Who do you want for the GOP ticket in ’08 Dr. Cowen?

So asks Chris in the comments.  Right now I don’t have favored candidates in any of the parties, either here or abroad.  Furthermore I will deliberately resist developing such favorites, and insofar as I can’t help having them, I won’t tell you who they are.  I don’t mean this in a libertarian "they are all crooks" sort of way, though that may be true.  It still really does matter who governs, and so we should take this process of candidate evaluation seriously.  It is just that I don’t want to be part of it.

As a blogger rather than decision-maker I am allowed my small space for protest.  I wish to protest our excessive tendency to choose sides with one group of people rather than another.  I wish to protest excess partisanship, and in particular excess partisanship motivated by the construction of "imaginary good" and "imaginary bad" political personalities.

As biological creatures we are programmed to respond to faces, voices, names, and identities.  We praise them, follow them, condemn them, figure out what side they are on, just like good ol’ East African Plains Apes.  Who is not excited to see a President of the United States attending a Wizards game in a nearby box?  I know I was, and I didn’t even vote for him.  Chimps will give up bananas, just to be able to gaze at photos of high-status other chimps.

I would like for my posts on MR to be one small space where these necessary but ignoble human tendencies toward personalization are resisted and sometimes even criticized.  I am biased, just as you are.  But for aesthetic reasons I would rather my biases be played out in the realm of ideas, rather than directed at people.  And at the margin, some of you should be just a little more like me.