Before we start arguing about the presidential election, we should all admit that this is a year of remarkably weak candidates. The weaknesses of Sen. Kerry and President Bush are obvious to everyone but their most fanatical supporters. (But no, that's wrong. Neither one of them has fanatical supporters. Each has fanatical allies, motivated by fanatical opposition to the other party.) The weaknesses of the Libertarian candidate and the various Green candidates would also be evident to all, if anyone but fanatical supporters paid any attention to them. I am a registered Libertarian. When the Libertarian Party finds a candidate who has the stature of such previous candidates as John Hospers, Ed Clark, and Ron Paul, I will joyously vote Libertarian. In the meantime, I don't plan to waste my vote. I will cheerfully, if not joyously, cast it for President Bush.

At this point, some of my libertarian friends are shouting, "Wait! What do you mean by 'waste'? You don't even understand what it means to vote!" Their argument is this. The chances are minuscule that any individual vote will actually affect the outcome of the election. Under these circumstances, voting is simply an expression of one's political ideology, and it would be sheer waste for any libertarian to vote for a major-party candidate.

It's an interesting argument, although I'm not sure I grasp its metaphysics, especially the implication that nobody's vote matters in practical terms. I don't know how close the election will be, but I don't intend to surrender my chance of affecting it; and I know that if more people felt as I do, there would be a much greater chance that the result would be affected. I intend to vote for the least imperfect candidate who is actually able to win. In other words, I am going to cast my ballot for the scorned and derided Lesser of the Two Evils.

Scorn and deride all you want; "able to win" is still an important criterion. If it weren't, I'd vote for Milton Friedman, and a hundred million other voters would go out and vote for their own private idea of the perfect candidate. But that's not what elections have ever been like. They are contests between two or three people, not a hundred million; and since 1796, none of the live options has ever been ideal. Even Thomas Jefferson was far from a perfect libertarian candidate, but if I had to choose between Jefferson and his opponent Aaron Burr, I'd vote for Jefferson, every time. In 1940, the two meaningful candidates were Franklin Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, two very bad candidates, from a libertarian point of view. But the country would have been a lot better off if Willkie had won and Roosevelt had been denied a third term. You may think it's morally wrong to give your sanction to the Lesser of the Two Evils, but are you willing to accept the responsibility of helping the Greater of the Two Evils to win?

George Bush is a big-spending modern liberal. So is John Kerry. Yet there are two vital differences between them.

One is character. In the early seventies, Kerry functioned as a Communist stooge. He enjoyed the experience, and he has never gotten over it. He is a meddler and a blowhard, a self-anointed apostle of uplift for the unwashed masses. Like all such people, he is ambitious and grasping, with a mile-wide mean streak. Bush, by contrast, is simply a small-town Rotarian, a man of completely conventional ideas and motives, pleasant and friendly in a canine way. The most interesting thing about him is the fact that he is a reformed alcoholic who has managed not to become self-righteous about reform. Case closed on the question of character.

The other difference is party affiliation, and it is much more important. When you elect a president, especially a personally weak president, such as Bush is and Kerry would undoubtedly be, you are electing not just him but his party, with its million heads and tens of million claws.

Now, I would prefer to vote for a party that endorses and practices an isolationist foreign policy and a domestic policy devoted to shrinking the government's economic, social, moral, medical, and educational involvements. The Republican Party endorses smaller government but has recently done little, or worse than little, to transform its faith into works. The Democratic Party has, for the past three generations, struggled to attain precisely the opposite aims. This is the party that wants to nationalize health care. This is the party that vows to roll back Bush's tax cuts. This is the party that is so devoted to racial quotas that it rigorously imposes them even in the supposedly democratic selection of delegates to its own conventions. This is the party that uses Al Sharpton as one of its public faces. Even its antiwar positions amount to mere timeserving. It applauded President Clinton's multitude of wars, it insisted that President Bush (re)invade Haiti and called him a racist when he resisted doing so, and it has now selected a presidential candidate who is proud to say he voted for (as well as against) the war in Iraq and would be better than Bush at winning it.

No thanks. Of the two real alternatives, I prefer the party that isn't pledged to every crackpot political idea that is current in America today and hasn't compiled an excellent record of turning crackpot ideas into laws. It's not for nothing that the Republicans are called the stupid party and the Democrats are called the evil one. Satan knows how to get things done.

Therefore, I and my household, as the Bible says, are voting for the stupid party. And I will vote for it with a measure of pride, knowing that votes for Bush will be interpreted as rebukes to the vileness of the Democrats' four-year campaign to paint him as a fascist drug addict energized solely by a desire to rape the environment, enrich the Halliburton Corporation, and return African-Americans to slavery. Within living memory, there has never been a national political campaign so frothing with hate. Lyndon Johnson's henchmen, as politically debauched as they were, never led public chants of "Don't drink the Goldwater!"; yet we have seen the unreproved indecency of the Rev. Mr. Jackson's "Keep out the Bushes!" Even Joe McCarthy never pulled the stunt that Dan Rather tried to pull on Bush, waving palpably forged documents accusing a man of 30-year-old misdemeanors, then responding to criticism by saying that the story was true, whether the evidence was forged or not.

Or don't you believe that CBS News is part of the Democratic campaign? The very basis of the Democratic Party, and of the institutional opposition to libertarian ideas in America, is the alliance of a partisan political elite with its front groups and minions in the media, the arts, the clergy, the foundations, the schools, the "civil rights" aristocracy, and the other parts of civil society that it has corrupted with its venom, obscurantism, and outright lies. If decency and candor are ever to be restored to our national political life, this unholy alliance, currently led by John Kerry, must be decisively rebuked. To give it an electoral victory, with the intention of expressing libertarian views, would be a tragically ironic mistake.