means the end of the GOP as a conservative party. Leave your “conservative” supporters without even a transparent fig leaf.

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A female reader with an exaggerated view of VFR’s influence writes:

Your goading him this way may backfire!!

Paul K. writes:

Wouldn’t the selection of Lieberman send the message that this election is about nothing but support for the war? That doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to me. Anyway, today’s big announcement that Lieberman will address the GOP convention makes it seem less likely that he is the running mate, as it’s a given that the running mate will address the convention.

Looking at what we are faced with in this election, as well as in the last few, I’m convinced that there is a fatal flaw in the primary process that selects our presidential candidates. Or perhaps I’m seeing a fatal flaw in what we call democracy. It doesn’t seem to be capable of addressing our fundamental problems.

LA replies:

It seems to me that there are two major alternatives for fixing the primary process.

The first is to make each party’s selection process truly democratic and representative, by ending the outrage of “open” primaries and allowing only registered members of each party to vote in that party’s primaries. With properly closed GOP primaries, Romney, not McCain, would now be the presumptive nominee.

The second alternative, which I would prefer but which is out of step with the spirit of our time, is to go back to the pre-primary system, in which several thousand party officials and office holders meet at a national convention and—gasp—actually select the nominee there. In that system, which was in place until the mid 20th century, you lose democracy in the modern sense of mass voting, but you regain a more vital type of democracy, in which the nominee is truly elected by a body of people gathered together in one place—sometimes only after many ballots. In the old system, the smoke-filled room system, someone as unrepresentative of the Republican party as McCain would never be nominated. Similarly, someone as odd, unprepared, and questionable as Obama would not be chosen.

Either of the above alternatives would be vastly better than the present system of “open” primaries which violates the very idea of representative democracy (since non-members of a party are allowed to vote for that party’s nominee and often play a decisive role,.as in McCain’s victory in New Hampshire) and is an insult to our intelligence.

Adela G. writes:

You write:

A female reader with an exaggerated view of VFR’s influence writes:

“Your goading him this way may backfire!”

And they call you humorless and misogynistic.

LA writes:

Yuval Levin at the Corner expands on what a demoralizing National Convention the Republicans will have if McCain picks Lieberman, and concludes:

You just have to believe McCain and his folks have thought about this, and the Lieberman talk is a head fake. If so it’s a good one.

Levin also makes an exceedingly odd observation. He says the Lieberman nomination would attract to the GOP “security hawks who are not otherwise conservatives but could become so by cooperating with the right over time. It’s not a large group, but it’s a significant one in the country, and an important one in Washington too.”

Security hawks? Does he mean the neocons? Is this National Review contributor saying that neocons are not conservatives?

LA writes:

Prior to checking out NRO the last few days because of my interest in the Lieberman story, I had barely visited NRO for the last several months. It occurred to me that I hadn’t heard anything about John Derbyshire in a while. So I searched his name at the Corner, and there was just one entry by him:

Where Show Tunes Are Unknown [John Derbyshire]

Perusing that map I very helpfully posted, several readers have expressed curiosity about the regions marked as “Nogay” in a rather fetching shade of cerulean.

My advisor on Caucasian matters tells me the only thing he knows about these regions—which are, after all, very remote—is that they contain practically no good antique stores, the supermarkets do not stock Macadamia nuts, and the quiche is terrible.

08/18 12:38 PM

The man who regards it as beneath himself to know anything about Islam, and who has said that people who write seriously about Islam “need to get a life,” certainly seems to be continuing to keep his priorities straight about the things that are important and unimportant.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 20, 2008 09:49 AM | Send