Matthew Roberts may be correct that Chuck Baldwin and his Constitution Party represent the Right in a paradigmatic sense, but what is less demonstrable is whether it would pay for readers of this website to vote for Baldwin as a presidential candidate. The point to be stressed is that our side will not be able to elect a candidate this year, which is being politically dominated by the neocon and liberal Left. The best we can reasonably hope to do is make a statement that the media will have to notice. This would only be possible if we could get behind a presidential candidate who is likely to poll a substantial number of votes. The Pennsylvania primaries indicated how large this number may have to be. Although Ron Paul received 16% in the Republican race here, the media carefully concealed these startling results. I say ‘startling’ not only because Congressman Paul had by then left the race but also because the neocon propaganda apparatus had pulled out all stops to get captive minds to register as Democrats, in order to vote for the ?pro-Israeli? Hillary against the ‘pro-Palestinian’ Obama.

Clearly the best outcome in this year of poor choices would be if the neocon mouthpiece McCain went down to an ignominious defeat. But this would only be useful if his rightwing opposition contributed significantly to this outcome. Since the political-media establishment has no interest in reminding the public that McCain faces non-authorized opposition (except for isolated weirdoes) on the right, it would be necessary to find a candidate, who is both identifiably rightwing and who can poll large numbers of votes. The CP meets the first test, but it has failed repeatedly on the second. Moreover, there is no reason to assume that it would do better this year than in the past, when its portion of the national vote was well under 1%.