Colby Cosh: I would vote for John McCain
National Post columnist Colby Cosh says he would vote for John McCain. Reluctantly.
Colby Cosh - November 3, 2008
On some level I always feel a reluctance to express a preference in someone else's election. As a rule I don't tend to like Canadian right-wingers who ostentatiously dress like Washington lobbyists and talk your ear off at parties about the minutiae of Senate races, and I wouldn't want to be confused with one of those people. Truth is, though, I have a weird and unprincipled habit of talking myself privately into Republican candidates; maybe others who were pro-Reagan first and libertarians later share this tendency.
From the standpoint of Canada's self-interest, this U.S. election seems like the clearest-cut of my own political lifetime. Support for free trade is where the two major candidates are furthest apart. McCain truly deserves the epithet "unwavering" on the issue, while Obama has been backed into a corner by protectionist workers in high-leverage Rust Belt states. Practically speaking, an Obama victory is going to mean an immediate hit to our GDP. So I'd vote for McCain, especially since the Libertarians are running kind of a half-baked libertarian this time out. But of course, that's why this exercise is so awkward: if I were eligible to vote for McCain I would feel obliged to make the decision on the basis of American interests, and the calculus might very well be different.
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Colby Cosh is a columnist for the National Post and a member of its editorial board. He is a former sports correspondent for the Western Standard.