Over at the Vokokh Conspiracy, blogger and law professor David Bernstein tries to make a libertarian case for John McCain. His arguments fail to sway me -- how anyone who cares about foreign policy or civil liberties can vote Republican this year is beyond me -- but he had one paragraph I loved, so I'll quote it here:
"I think there are two great moral issues in American politics today, the disastrous War on Drugs, and free trade. The War on Drugs, for now, is hopeless. Free trade though, is not. Over the past couple of decades, a (statistical) billion people, more or less, have moved from poverty to the local middle-class because of globalization and free trade, far more people than have been aided by all the liberal do-goodism Obama, or any else, has or can muster. McCain is the candidate of free trade; Obama is the candidate of "fair trade," which in practice means protectionism. McCain's policies have the potential to rescue tens of millions of additional people from poverty, who will stay mired there under Obama. (And I always had at least one soft spot for Bill Clinton, for standing up to the unions and the know nothing wing of his party in favor of free trade and NAFTA)."
At the same blog, Ilya Somin makes an interesting case for divided government, but not enough to overcome the nausea the McCain/Palin ticket induces in me.