April 26, 2008

I am at the Constitution Party’s national convention held this week in Kansas City, where only moments ago the delegates voted, and with promising results. First, the delegates prevented the Straussian neocon Alan Keyes and his supporters from taking over the party. Second, they overwhelmingly elected, in light of the fact that no stronger candidate stepped forward, Chuck Baldwin as their presidential nominee. (The VP nominee, who hopefully will not be Alan Keyes, will be nominated this afternoon.)

Now that Ron Paul is effectively out of the race, there may again be a candidate for paleoconservatives (notwithstanding Gottfried’s obituary) to support. For those of you unfamiliar with Baldwin, he’s a pastor at the Crossroad Baptist Church in Pensacola, Florida, former activist in the Moral Majority (who since has repudiated the Religious Right’s groveling for crumbs before the GOP), a radio personality, and a columnist, whose pieces regularly appear at VDare and numerous other sites. He is sound on immigration, sound on trade, and sound on the war.

Unless another, more electable third-party candidate steps forward (like Lou Dobbs), Baldwin may be one’s best bet for two reasons.  First, voting for a minor third-party candidate sends a better message than abstaining or voting for a Leftist like Barack Obama (who’s hostile towards working-class Anglo-European Americans, wrong on immigration, dishonest about trade, and probably will start a war in Darfur), which would be interpreted as a general shift of the “conservative” electorate to the multicultural Left.  Second, as Chilton Williamson Jr. argues in his recent article “Time for a Multi-Party System,? there could be long-term gains (such as a “multiplicity of parties, representing a multiplicity of interests”) in abandoning the two major parties, which have become a “broad and contradictory coalition of factions.”  (Better said than done, but a sizeable defection is a start.)

Some anti-war libertarians have expressed support for Bob Barr, former representative from Georgia, but, like Jim Webb, he seems to have drifted to the Left on immigration.  Although previously sound on the issue (ABI gives him a career grade of A+),  on Neal Boortz recently, Barr peddled the same propaganda as Barack Obama or John McCain: “I think as a practical matter, that makes a lot of sense [amnesty]. I’m not sure how you would go about rounding up millions of people and trying to deport them.”  (Ever hear of attrition or incentives to self-deport?)

With the sorry pool of candidates this year (and with those from the two major parties differing from each other in no substantial way), Chuck Baldwin may be the lone beacon of light on an otherwise dark horizon.