Presidential Scouting Reports

A libertarian fan's guide to the World Series of politics

Nick Gillespie, Jesse Walker & David Weigel from the June 2007 issue

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Pros: Whatever Edwards could offer libertarians—and it won’t be much—depends on which version of him shows up to the game. The late ’90s Edwards was a bland centrist, basically a hunkier Bill Clinton. The Edwards of this campaign, so far, is the most anti–Iraq war of the leading candidates and has apologized for voting for the war in 2003.

Cons: Edwards did more than vote for the war: He co-sponsored Joe Lieberman’s hawkish Iraq War Resolution, the one that empowered the president to make war without coming back to Congress. His big idea in 2004 was an expanded domestic surveillance agency within the Department of Homeland Security. He avowedly believes that government needs to combat economic inequality with redistribution, taxes, entitlement spending, and protectionism, and the extent of those beliefs has grown since his first Senate bid.

Bottom Line: The only thing connecting Edwards’ policy switches has been popularity. He was for war when it was popular, against it after it became unpopular.

Bill Richardson

Vitals: A former State Department go-fer and Democratic Party hack, Richardson won a U.S. House seat from New Mexico in 1982. He held it until Bill Clinton nominated him to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; after 18 months he was promoted to secretary of energy. In 2002 he won New Mexico’s governorship, winning re-election in a 2006 landslide.

Pros: The only governor in the Democratic race is also one of the country’s most fiscally tightfisted executives. Richardson cut New Mexico’s income tax from 8.2 percent to 4.9 percent, halved the capital gains tax, and eliminated the gross receipts tax. He frequently and explicitly draws a link between lower taxes and economic growth, something rare in a national Democratic politician. He not only supports the right to carry a concealed weapon but holds a concealed-carry permit himself. He sometimes skirts close to libertarianism on other issues, endorsing charter schools (but not vouchers) and medical marijuana (but not decriminalization).

Cons: Richardson has signed a smoking ban and is warming to the idea of a drug offender registry. There’s also the lingering issue of his behavior during the espionage investigation of Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, when he may have leaked damaging information about Lee, using his power as a cabinet secretary to try an innocent man in the press.

Bottom Line: Of all the Democratic candidates, Richardson would be most likely to cut taxes. And after Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), he’s the most open to reforming drug laws. If the party really wants to make a play for the “libertarian West,” it’ll nominate Richardson.

Joe Biden

Vitals: Biden is one of that elite club of politicians who have spent more of their lives inside the Senate than outside it. Since being elected in 1972 he has chaired two committees (Judiciary and Foreign Relations), shot down one Supreme Court nominee (Robert Bork), and installed pioneering hair plugs that, by 2005, started to look almost life-like. His 1988 run for president hit the reef after he cribbed a speech from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, turning “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to go to university?” into the slightly less evocative “Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family to go to a university?”

Pros: He was an early and eloquent critic of torture in the war on terror, delivering a strong defense of the Geneva Conventions: “We have these treaties so when Americans are captured they are not tortured. That’s the reason in case anybody forgets it.” He has entertainment value too,
with the loosest lips of any 2008 candidate, whether talking about his enemies (“Every single person out there that is of any consequence knows the vice president doesn’t know what he’s talking about”) or his friends (Barack Obama is “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”).

Cons: Before he ran for president in 1988, Biden made his bones as one of the Senate’s most rabid drug warriors. He sponsored a 1979 bill allowing prosecutors to use RICO statutes to go after drug dealers and requested a General Accounting Office report in the early 1980s that gave federal prosecutors the leeway they needed to use sweeping asset forfeiture laws in drug cases. He also was chief sponsor of the 1982 Senate drug bill that gave essentially limitless powers to the Department of Justice. And he sponsored the 2004 RAVE Act, which turned bottled water and glow sticks into “drug paraphernalia.”

Bottom Line: If—make that when—Biden loses badly, he could start hosting his own talk show. There’d be no need for guests!

Chris Dodd

Vitals: A New England liberal lion who looks like he’d be happier debating Daniel Webster than Dennis Kucinich, Dodd is the son of another longtime Connecticut senator, Thomas Joseph Dodd. He schlepped around the Dominican Republic in the Peace Corps before winning his own House seat in 1974, then in 1980 a seat in the Senate, where he has played second banana—to Lowell Weicker, then to Joe Lieberman—ever since.