The law also doubles the fines that can be levied against people engaging in illegal file sharing, and makes it easier to seize property (such as computers) used to violate copyrights. Lawyers and activists in the free culture movement, which opposes overly restrictive copyright laws, managed to excise some other provisions from the original bill, including a measure that would have handed over any damages won in the government's lawsuits to the record industry.
Don't expect an Obama administration to eliminate the new post. The Democrats have close ties to the entertainment industry, so there's little reason to believe they'll be any less aggressive about enforcing IP law.
The post Czar Wars appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Congress requires that just under a quarter of all government contracts go to small businesses. According to an investigation by The Washington Post, at least $5 billion of the $89 billion in government contracts allegedly awarded to small businesses in 2007 went to entities that don't fit that description.
The Small Business Administration (SBA) claims the errors came not from chicanery but from "miscodings" based on bad data. Since the federal government kept records of 6 million contract actions in 2007, the SBA maintains, the mistakes identified by the Post represent a very low error rate and suggest that the agency was actually on the ball. "The Post's report, taken along with other credible analyses," acting SBA Administrator Sandy K. Baruah said in a statement, "should lay to rest once and for all the unsubstantiated or uninformed claim that scores of billions in small business contracts is purposely diverted to large businesses."
The post How Big Is Small? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>They had been waiting outside the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., for up to 45 minutes, ready to greet the long-shot Republican presidential candidate as he arrived for an interview with George Stephanopoulos, chief Washington correspondent for ABC News. The famous interviewer had walked into the hotel minutes earlier, smiling at the crowd, but was barely noticed. The obscure congressman was greeted with shouts, cheers, and a bunch of hand-held cameras.
I asked Paul about reports that his rival Sen. John McCain—then cratering in the polls—might take public financing. "He needs it," Paul said, chuckling. "We don't need it!"
Inside the hotel the politician known as "Dr. No" told Stephanopoulos his campaign had raised $2.4 million in the second quarter, quadrupling his numbers from the quarter before. "We're on the upslope," said Paul. "We feel good about what's happening."
Stephanopoulos asked just one tough question: "What's success for you in this campaign?"
"What's success?" Paul pondered this. "Well, to win, is one, is the goal—"
"That's not going to happen."
Paul was taken aback. "Do you know for—absolute? Are you willing to bet your—every cent in your pocket for that?"
"Yes."
"You are. OK. I thought so when I ran for Congress." The congressman laughed and moved on.
Paul's life was changing dramatically. Within six months he would raise another $25 million for his campaign, giving him a larger war chest than McCain at the time. Within ayear he would draw thousands of supporters to a "Revolution March" in Washington, leading up to a massive "Rally for the Republic" just minutes from the site of the Republican National Convention. By the end of 2008, Ron Paul would be a bona fide national political figure: author of a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, subject of two quickie biographies, a frequent guest on cable news shows.
But 2008 would end with Stephanopoulos' question hanging. What was success? Having failed to win the Republican nomination, did Paul's candidacy affect the big-government direction of the GOP? Did it improve the fortunes of a more ideologically compatible political grouping, the Libertarian Party, which nominated Paul for president in 1988 and still counts him as a lifetime member?
Optimism for the Paul campaign peaked in December 2007 and faded by February 2008. Optimism for Libertarian candidate Bob Barr's effort to pick up the Paul banner peaked in May and was in tatters by September. By November, mutual recriminations from both camps put libertarians in a familiar political position: bitterly blaming one another for their ongoing marginalization. "Paul set the liberty movement back a decade by encouraging people to stay in the GOP," Barr Communications Director Shane Cory told me just days before the election. Paul Communications Director Jesse Benton described Barr's campaign as "disappointing" after the election. "They got more and more desperate."
Paul launched his presidential bid on January 11, 2007. In the first three months of the year, he raised only $640,000 and hired a skeletal staff. The momentum shift came on May 15, 2007, when Paul butted heads with Rudy Giuliani in the second GOP presidential debate. Pressed on whether he thought the United States could still follow a "humble foreign policy" after 9/11, Paul tried to explain the theory of blowback. "Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us?" he asked. "They attack us because we've been over there." A sputtering Giuliani demanded that Paul "withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that." The South Carolina crowd roared. Paul refused to back down, and was heavily booed.
"A lot of people thought that would be our death knell," Benton recalls. Back in D.C., a Giuliani-supporting peer (Paul won't say who) thanked the Texas congressman for "helping my guy out." But Paul benefited more than Giuliani, receiving a surge of donations and media profiles. "It really rocketed our campaign forward," says Benton. Of the $2.4 million three-month fund raising haul that Paul told Stephanopoulos about, nearly all of it came in the weeks after the debate.
The new energy around Paul siphoned attention away from the Libertarian Party. Eleven days before the South Carolina debate, minor celebrity oddsmaker Wayne Allyn Root had announced a bid for the party's nomination, entering a field that included medical marijuana activist Steve Kubby, Massachusetts party chair George Phillies, and software entrepreneur Michael Jingozian. But the only libertarian the press wanted to cover was Paul.
"While Ron was running there was no interest in anyone else in the libertarian movement," Root says. "Not for me, not for anyone in the L.P. The oxygen was sucked out of the room." On July 17, Kubby promised to leave the race and encourage the L.P. to run no candidate if Paul won the GOP nomination.
The excitement around the "rEVOLution" reached a crescendo on November 5 with an online "money bomb" that raised $4.2 million on the anniversary of Guy Fawkes' attempt to blow up the British Parliament. Paul had been winning nonbinding Republican straw polls in Iowa, Alabama, New York, and elsewhere, and was surging into double digits in early primary state polling.
The Libertarian National Committee chose to ride the wave. On the first weekend in December, the party's southeast regional representative proposed a resolution that "in the event that Republican primary voters select a candidate other than Congressman Paul in February of 2008, the Libertarian National Committee urges Congressman Ron Paul to seek the presidential nomination of the Libertarian Party." The motion was adopted unanimously. The representative behind the resolution: former Georgia congressman Bob Barr.
On December 16, the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, a second Paul money bomb raised $6 million. The Libertarian Party's 1988 nominee was about to raise more funds than any other Republican in the year's final quarter. The political aspirations ofmany libertarians were focused on a Republican.
The first signal that those dreams would fall short came in the January 3, 2008 Iowa caucuses, where a Paul campaign hoping to finish third with results in the high teens finished fifth with 10 percent. The candidate then belatedly threw himself into New Hampshire, hoping the Live Free or Die state, with its famously independent streak, would reward the only anti-war Republican in the field.
No such luck. Paul came in fifth again on January 8, with a paltry 8 percent of the vote, and the campaign never fully recovered.
"The fact is that our candidate was never sure about running," argues Justine Lam, Paul's e-media coordinator. "People in the grassroots blamed the campaign for Ron not spending more time in New Hampshire. I understand them, but that was the candidate's decision. He wasn't putting all his effort into it."
Although Paul finished an impressive second place in Nevada on January 19, the campaign failed to craft a strategy for the 22-state Super Tuesday on February 5, Benton says. Instead of concentrating on proportional representation states, where a second or third place showing could win delegates, they frittered away their time.
"We showed we could do well in caucuses," Benton says, "and if we had devoted more resources to them we could have won five or six states, like Montana, North Dakota, Alaska. We dedicated too many resources to closed Republican primaries. They were too hard to win, and we probably should have realized that."
Two days later, chief McCain rival Mitt Romney appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., and officially suspended his campaign. Hours later, Ron Paul walked onto the same stage, after an introduction by Bob Barr. "We now have the gold standard for being a conservative," Barr told the enthusiastic CPAC crowd, "and it's Dr. Ron Paul!" A rumor buzzed around the room: Barr was ready to take the baton for his own run.
But for months, nothing happened. Instead, the energy of the Paul campaign just slowly dissipated. A neoconservative Republican named Chris Peden had filed against Paul for his House seat in Texas and was claiming to anyone who would listen that he had Paul on the ropes. On February 11—the day before primaries in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia—Paul released a perplexing YouTube message acknowledging that the March 4 House primary "might change my schedule a little bit" and that his presidential campaign was scaling down. "To tell you that Peden played no factor would not be honest," Benton says. Still, Paul ended up routing the challenger by 41 points.
Other politicians were beginning to angle after Paul's voters. On March 18, Democratic presidential candidate and former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel told me, "If Ron Paul could raise all that money with his libertarian message, you know, I think I could raise a lot of money." Eight days later Gravel entered the Libertarian race. The same week, party mainstay Mary Ruwart joined the fight. Meanwhile, friends of Barr were making calls to see if the 1990s drug warrior could win the nomination of a party with many members who found him unacceptable.
Justine Lam considers this the period when the great libertarian momentum of 2008 was lost. "Ron didn't drop out in March, when he should have dropped out," she says. While Paul was focusing on his House seat, presidential campaign chairman Kent Snyder proposed that the national effort be officially dissolved and a new organization launched, to focus on educating voters, pushing libertarian legislation, lobbying members of Congress, and recruiting candidates for Congress. On June 12, a week after the final three primaries in Montana, South Dakota, and New Mexico netted him three second-place finishes and zero delegates, Paul finally launched the Campaign for Liberty, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.
By that point, Barr had won the Libertarian nomination in a narrow victory over Ruwart. Root, another '90s Republican, defeated Kubby for the vice presidential nomination, a reward for a last-minute endorsement that put Barr over the top. The Barr/Root ticket hoped to pick up not just Paul's voters but as many of his activists and donors as possible.
One stubborn thorn in Barr's side was the Constitution Party bid of the paleoconservative pastor Chuck Baldwin. Baldwin had defeated gadfly Alan Keyes for the C.P. nomination in large part by hinting he could get Paul's endorsement. Party founder Howard Phillips had commended Baldwin to delegates by suggesting that Paul's $35 million in fund raising were "resources we can look to if we nominate a candidate who has been a friend of Ron Paul." Over the summer, Baldwin and Barr campaigned for different halves of the Paul movement. While Baldwin inveighed against the New World Order at the D.C. Revolution March with speakers such as Phillips and leftist writer Naomi Wolf, Barr and Root campaigned at Freedom Fest, a Las Vegas gathering with speakers such as Steve Forbes and Christopher Hitchens.
"The tone from the Barr campaign had been getting more and more exasperated," remembers Benton. "They thought they'd swoop in and take Ron's supporters, hit 5 percent in the polls, get into the debates."
On September 10, Paul invited Barr and Baldwin, along with Green nominee Cynthia McKinney and independent Ralph Nader, to an event at the National Press Club where the candidates would sign a four-pronged statement of principles on foreign policy, privacy, the deficit, and the Federal Reserve, and win Paul's endorsement—all of them, equally. Barr signed the statement but pulled out of the press conference, scheduling his own event nearby to criticize Paul for splitting up the "pro-freedom" vote. Paul was furious. Twelve days later he endorsed Baldwin.
It would be easy to overstate the impact of the falling-out. "I'd like to think Dr. Paul doing what he did probably pumped a few hundred thousand extra votes into the third parties," speculates Benton. "But I don't think he had a tremendous effect." Barr campaign manager Russ Verney is more blunt: "Look what Paul did for Baldwin. Not much." Baldwin ended up getting about as many votes (186,457) as the Constitution Party's first candidate, Howard Phillips, 12 years earlier; Barr won 511,529 votes, the highest Libertarian total since 1980 but only the fourth highest in percentage terms. Paul, by contrast, won 1.2 million votes in the Republican primaries.
The year ended with George Stephanopoulos' question still hanging. What, for Ron Paul in 2008, was success? Whatever it was, the Libertarian Party could not capture it.
David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.
The post Where Did It All Go Wrong? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Interactive Media Entertainment Gaming Association filed a brief arguing that seizing the names would violate the Constitution. The state insists its aims are more modest. "Our goal has never been owning those domain names," said Jennifer Brislin, a spokesman for Kentucky's Justice and Public Safety Cabinet. "We're looking for the owners of the domain names to pay damages to Kentucky. The domain names are just the door to online casinos that are taking money from the state."
The governor's rhetoric isn't so modest. Introducing the lawsuit, Beshear said that bold action was needed because terrorists might benefit from online gambling. "This," he declared, "isa threat to national security."
On October 16, a Franklin Circuit judge allowed the state's seizure case to continue and set up a hearing for November 17.
The post Kentucky Reign appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>But the Democrats survived. In fact, they came back faster than all but the most optimistic liberals expected. In January 2009, they are returning to Washington stronger than at any time since the Great Society Congress of 1965-67.
Washington's libertarian activists and think tankers are still trying to wrap their brains around the new reality. Today you can sort them into two rough categories. There are the Bargainers, the ones who believe they can do business with President Barack Obama. And there are the Battlers, the ones who believe Obama can-and should-be impeded while the Republican Party is rebuilt into a genuinely liberty-minded organization.
"The upside of the Obama victory," says Matt Kibbe, president of the pro-market group FreedomWorks, "is that it draws, more clearly, the lines between the good guys and the bad guys. It gives us an especially good idea of who the bad guys are." I.e., the new administration.
A D.C. libertarian's status as a Bargainer or a Battler largely depends on what issue he or she works on every day. Economic libertarians such as Kibbe, the people who spent the Bush era pushing unsuccessfully for market-based health care reform and private Social Security accounts, expect four to eight years in an even deeper wilderness. "I watched the Social Security campaign unravel from the inside," Kibbe remembers. Now there will be no "inside."
Obama has some advisers who sympathize with libertarians, many of whom he befriended at Harvard and the University of Chicago. These include Jeff Liebman, one of Obama's top economic advisers, who has been attacked by liberals for statements supporting Social Security privatization and tax cuts. "I know Jeff Liebman well," says Michael Tanner, a Cato Institute analyst who fought for private Social Security accounts in 2005, but "Obama ran a campaign that precludes Social Security reform."
The Battlers are not necessarily apocalyptic. A Democratic victory has been predicted for so long that they grew acclimated to the idea. Gallows-humor jokes about the Obama presidency were part of the city's conversation for months before the election. But in the closing weeks the news just got worse and worse.
A Democratic Congress became a Democratic majority of at least 254 seats in the House and 57 seats in the Senate. A financial crisis triggered a $700 billion bailout and widespread nationalization of the banking sector, engineered by Republicans. Some form of national health insurance seemed increasingly likely as the political terrain grew more favorable. The ailing Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) has made it clear that he wants a health care bill-"the cause of my life"-to pass.
"We'll all have to suffer for him," says Tanner. "In Egypt, didn't they bury the pharaohs with their slaves?"
The Battlers' fear is tempered by their dismal experiences with Bush. The 43rd president's second term began with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, but a post-election push toward the long-held libertarian dream of privatizing Social Security was nearly dead on arrival. As worried as he is about Obama, Tanner now admits that he was "dead wrong about Bush." White House staff members "met with us but didn't listen," he says. "A lot of meetings were held just to soothe us. The Clinton administration, whether you believe it or not, treated us better."
Myron Ebell, an environmental analyst at the pro-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, had an even tougher time with the Bush White House. "We won't have allies in the Obama administration," he says, "but we didn't have allies in the Bush administration either. Look at Christine Todd Whitman at the EPA. [Former Energy Secretary] Spencer Abraham didn't know much about energy. [Former Treasury Secretary] Paul O'Neill supported cap and trade [a plan to raise emissions standards while offering companies tradeable emissions credits], and so does [Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson." While Ebell expects worse from Obama, he feared the possibility of a John McCain presidency even more.
Other libertarians, including many Bargainers, never even went through a period of expecting anything from the Bush White House. Chief among them are anti-drug war activists. The Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), which spent both the Clinton and Bush years in a defensive crouch, is cautiously optimistic about the Obama administration.
"Obama has spoken out about ending DEA meddling in states where some marijuana use is legal," MPP President Rob Kampia says. "The generic Democratic member of Congress is better on our issues than the generic Republican member of Congress. Look at the votes on our bills."
Kampia has been burned before. Both Clinton and Bush reportedly experimented with drugs, but both became fierce drug warriors. "What makes Obama better than them," Kampia says, "is that he's not a liar. He hasn't lied about his personal use, or his stance on DEA raids. He's shown intellectual honesty about issues, while other politicians squirmed away, to their detriment."
Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, is not himself a libertarian, but he litigates for one of the issues many conservatives and libertarians still agree on: ending government-mandated racial preferences. He has successes to point to from the Bush years. The 2003 Supreme Court cases Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger narrowed the scope of preferences, and the addition of Samuel Alito to the high court increased its skepticism on this count. In Clegg's view, Obama can actually do what Bush and his Justice Department never dared to: attack the underpinnings of affirmative action itself.
"I can imagine a Nixon-goes-to-China moment on racial preferences," Clegg says. "The very fact that Americans have elected a black president should raise serious questions among the people who supported race preferences in the past as to what extent they can still be defended." Clegg points out that Obama has said his daughters are so privileged now that they shouldn't benefit from affirmative action.
Jameel Jaffer spent considerably more time than Clegg fighting the Bush administration. The director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project and the lead plaintiffs' counsel in the national security letter case Doe v. Ashcroft and several other abuse-of-power lawsuits, Jaffer has spent his legal career trying to roll back executive power. He is not yet sure of what to expect from Obama.
"No president is going to be as eager to wield the power that Bush arrogated to the executive branch," Jaffer says. "Executive unilateralism was a signature idea of his administration." The problem is that Obama isn't so easy to read. After saying he'd vote against it, he voted for a bill that legalized warrantless monitoring of international communications involving people in the United States, previously prohibited by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. "It was by far the most sweeping surveillance statute enacted by the Democratic Congress," Jaffer says. "We think it's unconstitutional. I hope a lot of leaders come to recognize that they made a mistake."
With the Bush administration ending in a frenzy of disappointment, most libertarians don't expect much more luck with Obama, outside of a few issues involving drug policy and executive power. The debate in Washington now is on how much effort to spend trying to remake the Republican Party. "We're fighting for the soul of the GOP," says Tanner, who adds that libertarians need to look beyond the party, at other reformers, other populists, people who won over Americans as much as Bush has lost them. "We need to seize that Ross Perot mantle of fighting against these guys."
David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.
The post Beat the New Boss appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Exhibit A: World Net Daily, which had been the de facto control room for Birtherism, has rushed right along to the Blagojevich scandal. I count seven articles about Blagojevich on the web mag's front page compared to five about the birth conspiracy, and the ratio was much higher on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Exhibit B: Roger Bredow, who organized a tiny vigil outside the Supreme Court to pray that they'd disqualify Obama, immediately jumped onto the Blagojevich story.
These are good things, as no small number of conservatives were fretting about the rise of something like the old Vince Foster and Ron Brown and "Clinton Chronicles" conspiracies of the 1990s—freakish stuff that whipped up talk radio but made the opposition to Democrats look crazy.
One problem: if this conspiracy is losing steam, it's still popular with the Constitution Party and with elements of the Ron Paul r3VOLution. Last week, staffers for Paul told me that they were inundated with calls about the birth conspiracy, egged on by talk radio hosts who helpfully informed listeners that "Dr. Paul cares about the Constitution." This week I see that the Constitution Party (whose candidate for president this year was endorsed by Paul) is "challenging Barack Obama to release his birth certificate." Take it, national chairman Jim Clymer!
If a non-citizen can be given a free pass to the presidency than what's to say someone with no allegiance and who harbors ill will toward the country won't someday assume office?
What, indeed?
Maybe Ron Paul doesn't have to worry about this stuff. After all, what's the danger in people who associate themselves with his name and causes engaging in ethnically-charged wingnuttery?
The post Stay Classy, Constitution Party appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Throughout the intercepted conversations, Blagojevich also allegedly spent significant time weighing the option of appointing himself to the open Senate seat and expressed a variety of reasons for doing so, including: frustration at being "stuck" as governor; a belief that he will be able to obtain greater resources if he is indicted as a sitting Senator as opposed to a sitting governor; a desire to remake his image in consideration of a possible run for President in 2016; avoiding impeachment by the Illinois legislature; making corporate contacts that would be of value to him after leaving public office; facilitating his wife's employment as a lobbyist; and generating speaking fees should he decide to leave public office.
In the earliest intercepted conversation about the Senate seat described in the affidavit, Blagojevich told Deputy Governor A on November 3 that if he is not going to get anything of value for the open seat, then he will take it for himself: "if . . . they're not going to offer anything of any value, then I might just take it." Later that day, speaking to Advisor A, Blagojevich said: "I'm going to keep this Senate option for me a real possibility, you know, and therefore I can drive a hard bargain." He added later that the seat "is a [expletive] valuable thing, you just don't give it away for nothing."
Over the next couple of days – Election Day and the day after – Blagojevich was captured discussing with Deputy Governor A whether he could obtain a cabinet position, such as Secretary of Health and Human Services or the Department of Energy or various ambassadorships. In a conversation with Harris on November 4, Blagojevich analogized his situation to that of a sports agent shopping a potential free agent to the highest bidder. The day after the election, Harris allegedly suggested to Blagojevich that the President-elect could make him the head of a private foundation.
Between Blagojevich, Ted Stevens, and Wiliam Jefferson, this has been a pretty bad year for criminals in public office.
The post If the Governor Does It, That Means It Is Not Illegal appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Blacks are back. In August, Derek won a seat on the Palm Beach, Florida Republican state committee, which led to fulsome praise from David Duke.
Derek, being the son of Stormfront's own Don Black shows what so many of us should be doing. If he can do it with the notoriety of his father and the notoriety of another rather notorious relation in his life, me, in a place of the demographics of West Palm Beach, it should show to all of you that there is no reason why there shouldn't be thousands of us elected to office.
I think this is some of the greatest news in a long, long time.
The local Republicans groped around for a loophole and found one in Black's failure to sign a GOP loyalty oath. On Wednesday he showed up to take his slot on the committee (wearing the stupid hat he wore in the Ron Paul photo and refusing to take it off) and was shut out. Black whined to the Palm Beach Post about how he won in the first place:
"I talked about immigration," he said. "I talked about the presidential campaign. That was the biggest issue. This was back in August, July. Most of them weren't happy with (Sen. John) McCain turning out to be their candidate. It did come up a few times that I didn't like McCain."
The support of white supremacists for Ron Paul was a frustrating sideshow in 2007 and early 2008. It seemed unfair to slam Paul, as some blogs did, for merely being photographed with the Blacks. I met hundreds of Paul supporters, not all of them white, almost none of them racist. But I did see Stormfront's Jamie Kelso in the Ron Paul tent at the Ames, Iowa Straw Poll last summer, blogging excitedly about the rEVOLution, so it was't a surprise that racists tried to co-opt the Paul message. The Palm Beach Republicans have the right idea about how to handle these people: keep them as far away from real politics and other people as possible.
The post Return of the Blacks appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Theory of Money and Credit by Ludwig von Mises. The book is a 1912 study of monetary theory. It brought monetary theory into the mainstream of economic analysis. It is important reading for these troubled times.
I never believed that Joe was an "undecided voter." He was clearly an free market conservative who thought Social Security was a "joke."
The post I Plumb, Therefore I Am appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Ruffini, 30, is a veteran online political operative who worked for President Bush before heading the RNC's Internet department and advising Rudy Giuliani. "Maybe I'm being too optimistic here," he says, "but I think this period we're going through right now will be seen as a reawakening of not just the rightroots but also the Republican Party."
"The Republican Party cannot reboot if it's viewed only as a party of old, crusty white guys," adds Finn, who started a Washington-based online consulting firm with Ruffini last summer.
And the user-generated "Ideas" section of the site is… a jungle of comments by Ron Paul supporters. These would be the Ron Paul supporters whom RedState.com's Erick Erickson purged from his site, because clearly they were the only thing standing between the GOP and utter electoral triumph. The top three ideas are from Paul supporters, the fourth is the Fair Tax, the fifth and sixth are from Paul supporters, the seventh is the Fair Tax.
Ruffini, more than a lot of conservative bloggy leaders, had a strange respect for Paul supporters. (Tech-crazed Republican National Committee candidate Saul Anuzis famously tried to keep Paul out of Republican debates. He went on to lead his party in Michigan to its worst drubbing by Democrats since 1964.) It's clear that Paul grassroots activists like Trevor Lyman had huge breakthroughs this year. But the big Paul post-election venture, the Campaign for Liberty, has been criticized by Justine Lam, Paul's e-coordinator during the presidential campaign.
"I was very skeptical at first," Lam told me last week, "and I still am. Without Kent Snyder's direction and vision [longtime Paul friend and ideas man Snyder died this year], this can degrade into one of Ron's organizations from the past. Look at FREE—it's nothing. All they do is self-publish Ron's book, and not even at high quality. These organizations became salary collection devices for people close to Ron Paul. They didn't become real forces like the Institute for Justice, for example, that are able to create change. They just exist." Lam criticized the CfL for its "long, rambling" early e-mails—while it's improved since launch it's still not a group that has anything to teach Republicans.
So the Paul people are out there, and online… but they are either organized ineffectively or treated like a virus that takes over "real" organizations.
The post The Future is a 73-Year Old Man appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>We are sitting in the coffee nook at the Mayflower Hotel, the aged Washington, D.C. institution where, some 76 years ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote his first inaugural address. We are not yet talking about the campaign for president that Barr finished in fourth place with 512,000-odd votes. Barr is talking about his habit of downing a high-single-digit number of espressos every day, and how hard this was before Starbucks came along.
"Most countries I'd lived in had cultures of much heavier coffee," Barr explains. "In South America you've got café con leche. In the Middle East you need a knife and fork to drink the coffee. It was hard to get strong coffee here—I was delighted when Starbucks made it big."
Barr is in Washington to speak with fellow alumni of Georgetown Law School at a meeting of the Federalist Society, and to build up the client list for Liberty Strategies, his consulting firm. "I absented myself from producing income for about eight months," Barr says. "I'm a working stiff." Hence the coffee, and hence a packed schedule that's meant to introduce Barr to the people who can get him back in the black.
Over the course of a six-month campaign, Barr spent more time than he might have liked dealing with intra-Libertarian squabbling, lower-than-expected fundraising numbers, and what his running mate Wayne Allyn Root called "the ghost of Ron Paul"—persistent media attention on the indecisive Republican candidate who, contrary to some expectations, did not endorse the Libertarian ticket. Over coffee, Barr hashed out how he got the nomination, what went right and wrong, and what he's doing now.
reason: What did you get out of your stint in the Libertarian National Committee?
Bob Barr: From my standpoint, it gave me an opportunity I've not had before to learn the personalities in the Libertarian Party, and to learn the structure of the party. It gave me the opportunity to assure at least some Libertarians that I wasn't a Trojan horse. I wasn't a Republican trying to use the Libertarian Party to further the Republican agenda, or some such nonsense. I think I accomplished that working with the LNC.
reason: There are still LP members who aren't satisfied—less than there were in May, but various voices on the web who make this argument.
Barr: In any political movement you're never going to be able to satisfy everybody. Reagan didn't. I really don't think that anybody with a straight face could make that argument now. I really don't. Which does not mean that everybody in the Libertarian Party loves Bob Barr. I doubt that that's the case. I do think that over the course of the campaign, the people that we worked with, the issues that we presented, I think gave lie to any lingering doubts that I was not a Libertarian.
reason: In December of last year, you proposed, and the LNC passed, a resolution asking Ron Paul to drop his GOP bid and run as the Libertarian candidate. Was that more for attention, or was it a real attempt to get him to run?
Barr: I meant it exactly how it was worded. I saw at that point, and I don't think anyone saw otherwise, that Ron was not going to get the Republican nomination. He had, in fact, built up a significant amount of public attention, a persona as a libertarian with a small l, and my thought was, "Let's make a serious effort here, an honest effort to get him formally back into party and take advantage of what he's done." At the time, had he taken advantage of it, it would have been a significant boost for him and the Libertarian Party.
reason: You had joined the LNC saying you would not run for president. When did you privately decide to make the race?
Barr: I introduced Ron Paul at CPAC. His speech came a few hours after Mitt Romney left the Republican race, which made it much clearer that McCain was going to win the nomination. For whatever reason that's when I started being approached very consistently by a lot of Libertarians about throwing my hat in the ring.
reason: Why did it take two months for you start an exploratory committee and another month to announce? I've heard two explanations. One was the financial consideration of losing your clients, which you've already talked about. The other explanation I heard was that you could not risk running and losing the nomination.
Barr: I was never assured to win the nomination. Some people might have thought that. I didn't. I knew it would be a battle right down to the wire, which it was. I didn't get into it because I was sure I would win. I ran because I thought it was important to do it. Most of the time between February and May, I was working through the personal side of the run—talking to my wife, my son Derek.
reason: Throughout that period, though, and really up to the Republican convention, the big mainstream media story about Libertarians was what Ron Paul would do. Michael Badnarik, the party's 2004 nominee, told me in May that he was still waiting to see if Paul could win the Republican nomination before he supported the LP again. What was the effect of all this?
Barr: It was a not-insignificant frustration, let's say. It was somewhat difficult to convince people of the fact that we had a real timeline here. Certain things had to start being done in order to have the chance for the impact I knew we could have. Every day that went by with people sitting around for something to happen, which common sense told you was not going to happen, was a day lost. It was very frustrating.
reason: You were polling well through the summer, but you took a hit after John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. What was the impact of that on your campaign?
Barr: I don't think that Palin really mattered that much. Initially, perhaps, when her name was first announced and there was all of this unbridled excitement over Sarah Palin, I think there was some concern that it would stanch the flow of Republicans ditching the ticket because of McCain's liberal credentials. But by the time all the dust settled on election day, I think a lot of them realized that she was not the great savoir for the conservative movement that she was put forward as nationally, but I don't think that really mattered all that much. What killed us in the end is that the election came down to a referendum on Barack Obama, period. Nothing else seemed to matter to people.
reason: What did matter? Campaign funds? At the convention, Russ Verney told me that he hoped to raise $30 million, and the campaign eventually raised about $1.2 million.
Barr: If certain things had happened that we expected to happen early on, like gaining access to certain lists very quickly, I think we could have gotten there. But those lists turned out to be not available, unfortunately, and that prevented us early to turn over and over again into significant fundraising. We didn't get that seed money early on that we anticipated. We realistically anticipated it. We didn't sit around say 'it would be nice to have all that money.'"
reason: Was one of these Ron Paul's fundraising list?
Barr: All I can say is that it appeared very realistic that we would have a list that let us raise a large amount of seed money that we could build on. And that didn't happen.
reason: What effect did your own running mate, Wayne Allyn Root, have on the ticket?
Barr: I enjoyed having Wayne on the ticket very much. I enjoy him personally very much. I mean, he's a very gregarious person. I enjoy his family as well. I think he brought a lot of energy to the campaign, a new dimension to the campaign, and a business perspective that got him booked on Fox Business and CNBC with sufficient regularity to have a little breakthrough there.
reason: Did you expect Root to be more of a fundraising asset?
Barr: Everything in a campaign doesn't always work out like you hoped. What can I say?
reason: You and Root both spoke frequently about bringing conservatives into the Libertarian Party from the GOP. Are you still focused on that?
Barr: First things first. I'm not going to bring anybody into an organization unless that organization is ready for it, has the groundwork laid for it, has a degree of receptivity to make it productive to bring them in. There's a lot of work that has to be done to move the party down the road it started on under [former executive director] Shane Cory into a truly professional viable political entity. There are still those in the Libertarian Party that do not want to go down that road, and there are some in the party that will have to make an important decision about that: whether they want to build themselves into a professional viable political party, or whether they don't.
If so, we've got a tremendous opportunity to increase the size, power, influence of the party. The Republican Party is in absolute disarray. And I think it'll get worse for them. I don't even think they've even reached bottom yet. If the Libertarian Party were at the point I'd like to see it at, we could shine in this atmosphere. We'd be on the news, media would seek us out, to provide the counterbalance that no one else is capable of doing.
reason: After this year, and all of the tension and different timelines and goals of your campaign and the Paul campaign, is the libertarian movement stronger or is it more divided?
Barr: Absolutely, it's stronger. Absolutely. The way I look at it, it isn't as if Ron Paul built this foundation over here and our campaign built this one over here, and they're discreet components. We're building one foundation. What Ron Paul did was a tremendous benefit to the Libertarian movement in making people aware of the movement, of our philosophy, of elements people don't usually hear about in a coherent way. The monetary system, and so forth, which Ron talks about very eloquently.
reason: What mistakes were made this year that the LP has to avoid making again?
Barr: We have to not look backwards. If we are serious about being a real political party we have to set political goals, educate people, have a consistent message, organize at all levels, and look for opportunities. You don't wait for opportunities to be handed to you. Where's the Libertarian Party in these debates about the incoming administration? It needs to be there. But what do I know?
David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.
The post Bob Barr Looks Back appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>I have no problem with Eric Holder. I know him. I disagreed with him on some issues when he was with the Clinton administration and I was in the Congress… but, to me, Eric is somewhat different than the Clinton administration holdovers getting some of the other big posts. Being a lawyer and working at the Department of Justice—he's not a Clintonista policy type. Yes, he was associated with the Clinton administration as the U.S. attorney here in D.C, and then as deputy attorney general, but I wouldn't call him a Clintonista.
This is striking because Barr was one of the congressmen grilling Holder over the Marc Rich pardon in early 2001. Fast forward to 1:49 in this video.
Barr has largely moved on from that, and is even more positive about Holder than the leaders of the Drug Policy Alliance and Marijuana Policy Project. Barr was more concerned and surprised at Obama's apparent selection of Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State. "I think that is a lose-lose for Obama," Barr said. "I do not understand why he's doing that unless there's something going on behind the scenes."
The post Bob Barr on Eric Holder appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Waxman's takeover of the Energy and Commerce caps a quarter-century rivalry between him and Dingell. While they agree on many issues — most notably health care — the two men have clashed since the 1980s over environmental regulations. Waxman, who leans to the left of his party, is an advocate of strong clean air protections and stringent fuel-efficiency and energy conservation measures.
Dingell has been a fierce protector of the auto industry, which is crucial to the economy of his home state of Michigan.
Waxman's victory gives him control of one of the most powerful committees in Congress, with jurisdiction that touches almost every corner of domestic policy, from energy to health care to telecommunications.
You can't overstate how much liberals had come to resent Dingell. Glenn Hurowitz's 2007 rundown of the saga is a good place to start.
In a nod to Dingell, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi excluded an increase in vehicle fuel efficiency—despite the fact that the Senate included such an increase in its energy bill and more than 200 House co-sponsors have publicly backed the measure. It was a notable gap in a bill that otherwise included aggressive measures to tackle the climate crisis and secure energy independence, like diverting $16 billion in subsidies from oil and gas companies towards clean energy…
Earlier this summer, Dingell floated an energy proposal that could almost have come out of Dick Cheney's energy task force. Not only did it propose massive subsidies for dirt fossil fuels like coal and prohibit increases in automobile fuel efficiency, it took a somewhat gratuitous swipe at Pelosi's home state by revoking California's more than 30-year-old authority to set its own cleaner air standards.
Reason contributing editor Julian Sanchez has more on Waxman's views of intellectual property, part of his new fiefdom.
The post I For One Welcome Our New Mustachioed Overlords appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>I think history has already forgotten Battlin' Bernie Kerik, the laughably corrupt and mobbed-up cop whom Rudy Giuliani commended to George W. Bush as a great replacement for Ridge. Kerik's nomination caught fire like styrofoam in a microwave, and we as a nation got the first clue that Giuliani had been replaced at some point in 2001-2004 by a strange, bald cyborg that needed to recharge batteries by making inopportune phone calls to its "wife."
Anyway, the worst idea proferred by Chertoff has been the national ID card, the slow decline and sputter-out of which I wrote about earlier this year. One of the governors who helped nail down the coffin lid on REAL ID was… Janet Napolitano.
On Tuesday, Gov. Janet Napolitano signed a measure, House Bill 2677, barring Arizona's compliance with the Real ID program. In so doing, she called it an unfunded federal mandate that would stick states such as Arizona with a multibillion-dollar bill for the cost to develop and implement the series of new fraud-proof identification cards.
…
In a letter explaining her support for HB 2677, Napolitano cited a White House estimate that Real ID would cost at least $4 billion to implement. But thus far, she said, the federal government has only appropriated $90 million to help Arizona and other states offset those costs."My support of the Real ID Act is, and has always been, contingent upon adequate federal funding," Napolitano wrote Tuesday. "Absent that, the Real ID Act becomes just another unfunded federal mandate."
The implication is that Napolitano would favor a national ID if it could be funded. What's the likelihood of it being funded soon? Not very high. So Napolitano seems, first and foremost, like an effective manager who understands immigration policy and has been a bulwark against the crab barrel of restrictionist crazies in her state. Not the worst pick Obama could make.
The post Dammit, Janet, I Love You appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In late September, a White House economist arrived at Norquist's salon to sell a proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street firms whose investments in worthless mortgage-backed securities had sparked an international financial crisis. In a tense meeting, the president's emissary was turned into a piñata. Pro-market activists and economists with decades of experience battered him with questions, asking whether the administration was putting an end to capitalism as we knew it. The White House's economist responded coolly. Did these people really want to do nothing in the face of the great 2008 meltdown?
In the end, what fiscal conservatives wanted didn't turn out to matter much. As the Wall Street vapors scrambled every aspect of the 2008 presidential campaign and of George W. Bush's final days in office, no one was as angry as D.C.'s dwindling number of libertarians. They pointed out that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's plan involved a massive takeover of private firms and (in its original draft) unchecked executive power. They invoked previous examples of government meddling worsening crises, in the 1930s and the '70s. But as Washington faced the greatest economic panic in a generation, adherents of free markets were spectators in a debate between moderate interventionists and radical re-regulators.
Libertarians proposed alternatives, such as privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and letting the market find a bottom. They were shouting into the dark. Instead the feds imposed a two-week ban on short-selling stock and engineered the largest economic intervention since Nixon's wage and price controls. "The market is not functioning properly," warned President Bush. "The government's top economic experts warn that, without immediate action by Congress, America could slip into a financial panic and a distressing scenario would unfold."
People who should have been primed for such a crisis had little voice in the matter. Take the Republican Study Committee (RSC), the fiscally conservative caucus within the House of Representatives. The RSC regularly responds to pork-filled budgets with thriftier alternatives. As Wall Street shattered, the RSC was confronted with a spending package equal to a million earmarks.
On September 18, the committee sent a public letter to the White House opposing any Wall Street bailout because "the risk to taxpayers and to the long-term future health of our economy remain just too great to justify." The next day, RSC Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) put out a tentative, grasping statement on the proposed bailout that decried the idea without ruling it out completely: "My mind remains open."
The next day the draft of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's plan was released, with a giant price tag and a two-year ban on oversight of Treasury's activity. Former RSC Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.), who attracts TV cameras like lightbulbs attract moths, rejected "the largest corporate bailout in American history."
And then all went practically silent. Fiscal conservatives dared not come out swinging against a proposal whose effects they could not predict, offered by a White House they had trusted more often than not.
On September 22 at 5 p.m., the RSC met to strategize further. Who was opposed to the bailout, full stop? Who had alternatives to propose? According to staff who attended the meeting, the mood was somber and the opposition was not uniform. The next morning, when the full Republican conference met, there was even less unity. According to Arizona Rep. Jeff Flake, only about half the party's members opposed a bailout.
On September 23, a dozen members of the RSC called a press conference in the House to sell their suggestions. These fit on one piece of paper, and included a two-year suspension of the capital gains tax, full privatization of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae "over a reasonable time period," and a suspension of the "mark-to-market" regulations that forced banks to value assets at zero if they couldn't be sold at that precise moment.
At the press conference, Republicans proposed fixes with little chance of making it into a bailout bill. Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.) suggested that business tax cuts could attract investors to our shores, bringing in more revenue from "profits left stranded overseas." Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), a dogged supporter of more oil drilling, claimed that the policies he favored would, conveniently, pull us out of the crisis. Mike Pence was the only legislator at the events who ruled out any vote for the bailout. He tried, in vain, to challenge the premise. "There are those in the public debate," he said, "who have said that we must act now. The last time I heard that, I was on a used-car lot."
"I would amend that statement," added Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.). "The last time I saw the phrase 'act now,' it was advertising one of those time-share condo deals that lock you in after a free trial period."
"Did you try it?" asked a reporter.
"No!" Shadegg laughed. That summed up the fiscal conservatives' effort: outraged gallows humor with no expectation of success.
Members of the RSC got a louder megaphone for their ideas when GOP presidential candidate John McCain flew to Washington to tacitly support them. The stunt drew some attention to the House Republicans' proposals, and a coalition of Republicans and liberal Democrats defeated the bailout in an initial vote. But the suggestions themselves didn't challenge the central proposition of the bailout: that the government, in a crisis, needed to nationalize whole chunks of the finance industry. The minority of Republicans who spoke up were accused of being Chicken Littles stoking false fears about the "end of capitalism."
Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.), an Ayn Rand devotee who made his name voting against earmarks, said he would reluctantly support Paulson's bailout. "People are struggling with it around here like you can't believe," he explained. "This proposal is anathema to everything I believe. I've voted against million-dollar bills, and here's a $700 billion one. But to do nothing—that really threatens a massive expansion of government."
Campbell says he was willing to make the sacrifice, just this once, because he believed the crisis was comparable to 1929. "If John Q. Lunchbucket doesn't understand this stuff, and waits in line for a block to get into his bank, and then is told 'we don't have your money,' he will respond to any proposal to prevent that in the future. Any populist who says 'I'll make sure these guys never get your money again' will have his ear."
But who's to say that this scenario hasn't already taken place? If libertarians had won the argument on the economy—if they were as influential as social democratic writers such as Naomi Klein and Thomas Frank claim they are—they would have dominated the argument about the causes of the crisis and the damage intervention would wreak. That didn't happen. A bill that failed on September 29 was re-written in the Senate, then passed the House on October 3. Among the congressmen who changed their votes was Shadegg, the man who had compared the bailout to a time-share ripoff.
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), with a media profile burnished by his presidential campaign, appeared on CNN many times over the weeks of the crisis to explain why the Federal Reserve was to blame. But Paul was lonelier than ever. No other Republican was willing to suggest that avoiding a bailout and risking "a bad year," as he put it, would forestall several more years of economic central planning. They accepted the crisis narrative and attempted to legislate around the margins.
"This does ensure that President Bush will have a legacy," laughed Competitive Enterprise Institute president Fred Smith after that Americans for Tax Reform meeting. "It's a legacy that will set back the concept of economic liberty by a century. The free market, for all intents and purposes, is dead in America."
David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.
The post Atlas Blinked appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>U.S. Attorney Eric H. Holder Jr. said in an interview that he is considering not only prosecuting more marijuana cases but also asking the D.C. Council to enact stiffer penalties for the sale and use of marijuana.
"We have too long taken the view that what we would term to be minor crimes are not important," Holder said, referring to current attitudes toward marijuana use and other offenses such as panhandling.
Now, people arrested in the District and charged with distributing marijuana, even large quantities, face only misdemeanor charges, a standard that has sparked repeated complaints by police officers.
He also told the Washington Post that "the District could learn from New York's 'zero-tolerance' policy." I wonder what people in the drug policy reform movement, who have so far been (relatively) optimistic about Obama, think of this.
(Hat tip: Ben Masel.)
The post Obama's Attorney General on Drugs appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A little while ago I chatted with erstwhile Libertarian vice presidential candidate Wayne Allyn Root, to get a grapple on where the LP is going after 2008. Root didn't figure much into Brian Doherty's excellent rundown of the LP campaign, so I wanted to get his perspective.
"I just wrapped up another little political discussion," said Root. "I was talking to a guy who's run nine campaigns in Las Vegas, and won eight of them. He thinks I'm an absolute favorite for mayor of Las Vegas in 2011. And keep in mind, it's a non-partisan race, and the incumbent is term-limited, even though he's been inspired by Michael Bloomberg to try and change that."
Root was "obviously disappointed" with how the Barr/Root presidential campaign ended, but the only specific criticism he made was the decision to "stiff Ron Paul" at his September 10 press conference and offer him the LP vice presidential slot. "If you want him to get behind you, offer him the top spot on the ticket. If you want to snub him, offer him the number two spot. I mean, why would he ever take that, this candidate who'd won a million votes?"
That's as negative as he wanted to get. "I'm a team player," he said. He concentrated on his game plan for the next four years.
– "Pick up the Ron Paul torch." Root is reaching out to RP's old base of supporters, like moneybomb originator Trevor Lyman, and appearing on Lyman's Break the Matrix site whenever he can.
– "Become Rush Limbaugh." Root's book The Conscience of a Libertarian will hit shelves in May, and he's proud of the subtitle: "Empowering the citizen revolution, with God, guns, gambling, school choice and tax cuts."
– "Find the next David Koch." Root's convinced, and he's not alone, that the secret of the LP's success in the 1980 campaign was the vice presidential candidacy of deep-pocketed libertarian philanthropist David Koch. "I will spent the next four years with one goal in mind: Finding a billionaire running mate. Believe me when I tell you I will find him, or her. All of a sudden I'll be on TV day and night, just like Ross Perot, and suddenly we'll get 19 million votes, just like Ross Perot."
The post Wayne's World, Party Time, Excellent appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>I don't get it. Why is it so hard for the Democrats to kick Holy Joe Lieberman to the curb that he has so dearly earned? There are some reasons at the link (they're not afraid of him using his committee chairmanship to attack Obama, the president-elect wanetd them to forgive and forget), but are they the last people on earth who realize that Lieberman is one of the true scrubs of American politics, an unliked and unlikeable scold who can only elicit applause at John Hagee's church and the occasional PMRC reunion tours?
Let's turn the clock back a little. When Lieberman endorsed John McCain, it was supposed to help McCain court a few sought-after groups of voters. First, Jewish voters who might have a problem with a candidate who wanted to meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and, oh yeah, was named "Barack Hussein Obama." Second, independents. Third, voters in Lieberman's own state of Connecticut, a swing state as recently as 1992, and New Hampshire, a swing state every year since then.
How'd it go?
Jewish voters: John Kerry won them, 74-25 percent. Obama won them by more, 78-21.
Independents: Kerry won them, 49-48 percent. Obama won them by more, 52-44.
Connecticut and New Hampshire: Kerry won them, 55-44 and 50-49. Obama won them by more, 61-38 and 54-45. Obama's victories in both states were the biggest for any Democrat since LBJ, and I believe he's the first Democrat to every sweep every county in New Hampshire.
Senators protecting their own, nothing new. Senators protecting such an obvious loser… that's more unusual, isn't it?
UPDATE: There's some murmuring in the comments about why any reasonoid should care about this. Well, two years ago, when it looked like the video game-banner and drug warrior from Connecticut had lost his Senate seat, we fired off 21 guns. A Lieberman-free Senate would be a better Senate, insofar as such a thing might exist. It's been amusing/irritating to see Lieberman heralded, in his post-Democratic career, as a force for bipartisanship and independence. He's not: He's a full-scale nanny stater who gets squeamish when people behave in ways he doesn't like. Watching his McCain endorsement backfire or fall flat should have killed Lieberman's image once and for all, but apparently that image has George Romero and Lucio Fulci qualities.
The post Holy Joe Lieberman Was Resurrected After Three Days appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The post Weigel vs. Lilly: Endgame appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The real threat to the Republican Party is something we saw a lot of this past election cycle: libertarianism masked as conservatism. And it threatens to not only split the Republican Party, but render it as irrelevant as the Whig Party.
Huckabee trains a lot of fire on the Club for Growth, who had another tough election cycle, with 2006 victors Rep. Tim Walberg (MI) and Rep. Bill Sali (ID) going down in the Obama wave, joined by prize recruit Andy Harris in Maryland's first district. (Harris beat incumbent Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, a fellow Republican, in the primary, and watched Gilchrest push past him to elect Democrat Frank Kratovil.) Perhaps the Club's biggest success was its pre-emptive demolition job on Huckabee. The governor responds by accusing them and other libertarians of believing in "purity of politics first; people are on their own." In a chapter titled "Let Them Buy Stocks!" he accuses "libertarian faux-cons" of driving "the party even further away from its base of the hard-working middle class." He names names.
You can see the growing influence of faux-cons in the 2008 election cycle from the so-called Ron Paul Revolution to the economics-only conservatism reflected by some of the supporters of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani.
But he backs off on Paul.
Before I get singed by hot and angry mail from Ron Paul disciples, I want to be emphatic in stating my sincere respect for Congressman Paul. I was convinced that he at least had genuine convictions and was willing to stand by them and on them no matter what the audience–a lot more than I could say for some of the candidates who could change positions as easily as Cher can change costumes in one of her many farewell tours.
Subtext: "Go to hell, Mitt Romney. No, not the one you believe in. The one I believe in."
One reason Huckabee might be softer on Paul is the role that rEVOLutionaries played in Huckabee's West Virginia primary victory. West Virginia Republicans select their winner at a party member-only convention. As I reported on Feb. 5, Paul backers, who loathed the bullying and arrogant Romney faction, cut a deal with Huckabee backers to combine their votes and edge out Romney. All the news networks reported that John McCain supporters had made the deal, but Huckabee sets the record straight and credits the "horse-trading" of the Paul people for his win.
The post Mike Huckabee vs. the Libertarians. Sorry, "Faux-Cons." appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Does that mean there was a nationwide groundswell of support for Ron Paul? Sort of. We know what happened in New Hampshire, the state that's crunched the write-in numbers the fastest.
Hillary Clinton, the Democrat who finished first in New Hampshire's presidential primary last year, also took first among all the write-in candidates in last week's general election. She garnered 1,124 write-in votes. Clinton's husband, former president Bill Clinton, also had his supporters, claiming 13 write-in votes from around the state.
Libertarians also made a strong showing in write-in ballots. Libertarian icon and Texas Republican Rep. Paul snagged 1,092 write-in votes. Chuck Baldwin, the Constitution Party nominee, snagged 226 votes.
All year I argued that the Ron Paul rEVOLution had more dead-enders than the Hillary Clinton electorate. But it turns out that, in the one state where we have data, their numbers were pretty comparable.
UPDATE: A caveat about Ralph Nader: His better vote totals are largely a function of his making it on more state ballots than he did in 2004 and 1996. In swing states where he's always been on the ballot (and where he focused his attention), his numbers are cratering. Nader won 28,087 votes in Florida this year, down from 32,971 in 2004 and (famously) 97,488 in 2000. In Colorado, Nader won 12,542 votes, down marginally from 12,718 in 2004, way down from 91,434 in 2000, and down even from the 25,070 votes he won in his 1996 non-campaign (when he allowed his name to be placed on ballots but refused to stump on the trail). California is Nader's burial ground: he won 237,016 votes there in 1996, 418,707 votes in 2000, and missed the ballot in 2004. But this year he got back on and won only 95,609 votes, even though liberal voters had no doubts about Obama winning the state.
It's hard to escape the conclusion that Nader would have been better off skipping this race, as far as it concerns his reputation. (Beyond the paltry vote totals, all that'll make his obituary is him accusing Obama of "acting white" and being an "Uncle Tom.") That's also true for McKinney, but probably not true for Barr, Baldwin, and Paul.
The post So Let It Be Written In, So Let It Be Done appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last week, Campaign for Liberty press guy and Ron Paul grandson-in-law Jesse Benton was driving to a constituent event with his boss and the subject of 2012 came up.
"He hasn't closed out the idea of another run," said Benton today. "We have some time to decide whether he runs again, or whether he gets behind somebody else. But we don't have tons of time. By the middle of 2009, the decision needs to be made."
Benton isn't pushing Paul one way or the other. "I could get behind either decision, but it needs to be made in the next six months or so," he said. "One thing we learned is that those voters in New Hampshire and Iowa expect, to see their candidates early and often." Paul entered the 2008 primaries in January 2007, about 11 months and two weeks before the Iowa caucuses.
I asked about the rumor that former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson might jump into the race (unclear in which party yet). "If he were to decide that he wanted to do that, he'd be a great guy to take the reins. But I don't think that what Dr. Paul captured was 100 percent transferable to anyone else. I think the Bob Barr campaign assumed that and it didn't pan out."
Would Paul run as a Republican again or as a Libertarian? "We try not to ever deal in absolutes in politics," Benton said carefully. "But he would be very likely to be running as a Republican again." It's not just that "working within the system" gets more exposure for a candidate. It's that several Republican primary states include the caveat that candidates cannot run in their primaries and go third party if they lose. "To be frank, I got tired of the 'third party' question getting asked time after time, and I know that Ron did too."
Paul is almost exactly a year older than John McCain, and turned 73 in August.
The post Ron Paul 2012? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Over the past two days, Boone spoke at events where he said that the wind project is having trouble getting financing because of the credit crunch.
He was also quoted saying that falling prices of natural gas, used in power plants, are making his wind project less economical.
Another possible factor (albeit smaller) is the defeat of California's Proposition 10, a plan to provide rebates that was heavily funded by Pickens because of the potential windfall to his business. reason was critical of that set-up early this year, and Pickens spent a lot of his time dealing with criticism in a conference call I participated in last month. But the biggest problem I had with Pickens' year-long campaign was his populist angle that our purchase of oil from other countries was "the largest wealth transfer in the history of mankind." Steven Milloy put it best.
Contrary to Pickens' demagoguery, "wealth transfer" is a term generally used in the context of estate planning, where money is simply "gifted" to heirs.
Our purchases of foreign oil, in contrast, are more reasonably known as "trade" — and trade is good.
Americans are not simply petro-junkies who mainline crude oil for the masochistic high of watching gas pump numbers spin faster. We produce goods and services with imported oil more than any other people on this planet.
The Pickens TV and PR campaign was one of the most sophisticated I've ever seen: not only did he get Al Gore and the presidential candidates to give him cover, I remember an Ohio voter who said she didn't like McCain or Obama so she'd write in Pickens. (Pickens' gravelly Texas accent was a big help, I think: as Ross Perot could tell you, there's something more politically attractive about a plains tycoon than, say, a Silicon Valley billionaire.) But I'm not weeping that his $57 million campaign isn't getting him what he wanted this year.
The post The Snake Oil Well, Running Dry appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>With president-elect Barack Obama stepping into the White House, with expanded Democratic majorities in Congress, with public sentiment moving against free markets in the midst of the economic crisis, and with Virgina voters supporting a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1964–now what? What does this mean for freedom and the free market principles that conservatives and libertarians fight for? Will this be the opportunity for the Republican Party to rebuild and come back to their roots of a smaller government? What lessons can be learned from this election and how do conservatives and libertarians move forward?
I'm stepping in for Evans-Novak reporter Tim Carney, so my remarks will be mostly exit poll and other data-driven with some suggestions of what libertarians in the GOP should do. The answer, obviously, is to ban gay marriage everywhere and ask Democrats hard questions then upload the responses to YouTube. Also, to run Sarah Palin for president every four years.
The post Weigel: Live and In 3-D appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The post Weigel vs. Lilly: The Saga Continues appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Look at Virginia. The first number is how much of the vote John McCain scored in this district. The second number is what George W. Bush scored four years ago, when he easily defeated John Kerry statewide. I've bolded the districts where the representative is now from the party whose presidential candidate lost the district. (VA-02, VA-05, and VA-11 all replaced Republicans with Democrats this year.)
VA-01: Rob Wittman (R)—51% (60%)
VA-02: Glenn Nye (D)—49% (58%)
VA-03: Bobby Scott (D)—24% (33%)
VA-04: Randy Forbes (R)—49% (57%)
VA-05: Tom Perriello (D)—51% (56%)
VA-06: Bob Goodlatte (R)—57% (63%)
VA-07: Eric Cantor (R)—53% (61%)
VA-08: Jim Moran (D)—30% (35%)
VA-09: Rick Boucher (D)—59% (59%)
VA-10: Frank Wolf (R)—46% (55%)
VA-11: Gerry Connelly (D)—42% (50%)
See what happened? Only two of the state's six Democrats are in McCain-voting districts, one of them in a squeaker (Perriello) and one whose southwest district is so safe for him that the GOP didn't even field a challenger (Boucher.) Two of the state's five Republicans are now in Obama-voting districts, even though their districts voted for Bush last time. And two of the three Democrats elected this year, Connelly and Nye, are in districts that swung from Bush to Obama.
Keep in mind, all of this happened in a state whose Republican governor and legislature started the decade by gerrymandering the districts for maximum GOP strength. Bush carried nine of Virginia's 11 districts twice. McCain carried only five of them. Once we learn the full results from states like Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana, Iowa and Wisconsin, places where Obama dramatically outperformed in the suburbs, I think we'll learn that most congressional districts went blue at the presidential level. In 2004, 255 congressional districts had gone red.
The post I Don't Know What to Do Now That Pink Has Turned to Blue appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Mark Begich (D)—132,196
Ted Stevens (R)—131,382
Bob Bird (AI)—11,315
Fredrick Haase (Lib)—2086
Others—1858
Markos "Daily Kos" Moulitsas, who's been following the numbers closely, claims that the remaining ballots come from Democratic-leaning districts. Nate "538" Silver has more. If Begich even builds a 0.51 percent lead over Stevens (he's at a 0.29 percent lead now), he escapes a recount and takes over the seat. This would, among other things, close Sarah Palin's escape hatch out of Alaskan politics. It would also lock down 58 Democratic Senate seats (counting Joe Lieberman), with the Minnesota Senate race looking better for them every day. (Democrat Al Franken has gained hundreds of votes as the state recounts ballots, and the Republicans have shown their panic with lawsuits and op-eds trying to cast doubt on the count.)
UPDATE: From the Anchorage Daily News:
Republican Party of Alaska Chairman Randy Ruedrich wasn't giving up hope for Stevens, saying Begich's advantage could lessen as the state finishes counting the early votes.
He said remaining mail-in absentee votes "should be much more favorable to Republicans" than the ones counted so far.
But state Democratic Party spokeswoman Bethany Lesser said Begich workers are cautiously optimistic the lead would hold. She noted that the election district based in Nome, which covers Northern and Western Alaska, has not counted any of its absentee ballots yet. Begich beat Stevens in that area on Election Day, just as he did throughout Bush Alaska, a traditional Stevens stronghold that relies on federal appropriations.
Begich also won the voting on all four of Alaska's military installations on Election Day. That makes the Begich campaign optimistic about overseas absentee ballots from service members.
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]]>Treasury is unlikely to conduct any auctions to purchase bad loans and other troubled assets—the original intention of the $700 billion rescue plan. Instead, Treasury is expected to continue focusing its firepower on injecting capital directly into the financial sector, these people said.
There is good news:
Before launching its $250 billion capital-purchase program last month, Treasury toyed with requiring banks to raise matching funds alongside any government investment, but it thought that might discourage some firms from participating. It also worried that firms would not be able to raise private money in the current market environment.
Instead, Treasury structured its investment in a way that it believed would encourage firms to eventually raise private funds. But Treasury officials now think market conditions may have improved enough that companies could raise private capital.
The post The Incredible Bendable Bailout appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he's the one who proposed this national security force. I'm just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism. That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist.
There are so many points in there at which Broun could have shut up. Maybe the phrase "exactly what Hitler did"? Maybe the totally baseless claim that Obama's mulled-over "civilian security force"–still not a good idea, by the way–would be some sort of Chavista unit "answering to him"? This extra excerpt of the Broun interview is illuminating.
Broun theorized that after Obama creates this national police force he'll ban gun ownership.
"We can't be lulled into complacency," Broun said. "You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I'm not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I'm saying is there is the potential."
That's another fringe position, but it's one egged on by the NRA, which warned gun owners that a President Obama would literally rip their firearms from their warm, living hands.
Jake Tapper, in that last link, calls this "Obama Derangement Syndrome." I think this is some of the first anti-Obama wackadoodlry that isn't specific to the candidate. This was the language used to scare the fringe right about the last Democratic president, too. It's incredible dumb and off-putting, not to mention wrong.
UPDATE: The Angry Optimist says:
If someone wants to make the comparison of pre-Reich Germany and Obama, Mr. Weigel, it is incumbent on you to say why it is dumb.
OK. First, the Democrats didn't seize power through violence and threats against their enemies. I'm sure someone can point me to isolated stories of Obama supporters bullying McCain supporters, but I doubt any conservative are nervous about stepping outside without their Democratic Party membership cards. Second, the Schutzstaffel (which Broun appears to be invoking) was created as a personal guard service for Hitler. Obama is proposing a new civilian force that he'd command as he commands every branch of the military.
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]]>Barr/Root got the 2nd highest raw vote total in the 37 year history of LP, we did it in perhaps the worst environment for Third Parties ever (because of the hype, fear, and excitement over Obama)… and we did it on a virtually non-existent campaign budget. Obama won with almost $700 million. We did it with no money. Only nonstop media appearances… and IDEAS!
In all prior elections, the LP VP candidates were literaly MIA and invisible for the entire campaign. They received zero media attention. In 2008 I changed all that with 800+ media appearances, including FOX News Channel nonstop in the last month of the campaign. What I accomplished is remarkable for a third party VP candidate. That is a SMALL sign of things to come.
I campaigned for over a year with one theme at every event, every media appearance, every debate, every speech, every conversation with voters: that Barry Goldwater had great ideas, yet still lost in a landslide. Reagan took the same ideas and won in two landslides. The only difference was his ability to communicate, educate and motivate voters. I'm a Reagan/Obama for the LP and the Ron Paul freedom movement. Obama's election proves a good communicator can change everything.
Now instead of running for President for a short period of time, or a spur-of-the-minute idea. I have four years to hit the ground running. Four years of nonstop media appearances. Four years of serious fundraising. Four years of contrasting my ideas for smaller government with those of our President Barack Obama, my college classmate, my Libertarian book out with one of the world's biggest publishers in May, and serious interest from major radio syndicators for my own national political radio show called (what else?) ROOT FOR AMERICA.
A little while later I heard from Steve Kubby, the medical marijuana activist who narrowly lost the party's VP nomination to Root and beseeched LP "radicals" not to bolt the party. (Given how few people voted for the breakaway Boston Tea/Personal Choice Party, I think Kubby succeeded.) Kubby has put out a public statement on this year's LP campaign.
The bottom line for this ticket is that they promised $30 million in campaign contributions and a popular vote of 5%. Instead, they raised just over $1 million and failed to break 0.5% of the vote, landing them a 4th place finish for LP presidential campaigns. Barr and Root received a record amount of media coverage and they are celebrities in their own right, but it didn't work out the way we were told it would.
So much for media and celebrity.
The Barr/Root campaign was an honest test of media and celebrity and the results are clear. Media and celebrity is not the answer. Our ideas and our ability to communicate those ideas, is what sets us apart and earns us serious attention. The hunger for new ideas has never been greater and our ideas, about limited government, ending personal income taxes and upholding personal freedom are more mainstream than ever.
If we dilute our message and rely upon celebrity, it gets us nothing but empty rhetoric. On the other hand, if we transmit a pure signal and only a handful get it, but they totally and earnestly get it, then that is revolutionary.
I think the poor showing of Ralph Nader—on more ballots than ever, but registering his lowest vote totals ever in most states—is the best evidence that this was just a bad third party year, as Root suggests. But there were two other directions the LP could have gone in. One minor change would have been the selection of Kubby instead of Root as VP. Kubby would have soothed most of the people who went online and agitated against Barr/Root, and given the campaign an extra media hook (the drug warrior and the drug war victim!), but it's unlikely Kubby would have done as much media as Root or appealed directly to conservatives.
A major change would have been the nomination of Dr. Mary Ruwart over Barr. Ruwart might have secured the endorsement of Ron Paul. She certainly wouldn't have spooked him into endorsing Chuck Baldwin. But the low vote totals of the Baldwin campaign don't suggest that Paul could have boosted any candidate that much, given that his endorsement wasn't backed up by campaign appearences or fundraising. And Ruwart would have alienated Barr supporters (and Root) to the degree that they might have sat the election out. With no media profile outside of the movement, she would have gotten a level of coverage comparable, probably, to Cynthia McKinney. There was no one "right" way to boost the LP in 2008.
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]]>Somewhere on the 14-hour plane ride back, McCain said to Graham, "You know we got to keep going; we can't let those guys down." Graham replied, "That's right, John. If they can do it, we can do it."
…
The weather in Charleston was awful—sleeting rain—and McCain seemed caged, cooped up with his friend Lindsey Graham, who was annoying him by trying to "visualize" victory. By 7 p.m., Cindy and Graham were ready to "jump out the window," Graham later recalled. McCain's 95-year-old mother, Roberta, tried to lighten the mood by cracking jokes about how she wanted to marry Lindsey.
…
McCain could look hot or riled up (his traveling buddy Lindsey Graham particularly affected his moods, for better and for worse).
…
Piper, the governor's 7-year-old, thought nothing of crawling across Joe Lieberman's lap to get to her mother. Lindsey Graham mischievously enjoyed getting the child hopped up on Mountain Dew, a beverage to which he was mildly addicted.
…
McCain had been too wound up to get to sleep, calling Graham at 1 a.m. ("What'd ya think, boy?" "Home run.")
…
As Lindsey Graham told the story, he had been awakened at 4:30 on the morning of the final debate. It was McCain on the phone. "I can't sleep," said the candidate. "Well, now neither can I," said a sleepy Graham.
There's nothing quite so… Adam West and Burt Ward about the magazine's Obama reporting. If anything, he comes off as eerily calm and equally eerily dorky.
During one of the debate preps, the lights blew, flickering on and off like a strobe light from the 1970s disco craze. Obama stood behind the podium, quietly singing the song "Disco Inferno," last popular in the heyday of "Saturday Night Fever."
…
"That's an interesting belt buckle," he said to Michelle, mischievously. She feigned offense and said, "I am interesting, next to you. Surprise, surprise, a blue suit, a white shirt and a tie." Obama grinned and bent down until he was almost at eye level with her waist. He jabbed a playful finger toward her belt buckle, and let loose his inner nerd. "The lithium crystals! Beam me up, Scotty!" Obama squeaked, laughing at his own lame joke as Michelle rolled her eyes.
That's what you had to choose between, America: a man who calls Lindsey Graham when he can't get to sleep and a man who still quotes The Trammps.
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]]>The post Obama's Right Hand appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Idaho: Bush won 68-30 in the popular vote and all but one county. McCain won 62-36 in the popular vote and all but three counties. Most populous county: Ada (Boise), which went 61-38 for Bush but only 51-48 for McCain. Also, Democrats gained the first House district, the western Idaho sprawl that contains Coeur d'Alene and the Boise suburbs.
Montana: Bush won 59-39 in the popular vote and 50 of 56 counties. McCain won 50-47 in the popular vote and 44 of 56 counties. Most populous county: Yellowstone (Billings), which went 62-36 for Bush and 52-46 for McCain.
Wyoming: Bush won 69-29 in the popular vote and 22 of 23 counties. McCain won 65-33 in the popular vote and 21 of 23 counties. Most populous county: Laramie (Cheyenne), which went 65-33 for Bush and 59-39 for McCain.
Utah: Bush won 72-26 in the popular vote and swept all 29 counties. McCain won 63-34 in the popular vote and 27 of 29 counties. Most populous county: Salt Lake (Salt Lake City), which went 60-38 for Bush but only 49-48 for McCain. (If Ralph Nader voters had broken for Obama, he would have become the first Democrat to take this county since LBJ.)
Again, this wasn't about Hispanic votes. In 2004, John Kerry carried 24 percent of the white vote in Utah. This year Obama carried 31 percent. So what happened?
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]]>There's a strong feeling, [Spectator Editor R. Emmet] Tyrrell said, that social conservatives, free market conservatives, and national security conservatives will all be able to work together.
He also said that "there's a sense that the Republicans on Capitol Hill are freer of wobbly-kneed Republicans than they were before the election."
[Spectator Publisher Al] Regnery said, "The consensus was that this was not a mandate for Democrats, that this country is still center-right. The overriding fear was that the Republican Party does not represent conservatives," and there was a desire to get behind genuinely conservative candidates.
Isn't it striking how the two parties react to defeat? In 2004, Democrats agonized about how the loss of "values voters" was a problem they'd have to overcome, that they needed a new Southern governor to win, because that's the only way they'd won since the 1970s. Late in the year Democratic leaders tried to anoint pro-life former Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer as DNC chair on the harebrained theory that this would satisfy Republican voters somehow.
Party leaders say their support for preserving the landmark ruling will not change. But they are looking at ways to soften the hard line, such as promoting adoption and embracing parental notification requirements for minors and bans on late-term abortions. Their thinking reflects a sense among strategists that Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry and the party's congressional candidates lost votes because the GOP conveyed a more compelling message on social issues.
Democrats spent much of the next two years in that box. Phil Bredesen, the conservative Democratic governor of Tennessee who has all the charisma of Stephen Wright at 4 a.m., was looked at as a prospective president because he cut spending and was, uh, from the South.
Flash forward to today, and the Democrats have elected a black senator who was raised in Hawai'i and Indonesia and who was accused by his opponent of being a socialist who befriended terrorists and voted for infanticide. So you can see why conservatives are skipping the "how do we change?" part and going right to hoping that Obama screws up. But this part of Klein's report doesn't make sense to me.
Although polls show that "conservative" is a more popular word than "Republican," it turns out that "Democrat" is a more popular description than "liberal," and the sentiment was that tougher language needed to be used to define Barack Obama and other Democrats as liberals.
Tougher? How about "socialist?" Oh, wait.
Language used to work for Republicans. Indeed, one of the more mockable exercises that Democrats tried from December 2004 to November 2006 was "reframing" their policies, because they were so in awe of how Republicans had popularized terms like "death tax" and made "liberal" a curse word.
The post All Mod Cons appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>There's a certain freedom that comes with belonging to a third party. Tuesday night in Georgia, Libertarians were the second happiest partisans you could find. Did they win anything new? No. Did they break the all-time Libertarian vote total in the presidential race? Also no. There was disappointment and a little surprise that anger at the Wall Street bailout and pessimism about Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) prospects failed to pry loose more conservatives over to the party of small government.
"When all the dust settles here, in January," said Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr, "people are going to be upset about a government that's offering more bailouts and less freedom."
Tuesday night Libertarians were a sideshow in a historical event on par with the moon landing. In downtown Atlanta, at Ebenezer Baptist Church, a block party broke out across the street from where Martin Luther King, Jr. used to preach. Entrepreneuers rushed to Auburn Ave. with boxes full of quickly screened Obama T-shirts with the label "44th President," and rally flags with Obama's face next to King's. At a ritzy bar up the street, the sound went down as Obama gave his victory speech—then the DJ scratched a record and played James Brown's "Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud." Down the street, jeeps parked, dancers climbed on top, and radios blasted songs such as "I Believe I Can Fly." White stragglers who'd biked down to watch it all exchanged fist-bumps with people they'd never met and might never meet again. It was that kind of a night.
Uptown at Barr's election party, the proceedings were a little more mundane. A bank of bloggers and Libertarian staffers refreshed and refreshed their browsers to see how their favored candidates were faring. "Where's Bill Redpath?" one yelled when CNN pronounced Democrat Mark Warner the winner in Virginia's Senate race, skipping over the strong showing by the chairman of the Libertarian Party.
Throughout the night, party operators like Stewart Flood and Daniel Adams were checking the progress of John Monds, a black businessman who'd run on the ticket for Georgia Public Services Commissioner. If Monds could win more than 25 percent of the vote, that would mean he received more votes than any Libertarian candidate in any U.S. election, ever—surpassing even Ed Clark's 1980 totals for president. At 11 p.m. it was clear he would get there. Monds took the stage just as the networks were calling the presidential race for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).
Even Bob Barr had a kind assessment about the history-making Democrat who, along with John McCain, had denied Barr his shot at the presidency. "It just illustrates the tremendous demographic changes, generational changes in this country," Barr said. "This really is a very different country, in some ways much better country, than it was several years ago."
That assessment is going to become a cliché this week, largely because it's true. Barack Obama won the presidency while losing traditional Democratic ground in slow-growing areas of the country. Take the state of Pennsylvania, where McCain had made his last stand, predicated on the hope that the gun-owning whites whom Obama had called "bitter" would march to the polls for the GOP. Sure enough, Obama carried only two counties in southwest Pennsylvania, one of them Allegheny, which contains the city of Pittsburgh. But Pittsburgh is the only part of that region growing in population. In suburbanized eastern Pennsylvania, Obama won by a landslide, carrying every county that borders Philadelphia, sweeping the counties on the Pennsylvania Turnpike up to Lackawanna. It wasn't just Joe Biden's 45-minute bromides about playing stick ball in Scranton that did it. It was a changing electorate lifting up a candidate of change.
For Libertarian and libertarian-minded candidates, this was the wrong kind of electoral shift. The charismatic B.J. Lawson was always going to have a tough time convincing voters in his liberal North Carolina district that he, too, was a change candidate. He couldn't survive the Obama wave. Wake County, which casts most of the votes in his district, swung from a narrow Bush victory in 2004 to a 57-42 Obama landslide. Lawson got buried underneath it. Damien Ober, a media-savvy LP candidate in D.C. who raised real money and campaigned on an anti-bailout, anti-tax platform, couldn't win 3 percent of the vote for a powerless office. Karen Kerin, who won the Libertarian and Republican nominations for attorney general in Vermont, scored only 20 percent.
Libertarians were much luckier, as usual, at winning state ballot initiatives. There were a few prominent losses, such as the San Francisco prostitution legalization measure and an income tax repeal in Massachusetts. Many libertarians will be distraught at the victory of anti-gay marriage laws in California, Arizona, and Florida, as well as a gay adoption ban in Arkansas. But California was a squeaker that took all the power of the Mormon Church and scores of split-ticket black voters, and the margins in Arizona and Florida were smaller than the margins in bluer states four years ago. Medical marijuana and marijuana decriminalization won everywhere that voters had a choice, as those issues often do.
Still, some of the Libertarians at Barr's party were worried about the results. Many still had Republican sympathies. "I would have preferred that McCain win, if Bob couldn't," said Mark du Mas, a Barr neighbor who maxed out donating to his campaign and leased him the campain office. "Ultimately we've got to have a galvanizing issue that gets people so angry that they abandon the two parties," said Andy Kalat, who also preferred McCain as a second choice.
The Barr campaign didn't bother with recriminations. Vice presidential nominee Wayne Allyn Root took the stage before Barr to lambast the "McCain-Obama bailout," calling the two parties "dumb and dumber, big and bigger." He had bet, publicly, that McCain would win the election. "He was winning until he voted for the bailout!" Root said after the speech. "But I didn't lose big money. I bet on Barr/Root!" Back on stage, he promised the crowd that he'd "see you again in 2012, maybe as your president-elect!"
Root didn't act bothered about losing the vice presidency, and he had a laugh at the coming era of Joe Biden gaffes. "I only put my foot in my mouth once in this campaign. And that was with you guys!"
Barr, who rarely campaigned alongside Root, brought him back on stage for his concession speech. "He got to go to all the good places, like California," Barr said. "I got to…well, I shouldn't say anything about the other states." Without a clear victory for the party to point to (it was obvious already that Ralph Nader would beat the party for third place, although Barr would outpoll 2004 LP candidate Michael Badnarik), Barr praised his staff and voters for a campaign run on the issues. "You ain't seen nothing yet!" Barr promised.
After the speech, Barr declined to rule out another run for office, saying he'd pick up his legal and punditry careers where he left them, although he'd lost his Alexandria, Virginia office when his landlords, the American Conservative Union, soured on his potentially McCain-spoiling run for president.
Barr turned 60 the day after the election. There wouldn't be such a ready crowd that night. So after his concession speech, caterers rolled out a cake, and the candidate blew out the candles. The night moved on at a languid pace as he signed autographs, reminisced with staff, and did a "live" media interview that was pushed back more often than the release date for Chinese Democracy. Later Barr and his staff decamped to his office to drink champagne and shoot plastic "Livestrong"-style bracelets at each other like rubber bands. The candidate sat down briefly at a computer to load up the Georgia Secretary of State's page. "I'm looking for something interesting in the state House races," he said. "Nothing yet."
In May, Barr had disputed the idea that 2008 represented a "libertarian moment." "I think," he said then, "that we're in a libertarian era." If that's true, it's an era that won't include any elected members of America's largest third party in Washington. But pundits are no longer talking about a "permanent Republican majority" based on social conservativism and small town votes.
This year is ending with Bob Barr, Ron Paul, and Wayne Allyn Root holding media megaphones they didn't have as recently as January. What will they do with that prominence? What will libertarians do now that the Republican Party has receded back to pre-Reagan levels of influence? That's for no one candidate to decide.
David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.
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]]>Bob Barr (LP): 490,689 votes. Only around half of what the campaign had hoped for, and had expected given its efforts in a bunch of close states. It's the second-best Libertarian presidential performance of all time, better than Harry Browne's two runs or than Ron Paul's run in 1988, but well behind Ed Clark's 921,128 votes in 1980.
Ralph Nader (Various Parties): 661,736 votes. A huge letdown for him, too, given the improved organization and ballot access he achieved this campaign. It's his second-worst performance in four runs for president, worse even than 1996, when he got 685,297 votes with a "non-campaign" on fewer state ballots. That year he scored 237,016 votes in California. This year he scored less than 90,000, even though Barack Obama was winning the biggest Democratic landslide there since FDR beat Alf Landon. Overall Nader got fewer votes than Eugene McCarthy in his forgotten 1976 run. I'd say something like this plus his racial attacks on Barack Obama mean "his career is finished," but when a guy's determined to become as relevant as those Jimmy Buffett for President bumper stickers there's not much you can do.
Chuck Baldwin (Constitution Party): 175,868 votes. Despite the Ron Paul endorsement, this is only the second-best Constitution Party performance ever: In 1996, Howard Phillips got 184,820 votes. The difference was in Alan Keyes, who stole the party's California ballot line and scored more than 30,000 votes there. (This doesn't include write-in votes, though, and even Paul himself had to write Baldwin in on the Texas ballot.)
Cynthia McKinney (Green Party): 142,865 votes. Only slightly better than the party's abysmal 2004 performance, which was hindered by Ralph Nader's decision not to run, then his decision to run, then his decision to atack the Greens when they didn't nominate him.
Ron Paul (Various Parties): 19,852 votes. We don't know how many write-in votes he got yet, but that's what he pulled by being on the ballot in Montana and Louisiana.
So if you add together Paul with the four candidates he gathered at the National Press Club to endorse (and include Barr, who was invited), Paul's favored candidates got around 1.5 million votes. In a historical perspective, that's… not that impressive, still. Ralph Nader got almost twice as many votes in 2000, and John Anderson got almost four times as many in 1980. It's a bigger third party vote than 2004, but not by much.
Why was this if everyone told the pollsters they were furious with the way the country was going and hated the two parties? I'd say it's because there was a Democrat and a Republican that people basically liked, but that wouldn't explain why 1988 third party voting was so low. I'm not hearing any of this discussed in the rest of the media, so Bob Barr's complaint from Ron Paul's presser rings true: The way to keep attention on libertarian political arguments was to consolidate behind one candidate. For all of Paul's flaws, his totals in Montana and Louisiana indicate that he probably could have run a Nader 2000-style campaign and gotten about Nader's 2.8 million votes.
The post The Ron Paul Vote appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>– Barack Obama's historic summit with Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher happened in Lucas County, Ohio. Obama carried the county 65-34 over John McCain.
– There are three states where John McCain outperformed George W. Bush: Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee. The rest either matched their 2004 margins or broke for Obama.
– About one in nine Montana voters who decided their votes in the last week went for Ron Paul.
– Alan Keyes Party candidate Alan Keyes got around 30,000 votes in California, just ahead of Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney, who lives in California.
– If you subtract the other candidates and read California like a rematch between Obama and Keyes (the two Illinois U.S. Senate candidates in 2004), Obama wins 99.5 percent to 0.5 percent.
– Cindy Sheehan got 17 percent of the vote in her race against Nancy Pelosi.
– States where Bob Barr came in third place: Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas. States where the Barr vote total is bigger than the gap between Obama and McCain: Indiana and North Carolina. [Corrected: Did the math wrong earlier.]
– Hillary Clinton won 21 states in the primaries if you count the contested Florida and Michigan contests. Obama beat McCain in 13 of these states. (I bring this up because I remember being on Clinton campaign conferences calls where it was argued that only Clinton could take these states.)
– As Matthew Yglesias notes, almost all of the areas where McCain dramatically outperformed Bush were in Appalachia. Arkansas and Oklahoma are just as striking.
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]]>Goode was elected as a Democrat in 1996 to a district that covers south central Virginia and includes Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia. In 2000 he left the Democratic Party and became an independent. In 2002 became a full-blown Republican. He kept winning re-election fairly easily. It helped that the GOP Senate and Assembly under Gov. Jim Gilmore (R) gerrymandered the state to create a solid majority of Republican House districts.
In 2006, Goode was re-elected easily. He then reacted with horror to the election of Rep. Keith Ellison, a black Muslim from Minneapolis, and his decision to be sworn in on a Koran.
The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.
No one expected Goode to lose this year. His standing in the polls suffered after some late-breaking financial scandals, but he usually won his district easily. But as of right now he's losing. He's down 100 votes, and might turn what was a 8-3 Republican majority in the House delegation into a 6-5 Democratic majority. The Democrats have locked up seats in suburban D.C. and the Chesapeake region.
This is illustrative because of the way the McCain campaign ended. It was a mess. Frustrated that the media beyond talk radio hadn't picked up on the Bill Ayers story, McCain and Sarah Palin accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists" and demanded he reveal the extent of their "relationship." In the final week of the race, the campaign demanded that the L.A. Times release a tape of Obama at an event with Rashid Khalidi, a pretty mainstream (American-born) Palestininan scholar. Over the weekend a 527 blasted the airwaves with ads that rebroadcast Jeremiah Wright's "God DAMN America" quote. On election day the McCain campaign alerted reporters to the freakish story of two "New Black Panthers" standing outside a Philadelpia polling place with nightsticks. Why, I have no idea. Well… I have an idea, but I don't want to say it.
McCain did not run a bigoted campaign. He deliberately pulled punches (like never talking about Wright unless prompted) and he probably feels good about that today: What if he'd sunk into the gutter and lost anyway? Because he would have lost anyway. Karl Rove, whom everyone makes fun of today, was completely right in the 1990s when he realized that America was becoming a less and less white, more and more cosmopolitan country, and that any path for Republican dominance depended on winning the Hispanic vote and pulling some percentage of the black vote. As Steve Sailer (who's controversial but gets this stuff) points out, McCain won a 12-point victory among white voters. But white voters only made up 75 percent of the electorate, and even that number is distorted by the rejection of Obama among Southern whites who also rejected John Kerry by a landslide. In those Appalachian states that were supposed to shred Obama, he did much better. Pennsylvania, Obama lost the white vote by 3 points. In Ohio he lost it by 5 points.
In Michigan, the home of the Reagan Democrats, and of Detroit, whose "hip-hop mayor" Kwame Kilpatrick is going to jail, Obama won the white vote by 4 points.
It's way too easy to write the "Party X will never recover" story that looks silly in two years. I remember Grover Norquist pronouncing the Democrats dead in 2004. But we've got definitive proof that racial politicking is not enough to win an election anymore. Too many white voters reject it, and there are too many non-whites to make it electorally sensible.
The post Not Goode Enough appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>During the campaign, Nader suggested that Obama was "acting white" by not barnstorming the country and talking about poverty or something. But the irony is that Nader's one of the sorriest practitioners of ethnic politics out there. "Sorry" in the sense that it never works. He's run for president four times and each time chosen a hilariously unqualified ethnic minority running mate: Winona LaDuke (American Indian), LaDuke again, Peter Camejo (Hispanic) and Matt Gonzalez (Hispanic).
Nader's long nightmare is over, in a sense, because I don't think liberals can stay mad at him when they've won the presidency in a rout and he couldn't stop them. But his race obsession looks even worse compared to Bob Barr. "It just illustrates the tremendous demographic changes, generational changes in this country," Barr told me last night, discussing Obama's win. "This really is a very different country, in some ways much better country, than it was several years ago."
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]]>The Democrats have gained two Senate seats in the Southwest, in Colorado and in New Mexico, as those states fell to Barack Obama (along with Nevada). At this hour they look to have picked up one House seat in Nevada, one in Colorado, one in Arizona, and two in New Mexico, all while losing nothing from their 2006 sweep in the area.
It's yet more evidence that immigration restrictionism is terrible politics. On this, Karl Rove was right.
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]]>At 9:05, Barr campaign manager takes the stage at the Barr party to start thanking staff. Wayne Allyn Root is here, talking with Shane Cory. (Wayne had bet on McCain winning the election.) Everyone's attention is occupied when Georgia is called for McCain, with Barr scoring only 1 percent of the vote at that moment.
I talked to John Monds, the LP candidate for Public Services Commissioner who's aiming for the biggest LP vote total in Georgia history. He's on track–he's won a precinct! And he's up around 25 percent of the vote.
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]]>CNN is playing at the Barr party, and it's infuriatingly wimpy at calling races. Their exit poll shows Obama clobbering McCain by better than 10 points in New Hampshire, and no one at the party (who's not on the phone) realizes it.
I told Barr campaign manager Russ Verney about MSNBC's and ABC's Pennsylvania calls. "That's not a surprise, is it?" he said. I pointed out that McCain had spent much of the past two weeks there. "Like I said, it's not a surprise."
I'm hearing that John Sununu lost in New Hampshire, so I tell Barr blogger Jason Pye. "His comment a few years ago about the Military Commissions Act, that the Constitution is not a suicide pact? I lost all respect for him on that. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. Our foreign policy is."
I can't hear CNN in here, but at some point people are going to notice that the Bradley Effect did not exist. It simply didn't. Obama's on track to win the biggest Democratic victory in Pennsylvania since 1964. And whoever you're rooting for, that's fantastic—white voters did not lie to the pollsters to cover up their racism.
Florida Republican Rep. Ric Keller, one of the only Republicans to vote against the Iraq surge, has been defeated.
And… Elizabeth Dole. Bestower of the 21-year old drinking age. Creator of a TV ad that attacked her opponent for being friends with atheists. She's lost her Senate seat, and that's the last we'll ever hear of her.
The post Poll Closings at 8 p.m.: Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The first wave of exit polls, which are being broadcast on the cable channels (Fox News in the Varsity), look ridiculously good for Obama. Not the state-by-states, which are bunk, but the fact that more voters would be "scared" of a McCain win than an Obama win, that only 10 percent more of the electorate thinks McCain has more relevant experience than Obama, and so on. Sometimes that data falls apart. If it's at all right, the electorate is basically where Obama wanted it.
I'll start checking it here at 7.
UPDATE: I'm at Barr HQ, and the exits are coming in. The borig guys first: The earliest exit polls have Obama taking Virginia, but the biggest problem for McCain is that people who decided today broke for Obama. Remember: the polls showed Obama leading but under 50 percent. McCain was going to win it if undecideds broke his way. Unless they're lying, they will provide Obama his margin of victory. "We moved the ball forward and everybody know that we did," says Barr campaign guru Stewart Flood.
I talked to Barr foreign policy advisor Doug Bandow, who'd voted for his candidate but was rooting for an Obama "rout." "Obama's foreign policy will be no less aggressive than Bush's, but McCain's will be much worse."
The band at the Barr party plays "Sin City" as a number of Libertarians come over to ask us to ask if we have more detailed numbers. We kind of don't: Between the paucity of stuff that's in and the buggy state sites, we're sort of in a holding pattern.
The post The 7 p.m. Poll Closings: Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>There are plenty of ways to watch the election as a horse race. Jonathan Martin lists the most important counties in the swing states. John Tabin points out the close races and the signals that would hint at an Obama landslide or a McCain upset. Here's a relatively brief rundown on what will close when, and what tea leaves to read, as well as a list of notable ballot measures. To my mind CNN has the best and most quickly-updated information, but expect lots of news sites to freeze up, and to move on to others.
The post An Election Night Guide appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sometimes the call includes verbiage about the Second Amendment. Often, the person on the other end has something better to do.
"He already voted six weeks ago!" says Austin Petersen, a Libertarian Party worker who's been camped out in Atlanta for the Barr campaign. "Where do they hide all these votes before the election, anyway? Are they in a box somewhere? Where's the box?"
Mikael Sandstrom, an LP intern who's shadowing Peterson, has to do battle with a voter fretting that his vote for Barr could help elect Barack Obama. "No," says Sandstrom, in a more lilting, Southern tone than his usual voice, "it would be a vote for Bob Barr." Earlier today, a voter called the office and begged Barr to endorse John McCain. She was told that Barr was endorsing Barr. She wasn't satisfied.
Welcome to the final 48 hours of the Bob Barr presidential campaign. After winning the Libertarian Party nomination in May, Barr opened this office in the sprawling suburb of Smyrna, Georgia, with a view of Atlanta when you step outside for a smoke—something his staffers do every hour or so.
The office is as wide and rambling as the real estate developments that define metropolitan Georgia. A dozen people are at work, but there are almost twice as many full-stocked cubicles than staff. Typically they service the volunteers who come in on weekends to find more voters, but on the day before the election there is the hardcore staff and no one else. A flat screen TV is tuned to cable political coverage. A computer is tuned to Barr TV, which runs videos of the candidate all day long. Two Mr. Coffees churn in a small break room aside a heaving pile of lawn signs, pieces of mail, fliers, and gel bands that twist cyclist Lance Armstrong's "Livestrong" message into "Live Free."
"This is a real campaign," says Stewart Flood, a South Carolina Libertarian Party executive who has taken a three-week unpaid vacation to help out. "There was no headquarters in 2004. It was Michael Badnarik in a car, driving from event to event. They did raise money, but they weren't raising money. They did contact voters, but it wasn't organized."
In one of the most crowded cubicles, Barr communications director Shane Cory has a map of the country divided into seven sections. The states where Barr failed to make the ballot are blacked out. ("Louisiana screwed us," Cory recalls grimly. "We should have gotten on in Connecticut, and we would have, if the lawsuit was filed earlier.") Seven more states have been assigned numbers that indicate where the campaign is placing resources, which mostly consist of the candidate himself doing media and making speeches. Nevada, Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida—all swing states—are marked out.
As the campaign wound to a close, it was clear that Barr wouldn't get close to the $30 million fundraising goal campaign manager Russ Verney set in May, a disappointment that staffers blame in part on former Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). "Paul set the liberty movement back a decade by encouraging people to stay in the GOP," Cory says. "Not that the Republicans planned it, but if they did they couldn't have planned it any better."
Focus in Barr's Atlanta headquarters has turned heavily toward his native state. "Georgia just came onto the map when the polls closed between McCain and Obama," says Cory. "The rest of the states are being turned out by local people," says Verney. "That work has been decentralized."
The candidate spent the last day of the campaign on a small plane to Savannah for a last round of local media interviews. The other day it was Macon. Months ago the campaign purchased data from Barr's old congressional district in the wealthy Republican suburbs, and the office has been pushing those voters with help from phone-bankers on the west coast. According to state party chair Daniel Adams, the candidate is pulling around 5 percent of Republicans in his old district.
This has the potential to be the main story of Barr's campaign. At a brunch for staff on Sunday, Barr acknowledged that the tightening Georgia polls have boosted his media coverage. The final public poll of the state put Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) at 49 percent, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) at 48 percent, and Barr at 2 percent—down from his pre-Sarah Palin selection peak, but holding steady enough for Obama to potentially win a traditionally Republican state with a plurality of the vote. "If Obama wins this state," says University of Georgia political scientist Charles Bullock, "it will be in part because of Bob Barr."
There are two main challenges here for Barr. The first is that the tightness in the race is keeping some Republicans from casting protest votes. "We'd be above 5 percent if Republicans weren't struggling now," says Adams. The second is that Barr, like Ralph Nader before him, could become a scapegoat for a party that blew a presidential election. The mighty state GOP might go looking to retaliate. "I'm sure Republicans would like to limit [Libertarians'] ballot access right now," Bullock says. "But it's not easy to do when they play by the rules and score enough votes for regular access every year."
This year John Monds, a black Libertarian and NAACP leader, is one of only two candidates for state Public Services Commissioner. The party estimates his absolute minimum level of support at 25 percent, easily enough to maintain the party's ballot access, paving the way for Barr to do what many of his supporters hope—run for U.S. Senate in 2010.
People in Barr's headquarters aren't wasting their time thinking about this stuff on their final days of work. It just comes up when voters resist their entreaties to vote for the Only Candidate Against the Bailout. In the morning, LP media coordinator Andrew Davis posts Barr's final pre-election column for Townhall.com. In the afternoon, he sees the commenters and e-mailers attacking Barr for having the audacity to run. "Who financed your run this time, huh?" says one commenter from Georgia. "Soros or Barack, himself?"
The campaign brushes it off. When some of the phonebankers place an order for sandwiches, Sandstrom writes an IOU for Flood on a yellow post-it note. "Why don't you just give him a Federal Reserve note?" snarks Peterson. Longtime Barr staffer Jennifer Chambrin makes the necessary calls to cater and decorate Barr's election night party. Media Guru Steve Stinton keeps track of Barr's final run of appearances on a calendar that plans them up through Thursday. Vice presidential nominee Wayne Allyn Root's e-mail blasts announcing his latest radio appearances—"Wayne's on Jerry Doyle!"—are read as they come in. All of the big questions—the million-vote target, Barr's impact on the race, the bitterness of the GOP—will be answered soon enough.
David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.
The post Georgia on Their Minds appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Barack Obama (D)—8796
John McCain (R)—5355
Bob Barr (L)—97
As Winger notes, this represents a mini-surge in Libertarian support from 2004: Barr's 0.7 percent of the vote is much better than Michael Badnarik's 0.2 percent. Obama is leading McCain 61.7 percent to 37.6 percent, a big improvement for the Democrats, who lost nearly 2-1 here in 2004. I think Wolf Blitzer can take the rest of the day off.
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