Joseph Farah endorses Sarah Palin for president

Ben W. writes:

You said you agree with Joseph Farah with respect to not voting for John McCain. How about Farah’s latest choice for president?

LA replies:

Farrah says he’s going to vote write-in for Sarah Palin.

That’s pretty clever.

If Palin had a known political philososphy on national issues, and if it was conservative, and if she weren’t objectionable for all the reasons laid out at VFR, I’d agree with Farah.

Of course, such a vote would be purely a symbolic act on the part of each voter, having no legal existence. For a write-in vote to be counted, the candidate must be registered in that state as a write-in candidate. Since Palin is not so registered, write-in votes for her will not be legally counted under her name above the county level. At least that was the case in New York State when I voted write-in for Tancredo in 2004. My vote for Tancredo was listed at the local or county level, but, as I remember, at the state level, where the votes were offically added up, my vote was simply added to the generic “write-in” votes, not attached to the name of any candidate.

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Jim Farrar writes:

With regard to Joseph Farah’s idea that we should not vote for McCain, we should remember this:

The party in power, given enough of a legislative majority, can pass their agenda with impunity. To discover the bad consequences of this agenda and then to convince the voting public to reverse the situation takes on the order of 12 to 16 years. To reverse the bad legislation takes years as well, for a time constant of change from, say, a liberal agenda to a conservative agenda that is measured in decades. Even then, much legislation is difficult-to-impossible to change back—witness liberal-favored entitlements, which are almost sacrosanct once passed.

Thus, in this election cycle, thoughtful conservatives should consider the dire consequence of a vote to elect a liberal—Barack Obama—to the presidency, ostensibly to teach a hard lesson to their fellows. That dire consequence is a decades-long solidification of a liberal legislative agenda, an important part of which would be practically irreversible. McCain as president would certainly aid the preservation of much of the conservative agenda, and would work to scale down liberal initiatives.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 15, 2008 09:33 AM | Send