Army of Dog

Michelle Malkin posted the transcript of prepared remarks that John McCain delivered at Wake Forest yesterday on the issue of judicial appointments.  She ends her comments on the speech with this question:

Do you trust him? Can you trust him?

This issue has been bandied about by pundits and political junkies on the right since the day it became clear that McCain would be the Republican nominee.  The logic for voting for McCain despite deep ideological disagreement is that the ability of the next President to appoint as many as three justices to the Supreme Court (to say nothing of other federal-level judicial appointments) makes electing a Republican essential.  The common counter to that argument postulates that McCain’s penchant for poking conservatives in the eye makes him unreliable at best and therefore not worthy of support on that basis.

I will state up front that I have an ever-increasing list of issues where Senator McCain and I disagree strongly.  In fact, after a few shining moments where I allowed myself to hope for his conversion on issues like government bailouts of homeowners and commitment to spending reductions, the senior Senator from Arizona seems to be on a barn-busting campaign to alienate me and every other fiscal conservative in the country.  We’re still of one mind on Iraq and a commitment to fighting terrorism, but in every other area, from global warming to gas prices, we don’t see eye to eye.

Having said all that, I’ll still vote for him.  Not only that, I’ll probably do it sober.  The reason I can so comfortably say that I will vote for a man who will no doubt get further away from my political ideal in the coming months is that I play poker.  Certainly not professionally, but I play in a variety of games pretty regularly.  Poker, for those of you who haven’t watched television or been on the internet in this decade, has become so popular that it’s best players are now household names.  It seems that everyone has played Texas Hold’em at least once and the game’s terminology is showing up in the vernacular.

Anyone who wants to play poker at any level other than “sucker” has to understand one fundamental concept of the game, odds.  Calculating odds on the fly is the most basic tool of poker.  The ability to calculate and judge odds at a table is as important to Doyle Brunson as the ability to putt is to Tiger Woods.  You can have all the God-given talent in the world and if you can’t calculate odds, somebody’s going home with your money.

If I were sitting at a poker table deciding whether to call a large bet I would need to know three things to make my decision.  First I need to know what I stand to win.  That’s pretty simple math, I just take what’s in the pot and add the amount of my opponent’s bet.  I also need to know how much I stand to lose.  Also a simple calculation, I stand to lose the amount required to call.  The third thing I need to know is my chances of winning.  This is where the math gets slightly harder.  Without digressing into a dissertation on calculating hand odds, I have to know how many cards are left that will help me versus the total number of cards left in the deck.  That gives me a ratio and the rest of the decision making process is about comparing ratios and making the most profitable choice consistently.

“How in the name of all things holy does this relate to politics and John McCain?” you ask.  Simple, voting for McCain is about odds.  When we decide what to do in the upcoming election we face a similar choice to that of a poker player.  Our hand is not made, we don’t have a known quantity.  What we do have are choices that have different potential consequences.  We can stay home and not vote at all.  The Democrat will be elected and our only real hope is to minimize the damage they can do in four years by using our minority in both houses of Congress.  Given the lack of Republican political power that seems like a very bad option with very long odds to me.  Given what I know about the penchant Republicans have for “getting along,” it looks even worse.  Or we can vote for McCain and hope that his election buys us enough time to develop the next true leader of the conservative movement.  This strategy has the added benefit of creating a crisis within the Democratic Party.  Having a supposed dream slate of candidates and still managing to lose a Presidential election that was all but in the bag would have devastating consequences on the party from the top down.  This is the electoral equivalent of firing back over the top and forcing your opponent to make the hard decision.  You may not have a hand you like, but the other guy has shown weakness and if you win, he will have a very hard time recovering both psychologically and in terms of the game. 

Unlike poker players, however, the one option we don’t have is folding.  At the table, you can simply leave the hand and survive long enough to try again later.  It’s more often than not the best choice in the circumstances I’ve described, but unfortunately electoral politics has no muck.  One of the candidates left in this race will be the next President.  The only play we have left is to back the best odds, and right now John McCain, like it or not, is the best of a bad field.

I’m actually a rather cautious poker player by nature, but I’ve played enough to know that when you’ve run out of other options, aggression is usually the best strategy.  So I say we not only back the man who may betray us at any turn, I say we do it with gusto.  The answer to Michelle’s question is “no.”  I don’t trust him to make good judicial appointments, but I do trust the two he’s running against to make bad ones.