Who's Getting Your Vote?

Reason magazine has posted “Who’s Getting Your Vote?” on their website. It’s a poll of “a variety of policy wonks, journalists, thinkers, and other public figures” about for whom they’re voting in November, whom they voted for in 2000, their most embarrassing presidential vote ever, and their favorite president of all time. A few so-called “libertarians” list Lincoln as their favorite president, “because he saved the Union.” I guess that’s indicative of the direction the libertarian movement is running these days...toward statism and interventionism. But there are some revealing and fun answers sprinkled throughout the answers. And there are even a few principled non-voters represented.

Comedian and sitcom star Drew Carey says his favorite president is “Andrew Jackson, because he’s what a lap dance costs (and because, ironically, he opposed having a National Bank).” As for casting his vote this year, Carey says: “Quit pretending that it matters, would you? Can you vote for all the nefarious cabals that really run the world? No. Fuck it.”

Glenn Garvin, Reason contributing editor and a columnist for The Miami Herald, names William Henry Harrison as his favorite prez. Harrison, he reminds us, “caught pneumonia while delivering his inaugural address, lay in bed barely conscious for six weeks, and then died, his presidency having done hardly any damage to the country.”

Bob Higgs, author of Crisis and Leviathan and the more recent Against Leviathan, explains tersely what he’ll do on November 2: “I never vote. I don’t want to soil my hands.”

P.J. O’Rourke, political humorist, and occasional TV pundit, says: “I always vote Republican because Republicans have fewer ideas. Although, in the case of George W., not fewer enough.”

Other participants in the poll include Camille Paglia, Penn Jillette, Wendy McElroy, and a dozen or more others. It’s worth a look.