Reason Magazine - Staff > David Weigel

Czar Wars

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:00:00 EST

Americans aren’t just getting a new president this year. We’re getting a new czar. On October 13, President George W. Bush signed the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008, or PRO-IP. It creates the final new high-level post to be introduced in the Bush era: the United States intellectual property enforcement representative, whom you will soon be calling the “IP czar.”

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.

How Big Is Small?

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 10:03:00 EST

Lockheed Martin doesn’t fit most people’s definition of a small business. The defense contractor has 140,000 employees, and in 2007 it netted $3 billion in profits. Yet $143 million of its revenue that year came via 207 federal government contracts dedicated to “small businesses.”

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.”

Where Did It All Go Wrong?

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 15:00:00 EST

On the afternoon of July 6, 2007, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas emerged from his taxi to what was becoming a shockingly familiar sight: Dozens of fans waving handmade or Internet-bought “Ron Paul” signs.

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.

Beat the New Boss

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:00:00 EST

Four years ago, after the re-election of George W. Bush, the Permanent Republican Majority had finally taken over. Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform predicted that the Democrats would not even survive four more years. “Without effective control of the government, the Democratic Party is like a fish out of water,” Norquist said at the time, “a vampire in the sun, Antaeus held aloft, an appliance unplugged.”

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.

Kentucky Reign

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 10:00:00 EST

In 2007 Democrat Steve Beshear was elected governor of Kentucky after pledging to expand state-run gambling. Once in office, Beshear found that competition from online gambling was a huge obstacle. So in September 2008, his state filed a civil suit against absolutepoker.com, fulltiltpoker.com, goldencasino.com, and 138 other websites for exploiting its citizens. The Bluegrass State’sdemand: Block access for Kentucky-based gamblers, or we’ll take over your domain names.

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.

Bob Barr Looks Back

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:00:00 EST

WASHINGTON—"Life was a bitch," says Bob Barr.

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.

Obama's Right Hand

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:30:00 EST

...

Happy Birthday, Bob Barr!

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EST

ATLANTA—"I just want to say," says Libertarian U.S. Senate candidate Allen Buckley, "I'm a little disappointed right now. I think I was vastly superior to both of my opponents."

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.

Georgia on Their Minds

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:00:00 EST

The call sheet is short and perfunctory, and everyone who uses it puts a slightly different spin on it. "I'm calling to ask you for your vote for former congressman and presidential candidate Bob Barr," goes one version. "Bob Barr opposed the McCain-Obama bailout and McCain-Feingold. According to the National Taxpayers Union, only Bob Barr will cut taxes and reduce federal spending."

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.

"Can I Get Equal Time Here?"

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:30:00 EST

ATLANTA—"Look," says Allen Buckley. "We know this race is going to a runoff. You can vote your conscience."

Buckley, the Libertarian candidate for the United States Senate in Georgia, was looking straight into the bevy of local TV cameras at the Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) studio, recording this sixth and final candidate debate. On his left was Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss, who led comfortably in polls before the economy crashed and he voted for the $700 billion bailout. On Chambliss' left was Democrat Jim Martin, a former state representative who, to his delight, has surged into a tie thanks to millions of dollars in TV ads paid for by a party hungrily eyeing its 60th Senate seat.

This last-minute tightening has placed Buckley in the unfamiliar position of potentially affecting an election. He has run twice before for statewide office—two years ago he campaigned against Martin for lieutenant governor, and they both lost. But those races were not close enough for most voters to concern themselves much with Buckley's shy presentation and his relentless use of Government Accountability Office numbers to explain how current levels of federal spending are unsustainable.

The bailout cut right to Buckley's message. "I was against it, and I explained what I wanted to do instead," he explained before the debate. "I like tax cuts but only when they're matched with spending cuts, and I've proposed a 25 percent across-the-board cut in spending apart from Social Security. If we did that right now it would balance the budget, allow the Social Security surplus to be funded, and provide for tax cuts."

Neither of Buckley's opponents care to get that specific about slashing government. "I'm running against two Democrats, basically," Buckley grumbled as a GPB attendant pointed him toward the green room. Cobb County Libertarian activist David Chastain put it a little differently: "He's running against two socialists."

One of those "socialists" will win on or after Tuesday. If neither Chambliss nor Martin draw more than 50 percent of the vote, then by Georgia law they will battle in a run-off election to be held four weeks later. National Republican and Democratic money and bodies will swarm in with a force not seen since Sherman's March.

With such potential responsibility on his hands, Buckley spent the final debate bloodying up both candidates.

Chambliss, a tall, smug pol who combines the sneer of Spiro Agnew with the studied folksiness of Boss Hogg, tried to plain-talk his way through his support for the bailout on the first question of the night by maintaining that banks were just "fixin' to fail." Martin criticized that, so Chambliss shot back: "He's been for it, he's been against it, he's been for it, and tonight it's popular for him to be against it."

Buckley entered the conversation. "I called the GAO," he said, "and asked if this trend toward unsustainable deficits would continue under the policies of both major parties. They told me it would. I am the only candidate providing answers." But the Libertarian was left out of a finger-wagging exchange between the two major-party candidates over which banks, exactly, were benefiting unfairly from the bailout. "Can I get equal time here?" Buckley asked. The moderators passed.

Chambliss attributed the nationwide fall in gas prices to his vote to end the ban on offshore oil drilling, though he humbly acknowledged that "we [Republicans] can't take 100 percent of the credit." Buckley snorted audibly. "You can take zero percent of the credit, because that's what you're entitled to!" Chambliss laughed and half-patted the much shorter Buckley on the back. "The GAO probably told him to say that, too."

When Buckley got his chance to ask Chambliss a direct question he rattled off how much non-defense spending had increased in the Republican's Senate career, waved his notes, and asked, "What would you cut?"

"Alan, you should have taken your pill tonight," Chambliss replied.

"You need the whole bottle!" Buckley responded.

The somnolent studio audience cracked up. Chambliss drew back his lips like a crossbow. That was the last cheap shot he'd take at Buckley, who then used his question for Martin to ask "what has Senator Chambliss failed to do" about entitlement spending. Chambliss replied by accusing the Libertarian of wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare.

"Not true," said Buckley. He looked up from his notes and into the camera. "A U.S. senator just lied to you."

Buckley explained that he wanted a referendum on Social Security with the voters deciding whether to raise FICA taxes or not. Was it a dodge? Arguably, but that just laid the tracks for moderators to ask Chambliss about his support for the Fair Tax, the theoretical sales tax that would replace the income tax. "He's using all of you Fair Tax zealots because he's lost you on the real issues," Buckley said. "When the Republicans ran everything, he could have introduced a Fair Tax bill. Why didn't he, if he's such a good leader?"

Buckley closed his remarks with attacks on both candidates. Martin was a "good man" who wouldn't make a great senator, while "Saxby Chambliss is not, and never will be a great senator." He asked for people to support him, which would set up a runoff. And with that, he closed his final debate.

Local news reporters swarmed Buckley, Chambliss, and Martin after the lights dimmed. Before and after the debate, Buckley declined to say who he'd support in a runoff. (Given the chance to imagine actually winning, he called it a theoretical "gunshot heard around the world that would represent real change, not Obama change.")

"Alan was really good tonight," said Jim Martin as he spotted Georgia Libertarian Party Chair Daniel Adams. Buckley returned the favor. "Jim's a pleasant guy." He did not have similarly kind words for Chambliss.

An hour later, Adams joined a number of LP activists at a house they've subletted to the Bob Barr campaign's surplus staff. Fox 5 led its broadcast with Buckley calling Chambliss a "liar." But other than that, the third-party candidate barely made it into the final report. Editors included Chambliss' "pill" insult, but cut the Buckley comeback.

It was telling. If he forces a runoff, Buckley will become one of the pivotal politicians of election 2008. Close races are the surest way of drawing attention to Libertarians. Earlier that day, Bob Barr had noted that his uptick in local media coverage came as polls showed McCain's lead over Obama collapsing. There was a spoiler story to write again! But for one more election, despite the issues, despite the debate, that's the only story the rest of the media will write about Buckley.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Nice Guy, Wrong Year

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EST

"I want to give you a copy of our rulebook. Did you get one of our rulebooks? These are the rules that they need to follow up in Washington. Right now we're seeing what happens when you forget them."

B.J. Lawson, Republican candidate for Congress in North Carolina's 4th district, was standing outside an early voting center in Morrisville on Saturday handing out some of the 50,000 pocket Constitutions he bought from the Cato Institute, along with his one-page campaign flier folded inside. Early voting began at 8 a.m. with four boxes of Constitutions. When it ended at 5 p.m., Lawson had just handed out the last one.

"It's small," he told two young black voters. "You can whip it out"—he whipped it out—"in case of an emergency."

"Yeah, if there's a constitutional crisis," said one voter, nodding and credulous.

Nine months ago, dozens of Republicans claiming to be inspired by the longshot presidential campaign of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) jumped into national politics for themselves. Some lost their primary elections, including New Jersey Senate candidate Murray Sabrin and Virginia House candidate Amit Singh. Others won the right to be token candidates in rock-solid urban Democratic districts. (Among this group is New York congressional candidate John Wallace, who on Sunday released a rambling statement demanding that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) release his birth certificate, which the Democrat has already done.) The one Ron Paul-inspired general election candidate for Senate, South Carolina's Bob Conley (not a Republican, but a populist who calls himself "your grandfather's kind of Democrat") won his primary in a squeaker and proceeded to raise less than $50,000.

Lawson has broken out of this pack and become not just the most credible Ron Paul Republican, but one of the most credible Republican challengers of 2008, period. A 34-year-old doctor who built and then sold a company that made medical records accessible via personal digital assistants, Lawson has raised nearly $600,000 in a district where the last Republican candidate raised less than $50,000—half out of his own pocket. He has received a helpful endorsement from Ron Paul, including pleas for national "money bombs" on his behalf. And while putting away a GOP primary opponent who attacked him for his libertarian views (Lawson won by 41 points), he built a real campaign infrastructure. On Saturday, his Cary, North Carolina headquarters was packed with volunteers calling voters, bundling fliers, and taking turns turning out early votes.

But at the end of the day, Lawson is a Republican candidate in the non-Republican year of 2008. North Carolina, which no Democrat has carried since 1976, is being heavily targeted by Barack Obama's campaign. Lawson's district, which was gerrymandered in 2002 to include more Democratic areas to help re-elect incumbent Rep. David Price, is ground zero for Obama's state effort, and political tipsters rate the district "safe Democrat." In Wake County, where most of the district's population lives, the Obama campaign has registered thousands of new voters. An area that voted 51-49 for Bush over Kerry is showing as much as a 17-point Obama lead.

Lawson is blunt about the problem here. "The party has been so weakened by the tragic mismanagement of our country these past eight years," he explains. "Price has been running on Obama's coattails and saying he wants to be part of a team for change. Well, I'm sorry, but you've been there for 20 years. You had your chance. It doesn't make any sense for the voters to hire the guy who threw the brick through their window to fix the glass."

Lawson's strategy has been to distance himself from the GOP ticket and cast himself as a "change" candidate—a perfect down-ballot match for all of these Obama voters. His campaign literature contrasts Lawson's opposition to the Iraq War and the PATRIOT Act with Price's votes for funding the war and legalizing more government surveillance. "The incumbent has been there for 20 years," Lawson told voters in Morrisville. "He's working for his corporate donors, not for you."

These lines are winning over more voters than a generic Republican message might. Price has had to engage in a race he once took for granted, running ads attacking Lawson, and bringing some D.C. staff down here to help him out. But there are probably too many straight-ticket voters furious at Republicans for Lawson to convert. Jesse Benoit, a 33-year old who grew up in New York, compliments Lawson for what he's doing when the candidate hands him a pocket Constitution. But Benoit is too frustrated with the GOP to consider splitting his ticket like he's done in the past. "He's trying to change his party, which he has to, because it's not his party anymore," Benoit said. "He's a democratic conservative, is what I'd call him. But the national party has moved so far away from that."

Some voters were less interested in straight-ticket voting and, as such, more gettable for Lawson. "I want to know about Social Security disability," said Vicky Smith, a middle-aged voter sporting sunglasses and a gem-encrusted pumpkin sweater.

"The government's been lying to us in a lot of ways for a while now," Lawson says. "One of the ways it lies is in how it calculates inflation, so when Social Security benefits increase, they're getting increased much less."

"Exactly!" says Smith. "I mean, with the property taxes and all that we have to pay—it's ridiculous. We're on the low end of the totem poll. We can't take it."

"Exactly," says Lawson, nodding, hands on hips. "We've got to stop taxing Social Security benefits and start being honest about how much it costs to live, so we can eventually transition out of Social Security and into something more fair."

"We're on the low end of the totem poll," Smith says. "What do you call it, lower-class?"

"And it's getting worse and worse," Lawson says. "We're spending $700 billion to bail out the banks—"

"Exactly!" she interrupted. "Exactly!"

Anger at the bailout has helped Lawson frame his message down the stretch. "It's finally blown away the illusion that our government is responsible to the people," he explains. "Nobody wants to bail out Wall Street when the average American is losing his job. The bailout didn't change the campaign, but it put an exclamation point on what I had been saying."

State Republicans have warmed to Lawson since the primary. "We're the grassroots of the party here," says volunteer John Lahtinen, a Paul supporter who helped Lawson work the early voters on Saturday. Lawson's distasteful connections to Ron Paul are outweighed, in Republican minds, by the strength of the race he's running. "Every dollar Price spends is a dollar he can't give to someone to use somewhere else," Lawson says.

Even if Price wins, Lawson is still cheered by an organization that "came out of the woodwork" and survived past the flash of Ron Paul's presidential campaign.

"Maybe," says Lawson, "I'll become a community organizer."

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Empire Bloat

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 21:07:00 EDT

The Defense Department's 2008 Base Structure Report reveals just how far the military has spread across the globe. As of last summer, the Pentagon rents or owns 316,238 buildings around the world with a total value of more than $455 billion. These holdings are spread across 4,668 sites in the United States and its territories and 761 in foreign countries. That latter number doesn't include bases and sites in war zones or in those trouble spots where the U.S. doesn't release detailed information and expenditures.

This isn't a record for the Defense Department. The official number of military sites peaked in 1967, at the height of the Cold War and the conflict in Vietnam, with 1,014 locations in foreign countries. And the number is down from 823 in 2007.

According to the anti-war journalist Chalmers Johnson, one factor keeping the figure from rising further is the anti-American sentiment that spikes when the U.S. military moves in, allowing locals to blame Americans for any conflict in the region. Kyrgyzstani President Kurmanbek Bakiyev has threatened to close down the Manas air base in his country, demanding more payment for rent. And in Ecuador, President Rafael Correa has threatened to end America's lease on the Eloy Alfaro Air Base when it expires in 2009. He suggests he might lease it to China instead.

Yellow Peril

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 15:48:00 EDT

When the United States went to war against Japan in 1941, Congress passed a law commanding Japanese Americans to stay inside after dusk. Two years later, in Hirabayashi v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the curfew. Unlike Korematsu v. United States, the decision that justified race-based internment, Hirabayashi has never been struck down. It could still be used as precedent.

That’s cause for concern. In a new paper Eric Muller, a legal scholar at the University of North Carolina, makes the case that both decisions were based on lies probably driven by racial animus—and that legislators knew the truth while writing the law.

Muller’s paper, published in August by the Social Science Research Network, relies on publicly available memos to argue that American generals knew that Japanese forces were not about to attack the West
Coast and that there was no Japanese-American insurgency that could have backed them up. In 1942 Gen. George C. Marshall argued for moving resources from the Pacific to Europe because the Japanese threat was containable. “In view of the great distances over which these operations would have to be undertaken,” Marshall said, “it is probably not necessary to provide a strong scale of defen[s]e.”

Despite that, Justice Department lawyers told the Supreme Court extreme measures were necessary to stop the Japanese threat. The Court bought it, endorsing curfews in part because “the principal danger to be apprehended was a Japanese invasion.” Muller writes that the precedent provides a “warning about the blinding power of racial schemas in the wake of attacks by foreign enemies.” But it’s not a cold case. While most Americans have repudiated Korematsu, Miller says Hirabayashi’s reasoning is still “potent in today’s world.” Even if it’s based on a lie.

Atlas Blinked

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EST

Every Wednesday in Washington, conservatives gather in the conference room of Grover Norquist's pressure group, Americans for Tax Reform, to hash out arguments and promote their projects. The off-the-record meetings are notorious among liberals: proof of the shudder-inducing organizational powers of the right.

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 Third Man

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Some third party candidates brush aside the pundits and the polls. They cling to a few examples of third party success—Jesse Ventura!—to auger for their victories. North Carolina's Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Michael Munger doesn't do that.

"At this point, I expect between to receive between 3 and 4 percent of the vote," Munger explains as he drives up I-40 to a speech in Raleigh. "What usually happens to our candidates is that we head on a sharp downward trajectory as the election approaches. I'm doing a little better than that. But that's what almost always happens."

Munger has to think like this. Since 2000, he has been the chair of Duke University's department of political science. He's written or co-authored four books on policy, and was a fixture on local news before he got into this race. "I got to know the producers," he says, "before I needed them to book me."

Munger is one of the LP's most prominent candidates in what, as the campaign grinds into its final week, is looking like an above-average year for the party. It's a comedown from the expectations of May and June, when former Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) secured the party's presidential nomination and talked about raising $30 million and making a Perot-like breakthrough. But there were reasons why that didn't happen: some predictable, some not.

Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) shotgun political marriage to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin ended some of the wavering of libertarian-leaning Republicans. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) never gave the Barr campaign his stamp of approval, and eventually endorsed the Constitution Party's candidate after he felt that Barr slighted him. And no third party is blowing the doors off this year: The race between the first black presidential candidate and a war hero who chose the second female running mate in history has sucked out the energy from the non-aligned movement.

At the state level, the LP is having an easier time of it. Membership is up slightly. The intra-party sniping of the presidential race (one defeated candidate was leaking internal LP documents as recently as last week) hasn't trickled down. There are candidates who don't associate with Barr and candidates, like Munger, who have seen him pump up the profile of the LP.

"Having a complete ticket is a huge help," Munger says. "Bob Barr's somebody people have heard of. Half of the polls here include him. That gives people the sense that libertarians are a real party, and that it's not just me out here."

Munger ruminates on that for a moment. "I have had people come up to me and say, ‘I'm a Bob Barr libertarian, not a Munger libertarian.' But that tells you they're looking into it!"

Privately, Libertarians suggest that Munger is running one of the ten best Libertarian campaigns in the country. His competition comes from state House candidates in New Hampshire such as Morey Straus and Brendan Kelly, Vermont attorney general candidate Karen Kerin (who secured the support of the LP and the Republicans), and a pack of candidates in Indiana, Nevada, and the "new south." Georgia Senate candidate Alan Buckley, suddenly a factor in a tight race, was called a "viable third option" with "a message of responsibility that both parties would do well to heed." Indiana House candidate Eric Schansberg got a quasi-endorsement from the Indianapolis Star: "[A] prime example of how far the Libertarian Party has advanced in Indiana."

Munger is an example of how the LP can grow in a state not historically susceptible to third parties—unless they were led by George Wallace. He makes good copy, but not in the colloidal silver-chugging way. The closest he comes to eccentricity is his habit of growing his hair out for two years, cutting it, donating the results to Locks of Love, and starting the cycle all over again. That's as weird as it gets. The Munger campaign is a focused, four-issue affair that the candidate can elucidate in seven words: "bringing in business, controlling annexation, infrastructure, and education."

Conveniently enough, that's what Democrat Bev Perdue and Republican Pat McCrory are talking about. Munger has eschewed the strategy of debating libertarian philosophy with his rivals, or trying to insert discussions of pet issues into the race. In debates, he tries to pull McCrory to his side on charter schools, "the first thing I'd do in education." He tries to keep Perdue, a typically cautious North Carolina Democrat, on his side on social issues. That's hampered his progress.

"One reason I haven't been allowed in all the debates," Munger explains, "is that I'm taking votes from the Democrats. Sixty percent of my supporters are voting for Obama. I'll talk about gay marriage, and Perdue isn't, or doesn't want to."

But another reason why Munger has been marginalized is more fair. When asked how many offices Munger's campaign has opened, North Carolina LP Chairwoman Barbara Howe says, "my kitchen table, his kitchen table, and his home office." Munger has repackaged the libertarian message, sold it in a manner that appeals to state opinion makers. He has not built a political machine or a popular movement.

Instead, Munger is relying on a media charm offensive and a pack of volunteers. He's tapped the remnants of the Ron Paul movement in the state. "A lot of Ron Paul meet-ups were of Republicans who only became Republicans to vote for him." (Paul pulled 7.2 percent of the vote in the May primary.) He's also coordinated with B.J. Lawson, a Ron Paul Republican running for Congress in the gerrymandered district that includes Durham. They agree on one of the basic questions of libertarian politics, post-Paul. "Are we proud of our irrelevance," Munger says, "or do we try to become relevant?"

The quest for relevance this year involves getting that 3 or 4 percent of the vote, securing ballot access for next time, and becoming a real political party that the Democrats and Republicans both have to adapt to. It's the goal of the Barr campaign, only localized, slower, and a little more realistic in the final week.

"As I make appearances I'm organizing counties, I'm coordinating volunteers, and I'm building a database," Munger says. "The day after the election, we start organizing the next campaign."

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Spoofed!

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:30:00 EDT

“The whole idea of spoof, to me, is just so done and gone,” said David Zucker to The Onion AV Club. “I'm very proud of all three of the Naked Guns, but I think we've declared victory.”

That was ten years ago. In 2001, terrorists attacked and destroyed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—or have you forgotten? In 2004, a newly-minted Republican David Zucker donated to the Bush re-election campaign and made a commercial for the Club for Growth that portrayed a line-up of schmucks being as indecisive as John Kerry. “If you never commit to what you believe in,” said Zucker’s narrator, “who will commit to you?”

Zucker stayed committed, producing more political ads in 2006 and directing An American Carol, a feature-length—what’s the word?—spoof of the modern left, of terrorism, of Hollywood, of slavery, and of the never-promising genre of Charles Dickens pastiches. This is an idea even the Muppets had trouble with, and they didn’t have Zucker’s political obligations.

We open on an idyllic Fourth of July picnic, where embalmed-looking, paycheck-needing Leslie Nielsen gathers up some kids to tell them a tale occasionally broken up by erotic, slow-motion daydreams. It’s the story of Michael Malone (Kevin Farley, brother of Chris), a Michael Moore lookalike who is following up his success with films like Die, You American Pigs with a campaign to ban Independence Day.

”I love America,” Malone says in one of the many, many scenes where he’s eating and looking confused. “That’s why it’s got to be destroyed.”

Malone is approached by hard-luck Taliban terrorists who, buffeted by American military success, are having trouble recruiting fresh bodies. Led by Robert Davi, who reads his lines as if he’s smothering them with a hospital pillow, they corner Malone at an award show. ”We heard you were a big fat liar!” giggles Mohammed (Geoffrey Arend), before giving Malone tentative funding for a drama that will finally, finally win him the respect of the Hollywood elite.

All of this happens before any of the Dickensian ghosts show up to shake some sense into Malone. We’ve forgotten what’s being parodied by the time the ghost of John F. Kennedy jumps out of Malone’s TV set to remind him that his high-toned rhetoric disguised an anti-commie ass-kicker. The ghost of George S. Patton (Kelsey Grammer) guides Malone through most of his journey, showing him a world where American soldiers never freed the slaves or beat the Nazis, where ACLU lawyers groan and swarm like zombies. He summons the ghost of George Washington (Jon Voight), in a scene of transcendent weirdness, where Malone is shown the ashes of 9/11 victims to shame him out of making documentaries. Malone’s lessons end under the arm of “the freakin’ angel of death,” (country singer Trace Adkins), who shows him a future where morgue doctors play with his remains and Muslim conquerors build him a statue in occupied Hollywood.

Spoiler alert: Malone learns the error of his ways. By the end of the film he’s patched up relations with his Navy man brother, celebrated the Fourth of July, and started production on a patriotic biopic of JFK. He exposes the terrorists’ plot from the stage of a Trace Adkins concert, where the man sings an ode to America that goes, in part, “army, navy, air force and marines/the greatest fighting force the world has ever seen.”

And that’s how David Zucker returns to the spoof genre. (He has directed, but not written, two of the Scary Movie films.) The goals here are as partisan, zealous, and transparent as Warren Beatty’s when he made Reds, or John Travolta’s when he made Battlefield Earth. Zucker has promoted the film across conservative media, at the Republican convention (where screening attendees like Rick Santorum got liberal paper dolls for their kids), and on Fox News. “Laugh like your country depends on it!” bellows the movie’s ad copy. This is not a joke. If a Scary Movie bombs, some people lose money. If An American Carol bombs, Zucker’s quest to make Hollywood safe for conservatives is dealt a Dunkirk.

How successful can he be, though? Like Redacted (2007) and other Iraq films attacked by conservatives as propagandic money pits, the targets of AAC have shrunk since the screenwriters first aimed at them. Just because Michael Moore took four years to put out a documentary on his “slacker uprising” tour doesn’t mean people still take him seriously on electoral politics. Indeed, Moore released the movie for free online. He went through a brief moment as a symbol for everything conservatives hated about the left, roughly from the release of Bowling for Columbine to Bush’s re-election. Spoof targets work best when the subjects are brand new or ripped out of clichés. Farley’s Malone never overcomes the “oh yeah, that guy” factor.

Zucker doesn’t try too hard to understand the left beyond Moore/Malone. Late in the film, we learn that Malone was only ever unpatriotic because, as a portly teen, he had a crush on a girl who hated America, too. When she ran off with a soldier, he doubled down as a political activist. Malone’s motivation is the only one that Zucker explains: The rest of the liberals and left-wingers in the movie are psychopaths who willfully make things up, chant slogans mindlessly, and beat up people who upset them. This is the first Hannity and Colmes comedy, birthed in an echo chamber, with references that only make sense to people who are already die-hard conservatives.

Is it funny? It depends. Zucker funs around with Hitler by recycling a gag from his worst political ad, in which a James Baker III lookalike did the bidding of a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lookalike. There is a truly disturbing scene involving Leslie Nielsen and human dismemberment that might have gotten a chuckle at Ed Gein’s house. There are a few jokes that connect, though, and that puts An American Carol miles ahead of Fox’s short-lived “The Half Hour News Hour.”

It doesn’t put it in league with the great liberal comedy. There’s a reason for that, as TV critics point out every time a conservative comedy or skit fails. Political comedy mocks authority. Conservative comedy in the Age of Bush venerates authority. The “heavies” that corrupt Malone and (temporarily) ruin the lives of his conservative extended family are powerless, silly activists. Malone simply gets slapped around a bit and decides the establishment was right. If you transported Zucker back to 1978 and pitched him Animal House, he’d direct Niedermeyer: Man of Iron.

Hopefully this is a curable problem, a result of eight fat years of Republican rule, the bulk of which were spent apologizing for the Bush administration and agonizing over land wars in Asia. Conservative comedy thrived in the Clinton era; perhaps it can bloom again in the Brumiere of Barack Obama.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason. This article originally appeared at Culture11.

Abandon All Hope

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Theresa Finch was pissed off. Somebody had to be. It couldn’t have been quieter in the bleachers of Tuesday's Obama-McCain town hall debate if the events drinks were laced with Quaaludes. Audience member Finch was quiet, too, until she got up to deliver her question.

“How,” Finch said, “can we trust either of you with our money when both parties got—got us into this global economic crisis?”

Anyone could have predicted the candidates’ answers: It was the other party’s fault! (As McCain might say, it was “that one’s” fault.) “When George Bush came into office,” Obama said, “we had surpluses. And now we have half-a-trillion-dollar deficit annually.”

“Do you know,” said McCain, “that he voted for every increase in spending that I saw come across the floor of the United States Senate while we were working to eliminate these pork barrel earmarks?”

Tone-deaf debate answers are nothing new. The blowsy responses of McCain and Obama, though, revealed the traps that voters and the candidates have both fallen into. Voters are furious about having their money shoveled onto Wall Street. That was supposed to restore faith in the mortgage industry? Huh? What?

(Story continues below video.)

Click above to watch a 63-second condensation of Tuesday's 90-minute presidential debate between John McCain and Barack Obama.

On his post-bailout vote show, Lou Dobbs, the jowly arbiter of middle-American anger, called it “stunning setback for voters who believed the House would stand up for the American people and refuse to be bought out by the Bush administration, political elites, and Wall Street.” True, he always talks like that. But this time he was actually expressing what voters thought. A Tuesday CNN poll pegged the proportion of Americans who thought the bailout was “for Wall Street” at 53 percent. Only 40 percent thought it was passed to “help ordinary taxpayers.”

Obama and McCain are stuck in another trap. They voted for the bailout. They can’t run against it. They went all in, literally, and now they’re stuck selling its merits while frowning and promising that it was the only choice they had.

When you dip a little lower, under the presidential stratosphere, anyone who can be against the bailout is against it. In both parties. In Oregon, where Democrat Jeff Merkley is running stronger than people expected against Republican incumbent Sen. Gordon Smith, the bailout is the villain of a heavy-rotation TV ad. “In this economy, who's really on your side? Gordon Smith and Washington—a decade of no accountability. A trillion dollar check for Wall Street.”

You couldn’t find a politician more at odds with Jeff Merkley than Wisconsin’s John Gard, a Republican trying to take a GOP-leaning swing seat from Democrat Rep. Steve Kagen. Yet his message on the bailout is basically identical. “Now they want to give a huge bailout to Wall Street billionaires,” Gard says to the camera in a new ad. “You play by the rules and fall further behind while they break the rules, and Congress hands them your money.”

There’s no wiggle room here: None of the congressfolk who supported the bailout—and most did—are benefiting from it. Their tone is set by Georgia Rep. Jim Marshall, a perpetually endangered Democrat who is deflecting Republican attacks with an apology that is Jimmy Swaggartian in scope. ”I don’t like this rescue plan any better than you do,” he tells voters, sour-faced, in a new ad. “And I’m not interested in bailing out the irresponsible people who dragged us into this credit mess.” Subtext: “But I did it anyway. Let me keep my job!”

You'd expect some sort of libertarian backlash to be brewing—if you define libertarianism down to mean "not wanting to nationalize mortgages." There's not much evidence of it, although some bailout enemies are trying. In Massachusetts, libertarians are working to pass Question 1, a rerun of the 2002 ballot measure that would have repealed the income tax. Six years ago groups such as the Committee for Small Government and Citizens for Limited Taxation powered it to 45 percent of the vote. This year, according to the CSG's Carla Howell, the support on the ground is a little more noticeable, and the opposition of Massachusetts' political establishment is a lot more pronounced.

This weekend one of the protestors at a pro-Q1 rally showed reporters a sign he was proud of: "Bail Out Massachusetts Taxpayers!" Just like those Democratic and Republican challengers, here was an anti-tax activist channeling the anger of the hoi polloi against the government.

"The congressmen voting for the bailout," says Carla Howell, "have one financial qualification: They're on a first-name basis with the institutions that stuff their coffers. Beyond that they're unqualified to meddle with markets. People see the reaction to Katrina, the foul-out of the Big Dig, and this bailout, and that shakes their faith in government doing anything right."

Well, not quite. Faith in government was low before the bailout. Faith in Congress was lower. A Rasmussen poll taken right after the bailout showed voters ready to replace the entire Congress by a 4-1 margin. Faith in government has been low at least since Watergate. None of that matters, because both parties passed the bailout, and both candidates are defending it. On Tuesday night, John McCain even suggested expanding the role of the Treasury beyond the provisions of the bailout legislation, to purchase mortgages directly from homeowners.

Was the onus on John McCain to articulate a stance against the bailout? Should he have cracked open his Henry Hazlitt and explained why some industry failures are necessary for economic growth? Maybe he could have, but really, so could have anyone on the right. So could have Obama. But neither of them did, and a sort of gentleman's agreement developed: Anyone could complain about the bailout from a kneejerk populist stance, but no one could derail it. All you need to know about the craven political thinking at work came from the desk of Newt Gingrich, would-be idea man of the right, who first opposed any bailout, then publicly supported a bailout "reluctantly and sadly" about an hour before the House initially rejected the plan, and then pronounced McCain dead in the water for supporting the bailout at all.

The voter's place in all of this? McCain located it in a Wednesday campaign trail gaffe.

"Across this country," McCain said, "this is the agenda I have set before my fellow prisoners."

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Card Sharks

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 18:34:00 EDT

When Michigan state Rep. Fred Miller (D-Mount Clemens) got married in 2003, he received more gift cards than he knew what to do with. “I didn’t want to carry them in my wallet all the time,” he remembers. “Of course, some of them expired before I could use them.” The issue stuck with him, and when a constituent told Miller how annoyed she was about expiring gift cards, he pondered a possible solution: What if gift cards lasted longer?

Miller’s proposal became an amendment to the Michigan Consumer Protection Act, signed into law by Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm on July 12. Under the new law—which takes effect on November 1, just in time for the Christmas rush—gift cards sold in the state must last at least five years. That blue-and-gold Best Buy card slipped into your stocking this year can be redeemed in 2013 for the iPhone 13G: now with holographic conferencing!

The law passed with almost no objections, but the lobbyists who helped Miller are having second thoughts. “This started as a way to crack down on shady operators,” says Mary Dechow, director of government and regulatory affairs for the 89-location in-state supermarket chain Spartan Stores. “There were businesses taking advantage of people by selling one-month cards without broadcasting the fact that they lasted one month. It was important to crack down on that. But whenever you get a legislature involved, you go after the good actors as well as the bad.”

Dechow’s objections to the law include the rapid compliance schedule and the excessiveness of the five-year expiration window. “If you haven’t used a card after a year,” she says, “you’re not using it.” Miller isn’t worried about that. “People need to be confident,” he says, “that when they buy a gift card, it’s as good as cash.” His next priority: tax breaks for companies that hire Michigan workers wherever possible.

Divided in Nevada

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 11:51:00 EDT

It’s getting harder to find remnants of Ron Paul’s remarkable presidential campaign at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch. But they’re still there. On the wall, next to clips from Playboy and Smoke, you’ll find a framed local news story about a late 2007 press conference with brothel owner Dennis Hof and the libertarian Texas congressman. An eight-by-10-inch head shot of Paul hangs in the computer room. In the dining room, you can still see a picture of Hof and some of his girls clutching signs that spell out “Pimpin’ for Paul.”

But Hof ’s support is not transferable. In late August, as the Bob Barr campaign was scrambling for a national foothold, Hof was sitting in the Reno-Tahoe airport waiting for a flight to a Los Angeles charity auction. He told me he’s a one-man candidate and has no interest in backing the Libertarian Party nominee.

“Anybody who’s considering Bob Barr needs to understand that he’s a hypocrite, and that he lied about paying for an abortion for his first wife,” Hof said. He paused to answer a call from the plus-sized porn star Ron Jeremy. “I’d much rather these people just be honest. I’ve got my faults. I know what they are. I eat too much and I sleep with too many extremely hot 18- to-25-year-old girls. But I’m not a hypocrite.

Paul never seemed wholly comfortable with his Bunny Ranch support. Hof ’s enthusiasm was a symbol of just how far the rEVOLution reached. But the rancher’s disinterest in what the Libertarian Party is up to now is a symbol of something else: the rending of the Paul movement. Walk through a brothel or a casino, look up the low tax rates, and you’d figure Nevada was ripe for libertarian politics. It is, but not in a way that’s affecting the Obama-McCain slugfest.

The year began with a flurry of libertarian politicking. In January’s caucuses, Ron Paul placed second, behind Mitt Romney and ahead of John McCain. Paul’s army outnumbered and outsmarted the rank-and-file GOP, badly depleted by the national party’s problems and state party infighting. “There wouldn’t even have been a caucus in our area without Paul people,” says Juanita Cox, the head (until this summer) of the Storey County GOP.

Paul groups swelled. A Vegas Meetup attended by webbie Arden Osborne grew from fewer than 10 people to more than 200. “It just kept going up until those numbers came in from the caucuses, and it was clear that we weren’t going to jump all the hurdles the party had set up for us,” Osborne says. On the other side of the state, college libertarian leader Alyssa Cowan of the University of Nevada at Reno went through the same thing. “The most optimistic I ever was about this movement,” she says, “was about, oh, 11 p.m. the night before the caucus.”

After the caucus several hundred Paul supporters organized for the Republican state convention in Reno and won delegates, but the state party refused to send them to the national convention in Minneapolis. Instead a pro-McCain slate was appointed by conference call. The Paul backers sued. National media outlets started writing about the fissures in Nevada.

The dispute triggered a geographic split among Paul backers. In northern Nevada and in the state’s barren rural counties, Paulistas focused on shaming the Republican Party and fomenting a revolution at the Twin Cities convention. In Las Vegas, Osborne and others stayed in the GOP and focused on quietly taking it over for the long term. Paul supporters in both areas ran for office, but their most successful candidate was the Vegas-based state assembly candidate Andrew Brownson, whose door-knocking political organization earned him 23 percent of the vote, tying for second in a four-way primary. “If he’d started earlier,” says state Sen. Bob Beers, a Paul-sympathetic Republican who has grown exasperated with the convention coup faction of the movement, “he would have won that race.”

For the revolutionaries, Beers is part of the problem. He chaired the convention where the fracas began. Beers calls their story a “misdirection created by a minority of Paul supporters,” destructive to their influence in the party. “Losing is terrible,” Beers says, arms folded and shaking his head. “I hate to lose. But if you’re angry about what’s happening with the gavel, you get your own gavel. You
don’t subvert the Republican Party process.”

Lost in the middle of all this: the Bob Barr campaign. Nevada should be one of Barr’s best states. At a dinner of 12 Ron Paul Republicans at a Reno Claim Jumper restaurant, I ask how many of them will support Barr. Only one—Cowan—raises her hand. “He’s the only choice we’ve got,” she says. Two others are considering Chuck Baldwin of the paleoconservative Constitution Party. Cox questions whether electronic voting machines cut down Paul’s totals, rendering the whole question of who to vote for meaningless. The general attitude is summed up by video producer Cynthia Kennedy: “The big choice is whether to give up on the political process altogether.”

The small group of Libertarian Party activists in the Vegas area don’t have much of an organization of their own. “Someone needs to devote his time to rebuilding the party,” says Nate Santucci, the party’s secretary and a candidate for the state Assembly. “I can’t. I work all day. I’m on the road part of the year.”

Santucci’s day job is special effects coordinator for Penn & Teller’s five-nights-a-week magic show. It’s a “hotbed of libertarians,” says Penn Jillette—but not the kind of libertarians who are going to pound the pavement for Barr. Jillette is voting for Barr, but he’s not going to become some kind of celebrity advocate.

“I believe in individual rights so much that I don’t like any sort of ‘what’s good for the cause’-type questions,” Jillette says. “We have to leave open the possibility that the other side is right, even as we call them assholes.”

The party’s vice presidential nominee has no time for that kind of reluctance. From his sprawling home in a Henderson, Nevada, country club, overlooking the skyline of the Strip, Wayne Allyn Root hammers out press releases, books radio interviews (“No one has anything bad to say to me!”), and schedules appearances before conservative conferences and Meetup groups. He is concentrating on media instead of personal campaigning because there’s no infrastructure to build a personal campaign.

“We have to concentrate on this election,” says Root, a professional oddsmaker. “After the election, I want to build up the Libertarian Party of Nevada. When you go to a Republican fundraiser, you’re walking into a dining room at the Venetian and eating steak. The Libertarians are holding meetings at the back of a smoky bar.”

Root, who still has a photo of himself with George W. Bush on one of his walls, believes that wavering suburban Republicans, not Paul backers, are the winnable base for the state and national Libertarian parties. He rattles off interest groups he wants to bring into the party and talks about running for mayor of Las Vegas in 2011. He’s writing a book, The Conscience of a Libertarian, and transferring his interests from sports betting to investment banking and punditry. The theory is that if he sells the message, the party building will follow. “I suspect 40 years from now nobody will remember I was ever involved in gambling,” Root says. It’s kind of like Winston Churchill. Nobody knows anything about him except that he saved the world from Nazi Germany.”

But how much more selling does the libertarian message need in Nevada? Forget the legal gambling and prostitution: This is a state where Bob Beers was able to defeat an incumbent state senator because the latter pushed through a tax hike. Republicans shouldn’t be able to alienate libertarians and win elections here. “I’ve told the McCain people not to piss off the libertarians,” says political blogger Chuck Muth, a former Republican, now independent, who’s trying to find a friend in a safe Democratic state to vote Barr so he can vote McCain.

At the Bunny Ranch, there’s no talk of Barr among the staff. There’s a little discussion of Obama and McCain. Neither of them can touch this business, but they will not support the enterprise’s political values like Paul did either. “I don’t like either of them,” says Air Force Amy, the most famous of the Bunny Ranch girls. “I may move to Sweden.”

David Weigel (dweigel@reason.com) is an associate editor of reason.

Bob Barr Talks

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:00:00 EDT

On Memorial Day weekend, former four-term Republican Rep. Bob Barr took the stage at the Sheraton Denver and asked a skeptical Libertarian Party to make him its nominee for president. Hundreds of party delegates were dead set against his nomination. Anonymous flyers claimed the Georgian wanted to turn the Libertarians into "the New Republican Party." Barr's record in the House of Representatives, particularly his hostility toward medical marijuana and his support for President Bush's anti-terrorism policies, were widely seen as deal breakers.

"Many of you have come up to me and asked, ‘Bob, why did you author the Defense of Marriage Act?' " Barr told wary delegates. " ‘If you're so set against the PATRIOT Act, why did you vote for it?' Well, let me tell you: I have made mistakes. But the only way you make mistakes, the only way you get things done, is by getting out there in the arena and making those mistakes, and then realizing, as things go on, the mistakes that you've made. And I apologize for that."

That dramatic confession drew a burst of surprised applause from the ballroom. Hours later, Barr became the ninth man to lead the Libertarian Party into a general election.

Bob Barr is easily the most famous politician to represent the party. When Ron Paul won the nomination in 1988, the then-former Texas congressman was far from the national figure he is today. Barr's comparative notoriety, however, stems from some of the very activities he was atoning for in Denver, in addition to his aggressive role in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. His unlikely journey from drug warrior to Libertarian standard-bearer speaks volumes about how his views have changed, and also about how the conditions for Libertarian politics have changed—for the better.

Barr's public career began in 1986, when he was appointed the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia. There he prosecuted members of Pablo Escobar's drug cartel, jailed a Republican congressman for perjury, and consulted for the pro-market Southeastern Legal Foundation. In 1994 Barr was elected to Congress as part of the Newt Gingrich Revolution and became a dogged opponent of Clinton-era executive power. As a legislator, the staunchly anti-abortion, pro-drug war politician also wrote bills to limit the government's ability to tap phones and intercept cell phone calls, tighten the laws governing civil asset forfeitures, and shrink the duration of firearm background checks. In most of those cases both parties opposed him.

When Georgia Democrats redrew their state congressional map in 2002, they sliced up Barr's district and left him scrambling to run in a different one. The Libertarian Party, angered by Barr's opposition to medical marijuana, ran ads against him in the Republican primary, helping ensure his defeat. Barr then rebuilt his career as a lawyer, consultant, and pundit with a jaundiced eye on the Bush administration's post-9/11 abuses of civil liberties. He endorsed Libertarian presidential nominee Michael Badnarik in 2004, and in 2006 he officially joined the party as a regional representative. At the time he denied interest in a presidential run. But he entered this year's race shortly before the Libertarian convention, started building a staff, and is now aiming to be on 48 state ballots as a "viable third option" for the presidency.

Associate Editor David Weigel spoke to Bob Barr in May, just before the convention, and again in August. For a video interview with the candidate, go to reason.tv/barr.

reason: In 2006, when you joined the Libertarian Party, you told reason that you were not interested in running for anything else. What changed?

Bob Barr: A couple of things. First of all, since 2006 civil liberties have continued to be under assault by this administration and by Washington generally. At the national level—in both the Congress, with very few exceptions, and in the administration, with no exception—the assault on the right to privacy and other civil liberties, the assault on the notion that we are a nation that lives by the rule of law, not by the rule of men, continues to move forward at an accelerating pace.

There's a very interesting quote by Dante Alighieri: "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis remain neutral." So even though continuing to work as a member of the Libertarian National Committee certainly provided an appropriate forum and an opportunity to work to restore liberty and freedom in America, the process has accelerated so greatly that it was absolutely essential to enter the fray.

reason: Some of what you're talking about, though, you supported in Congress. You voted for the Iraq war.

Bob Barr: The Iraq war was presented as something that was based on sound intelligence: a clear and present danger, an immediate threat targeting the United States by the Saddam Hussein regime. We now know that the intelligence was not there to support those arguments. Many of us, including myself, gave the administration the benefit of the doubt, presumed that this would be an operation that was well founded, well thought-out, well strategized, when in fact it wasn't. There was no clear strategy, and we've paid a very, very heavy price for that.

After five years our government is spending humongous amounts of U.S. taxpayer dollars, somewhere upwards of $400 million every single day, to do something that the president said we should never do and would never do, and that is to build a nation. That's not the appropriate role for our military. It's not the appropriate role or goal for a legitimate national defense policy if the emphasis is on defense.

reason: What do you think about the claim by people on the right that radical Islam is a threat similar to communism?

Bob Barr: The Soviet Union and other communist nations, such as China, very clearly were adversarial to us. The entire thrust of their policies was anti-United States, and they created problems for us in a number of areas around the world. That has nothing to do with what's going on in Iraq. The occupation of Iraq should rise or fall on its own. I think it's a very bad foreign policy, a very inappropriate use of our military and a huge number of taxpayer dollars. I would as president begin immediately extricating ourselves, both economically and militarily, from Iraq. It is a bad policy, and it is a counterproductive policy.

reason: What about the PATRIOT Act?

Bob Barr: This was presented to us immediately after 9/11. I took what might be called sort of a leadership role in Congress in marshaling a lot of different groups in opposition both to the PATRIOT Act generally and to specific onerous provisions in it. Several factors caused me to sort of go against my gut reaction and vote for the PATRIOT Act.

The administration did in fact work with us and agree to several pre-vote changes to the PATRIOT Act that did mitigate some of the more problematic provisions in it. The administration also, from the attorney general on down, gave us personal assurances that the provisions in the PATRIOT Act, if they were passed and signed into law, would be used judiciously, that they would not be used to push the envelope of executive power, that they would not be used in non-terrorismrelated cases. They gave us assurances that they would work with us on those provisions that we were able to get sunsetted, work with us to modify those and to look at those very carefully when those provisions came up for reauthorization. The administration also gave us absolute assurances that it would work openly and thoroughly report to the Congress, and by extrapolation to the American people, on how it was using the provisions in the PATRIOT Act. In every one of those areas, the administration has gone back on what it told us.

reason: When the District of Columbia had a nonbinding referendum about decriminalization of medical marijuana in 1998, you wanted them not to count the votes. Do you regret doing that? How have you changed your views on decriminalization and on the war on drugs?

Bob Barr: It's a very legitimate question, and it's one that I've dealt with at great length with a lot of Libertarians.

As I've looked both at the way the drug war has been fought and at the overall substantial growth in government power—which as you know always comes at the expense of the liberty and the freedom of the people; there's nothing, no power that government exercises that is not the result of taking power from the people—the way the federal government has approached the war against drugs has been one that tramples on the very notion of federalism, which used to be one of the underpinnings of the Republican Party. And in that context, to now see the manner in which the administration has fought tooth and nail against any dilution of its absolute power over the states to completely run roughshod in the areas of drug use, even to the extent of refusing to allow legitimate testing to determine whether or not medicinal marijuana meets the criteria laid out in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act—that's very disingenuous. That's very improper.

reason: You called that "voodoo," the idea that marijuana could be used for medical purposes. You were debating Neal Boortz and dismissed it out of hand.

Bob Barr: I think what's really voodoo about this is the way the administration disingenuously says the Controlled Substances Act itself provides a mechanism whereby if there really are valid medicinal uses for marijuana, then certainly we'll consider those, and if they meet the criteria, we'll decriminalize it, take it off of Schedule I, for example. The fact of the matter is that the government has placed roadblock after roadblock in front of any legitimate testing of medicinal marijuana in order to meet the very criteria that the law lays down. That to me is voodoo. Not voodoo economics but voodoo government policy.

What's been very important to my epiphany in this area has been the fact that since 9/11, the speed and scope of the government's assault on individual liberty has become so profound, so pervasive, and so rooted in this notion that the federal government, the executive branch in particular, has plenary power to do whatever it wants. That has caused me to go back and look very carefully at a number of areas in which previously I might've been prone to give the government the benefit of the doubt. We cannot afford any longer to give the government a benefit of the doubt in these areas. We have to go back and try to reclaim them for the individual in terms of liberty.

reason: Would that extend to obscenity prosecution as well? What about the Justice Department prosecuting adult entertainment producers for things that it finds obscene?

Bob Barr: We have well in excess of 4,000 federal criminal laws on the books, to say nothing of all of the civil regulatory edicts that the government has available to it or that the states have available to them. There are over 4,000 different federal criminal laws! That's one reason why we have such a pervasive government presence in our society. That's why federal prosecutors and attorneys general as well—Eliot Spitzer when he was the attorney general up in New York, for example—have been able to use that very heavy hand of prosecution to dictate social behavior. And every year that goes by, not fewer but more criminal laws are placed on the books.

Regulating speech is not something that I believe is or should be in the so-called quiver of weapons that the federal government should have available to it. Particularly here again, as the federal presence has become so pervasive, so oppressive, we really have to take a proactive responsibility to go back and start looking at every one of these areas. Is this really a legitimate area for the government to be involved in? And with regard to obscenity, no, it isn't. That's an area where schools ought to be involved, where parents ought to be involved, where the telecommunications companies and the entertainment industry ought to be involved, but not the federal government. Certainly not from the standpoint of criminal laws.

reason: How would you characterize your philosophy? You've described yourself as a Randian. Unpack that.

Bob Barr: I don't know that anybody is a perfect Randian. I have a very high regard for Ayn Rand, her philosophy, her writings, and the ideas that continue to resonate surprisingly well in our society more than 50 years after Atlas Shrugged and 65 years after The Fountainhead was published. To me the philosophy that is at the core of Ayn Rand, that is at the core of the Libertarian Party, and that is at the core of my philosophy of what government should be doing, is that the government should exercise those powers that are clearly delineated to it and, in addition to that, are essential to allow the citizens to operate with the maximum amount of freedom in our society. In other words, scaling back tremendously, for example, that scope of federal criminal laws.

Even if Bob Barr were president or another Libertarian were president, none of these changes would be accomplished dramatically and instantaneously. But if we don't commit ourselves very consciously to the process, to start unraveling the power of the federal government in particular, I fear the notion that the federal government is able to and should be the supreme authority in a whole range of domestic behavior will be so entrenched, so established, so systematized, that it will from a practical standpoint be impossible to unravel. In that sense, I think this current cycle and the next few years are the sort of the last best hope, as Reagan said, to unravel the oppressive statism that has grown up in our society.

And it's the result not just of these social issues. It's the result, I think, also very much of the power of the government to regulate in the economic sphere. Government regulates so much of what goes on in business and in our economy at all levels, from the personal through the state to the federal level, that it has acclimated people to think of the federal government as not just the last but the first resort to solve problems that people perceive in this society. That is not the job of the federal government.

reason: Do you still think it was justified to impeach Bill Clinton?

Bob Barr: Absolutely. I believe in the rule of law.

The impeachment of Bill Clinton, I think, was a very appropriate exercise of legislative power in this country. Congress clearly has the constitutional power and the responsibility to assure itself on behalf of the American people that a president is operating within the bounds of the law, a responsibility that very, very few Congresses even understand anymore. Look at the sorry oversight experiences of the Congresses under the last several administrations. They rarely view as their responsibility assuring that the executive operates within the laws and with the intent of the laws that Congress has passed and the presidents have signed.

Where you have a president who violates those laws, if they are of the sort that go directly to the character of the presidency, not the president but the presidency, and the operation within the constitutional separation-of-powers framework that our Framers gave us through the Constitution, then I think it's imperative for the Congress to step in. The basis on which I had filed back in November of 1997 the first inquiry of impeachment had nothing to do with Monica Lewinsky or the subsequent obstruction of justice and perjury by the former president. It had to do with other issues that we were never able to secure support from the Republican leadership in the Congress to move forward on, and those related to possibly trading national security information and procedures, national security-related technology, in return for foreign monies coming into our electoral process, directly to the White House in some instances.

We were unable to get the Republican leadership to move forward on the basis that was the primary reason for our initial inquiry. Then the information came in on the obstruction and the perjury. To me, perjury and obstruction were of the sort of potential offenses on the part of a president that went to the character and nature of the presidency, that would provide and should have provided the appropriate basis for an impeachment.

reason: Who's your model Supreme Court justice, living or dead?

Bob Barr: I don't agree with him on several of his substantive opinions, but in terms of the approach and the background and the intellect that he brings to the arguments on the bench, it would be Antonin Scalia. I think he is a very, very fine jurist.

Pretty much all of the justices who have taken the bench in the last several cycles are far too ready to defer to the executive branch in terms of executive branch power. They are far too ready to concede plenary power to the executive branch over anything that might be called national security, whether it is or it isn't. That worries me a great deal.

reason: What Cabinet-level positions do you think could be abolished?

Bob Barr: I would certainly start with the Department of Education. There is, to me, no legitimate basis whatsoever to have the federal government involved in education, period, and certainly to the extent of having a multibillion-dollar federal agency setting the standard for schools in our country.

The Department of Energy to me has no broad legitimate function. If there are some legitimate purposes for having the federal government involved, for example, in assuring the security of atomic materials, that is a very limited function that can and should be more properly handled by the Department of Defense. It does not require a Department of Energy.

The Department of Commerce, to my mind, has no legitimate Cabinet-level function. If there are legitimate functions of the federal government in the commerce area to assure free interstate commerce under the Commerce Clause, that could be handled either through the Department of Justice, assuring that the laws against infringing interstate commerce are appropriately enforced, or maybe by having a very much smaller Commerce Office.

reason: If you were in Congress these last six years, do you think you would have started an inquiry or voted to impeach President Bush?

Bob Barr: I think there clearly were and remain areas that Congress needs to look into from an executive branch abuse standpoint. Whether or not that rises to the level of impeachment, we don't know yet, and I wouldn't speculate on that. But I do believe in the area, for example, of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, systemic abuses, based on a completely alien notion that the chief executive can ignore laws whenever the chief executive decides to, should be investigated.

There are other areas that have come to light recently. For example, the latest memo by John Yoo that relates to the notion that domestic military operations are not subject to the Fourth Amendment. That raises a threshold question: What are we talking about, "domestic military operations"? The federal government should not be involved militarily in domestic operations. What are they doing here? What authorities have they been abusing? Have they actually been operating in violation of the Fourth Amendment? Those clearly are legitimate avenues of inquiry.

reason: What do you think can be or should be done with 12 million undocumented people? Do you think it's a government role to keep track of those people, and potentially move them out of the country?

Bob Barr: Certainly. It is a proper function, in my view, of the government to know who is coming into the country and who is here under different types of visas and for different, lawful purposes. One of the reasons why the terrorists succeeded on 9/11 and on the days leading up to 9/11 is that the government was not tracking those who are in this country under various visas and various procedures. Obviously the results of not doing that can be devastating.

I believe it is a perfectly legitimate function of the government to provide visas, different types, for those who wish to enter the country, whether for work, education, or simply visiting. I believe in a very, very open system of visas for people who wish to enter this country. The criteria need to be that they submit themselves to having a reasonable background check to assure ourselves reasonably that they do not pose a security risk to this country and submit themselves to a basic health check to assure ourselves reasonably that they don't have a communicable disease.

For those who are currently in this country unlawfully, I do not believe in trying to round them up. I think that would require such an oppressive immigration or law enforcement presence that it would be completely counterproductive in terms of liberty and freedom. But I do believe if people who are in this country unlawfully do not submit themselves to coming back in lawfully according to the same terms as those people who are now seeking to enter the country, they should be deported if they are found out.

reason: What is the harm of having people who came here from Ecuador or Mexico, without documentation, if they're not otherwise committing crimes?

Bob Barr: It has to do with basic respect for the rule of law and respect for a country's sovereignty. If people do not have that respect for the law, and if people do not have that respect for our sovereignty, they have no business being here. If someone wants to enter this country, they need to do so lawfully so that our government knows who is coming in, and if they are here under a temporary visa, that we know that they are here under a temporary visa. When the terms of that are up, they need to submit themselves to a change in their status. I think it is a legitimate function of government to control its own borders and protect its own sovereignty.

reason: Libertarians are getting creamed when it comes to smoking and what's in food. Why do you think the momentum's on the other side?

Bob Barr: I suspect it's because we don't have at the appropriate level of government strong spokespeople to raise these issues and to get the appropriate pro-liberty view before the relevant government officials or the voters. It is very distressing to see these things happen, whether it's in New York, by virtue of Mayor Bloomberg, or in California, by virtue of his soul mate Arnold Schwarzenegger.

reason: An issue that really animated Ron Paul's campaign was whether there should be a Federal Reserve. What's your take on that, and how much of a priority do you make that in talking about the economy?

Bob Barr: The primary focus of our campaign is to begin shrinking the size, the power, the scope, and the cost of the federal government, even before we begin focusing on, for example, specific tax reform measures. The first order of business is to get a handle on the fiscal size of the federal government. They just raised the debt ceiling by $800 billion to $10.6 trillion, if I'm not mistaken. The president's budget, which is going to be nearly $500 billion in red ink at the end of this fiscal year, is well over $3 trillion. These sums bear no relationship to the reasonable function, the reasonable expenditures, of the federal government, and account for, in large measure, the economic problems we're having in this country. We've got to get a handle, first and foremost, on government spending.

If we allow ourselves to be drawn off that primary message, the priority message of this campaign, by getting into a theoretical discussion of the Federal Reserve, then it's going to be very difficult for us to reach the American public in a way that they can relate to, which is how much of their money the federal government is taking and spending on programs that it has no business getting involved in. Like $70 billion, give or take, with the Department of Education.

Now, as a longer-term measure, yes, that would be a goal of our administration. I do not believe it is appropriate for unelected, unaccountable individuals—that is, the Federal Reserve Board members—to be controlling and attempting to manage our economy. We are moving right now in the direct opposite direction than I would take, through the forced takeover of Bear Stearns, the involvement of the Fed in the mortgage business.

reason: You observed the 2004 Libertarian presidential campaign from the outside. What mistakes did you see? How would you correct them as a third-party candidate yourself?

Bob Barr: I'm certainly not so presumptuous as to tell the Libertarian Party what it ought to be doing or what it's done wrong in the past. But I think it is a responsibility that I have as a life member of the Libertarian Party, as a member of the Libertarian National Committee, and as a nominee to not engage in certain behavior or certain strategies that clearly are doomed to failure.

I think one thing the Libertarian Party needs to do is to present its message of freedom and liberty to the American people through candidates that the American people can relate to, and in words and priorities that the American people can understand. So that, for example, rather than talk hypothetically about executive branch power or hypothetically about the high cost of regulation, talk about these issues in ways that the small business owner, that the American family, that the individual voter and citizen in this country can understand.

If you talk about these issues in very vague, hypothetical terms, or you talk about issues that are going to scare the American public, I think you're making a mistake. You can make the same point, you can move that Libertarian agenda forward much more rapidly, if you keep in mind that your audience is not necessarily going to be fellow Libertarians, it's going to be fellow Americans. And you have to recognize also that in the heart of every American beats a libertarian about something. Every citizen in this country, I believe, has some area of their lives—whether it's their personal behavior within their homes, whether it's how to educate and discipline their children, whether it's about how to run their business, their political thought, their religious practices—where they want to be left alone. The Libertarian Party, I think, needs to recognize that and appeal to that and draw that out from the American public and the American voters, rather than talk just generally about great philosophical principles.

reason: How do you feel now about losing your House seat in 2002?

Bob Barr: I didn't set out to lose in 2002, and I certainly was not happy about losing in 2002, but to be honest with you, I lost not one moment of sleep over it. It happened. We moved on. You look for new opportunities. Those new opportunities presented themselves to me, to some extent, in the form of the Libertarian Party.

The fact that the Libertarian Party worked against me in 2002 caused me to look very hard at the Libertarian Party. Not as an adversary—not with any bitterness. I looked at the Libertarian Party because I believed there was something that they did and stood for that they were able to tap into that maybe I should pay closer attention to, and look at why I lost that election, not blame somebody else for it. I never blamed the Libertarian Party or anybody for my loss. That irritates me a little bit with the Republicans and the Democrats who denigrate any third-party candidate who might have the audacity to rear their head above the weeds and say "I'm going to run."

The two major parties seem to think that they have a God-given right to be the only players on the political field, and therefore if somebody else runs and gains enough votes, the major-party candidates can somehow through their flawed logic say, "Aha, I lost because this third-party candidate took votes." It's absolutely inappropriate. It's un-American. What Sen. McCain, if he is unsuccessful in the 2008 election, ought to do, is look back, along with his colleagues in the Republican Party, and do some soul searching. Why did we lose the election? What was it about our message and our platform, if there was one, that didn't resonate sufficiently with the American people? Why was this candidate not attractive enough to the people? Do that, and try to improve their message and their platform perhaps, rather than simply blame somebody else.

reason: Do you worry about being ostracized, as Ralph Nader was by liberals in 2000, or losing influence and the ability to speak out on some of this stuff?

Bob Barr: No, I don't worry about it. I believe I have developed over the years a marketable credibility on the issues about which I was asked to speak. That's not going to change. I fully intend to continue working on the same areas, and continue, I hope, to have credibility on issues like privacy, separation of powers, executive power, and congressional oversight.

Idiocracy Now!

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 17:54:00 EDT

Keep It Clean

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:56:00 EDT

For the last 22 years, it has been relatively easy to bring charges of money laundering against people concealing or moving large amounts of cash. In June the U.S. Supreme Court made it a little harder, ruling for defendants in two money laundering cases.

The 1986 Money Laundering Control Act broadly criminalized attempts to "conceal or disguise" the origin of ill-gotten lucre. That gave police the leeway to charge Humberto Cuellar with the crime after they pulled him over to search for drugs and found goat hair scattered around his Volkswagen Beetle-apparently an attempt to conceal the recent presence of marijuana in the car from drug-sniffing dogs. "Trooper Nuñez," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority in Cuellar v. United States, "doubted that goats couldfit in such a small space."

Police searched the car and found $81,000 bundled in a hidden compartment. Thomas said the money laundering charge brought against Cuellar could not be "satisfied solely by evidence that a defendant concealed the funds during their transport." According to the Court, transporting proceeds from illegal drug sales does not in itself constitute money laundering, which requires an intent to "conceal or disguise the nature, the location, the source, the ownership, or the control" of ill-gotten gains.

The same day that Cuellar came down, the Court affirmed a lower court's ruling in United States v. Santos. Efrain Santos of Indiana had already broken the law by holding an unauthorized lottery; prosecutors nailed him again on the grounds that passing out lottery profits to winners was a form of money laundering, since the statute prohibits the use of "proceeds" from illegal activity to carry on further illegal activity.

The Court disagreed, interpreting "proceeds" to mean profits, as opposed to revenue. "Allowing the Government to treat the mere payment of an illegal gambling business' operating expenses as a separate offense is in practical effect tantamount to double jeopardy," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, concurring with the majority.

These clarifications should mean fewer trumped-up charges of money laundering. Anthony Green, a representative of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers who filed amicus briefs for the defendants in both cases, told reporters the decision will "significantly raise the bar" for prosecutors and reduce abuse of the statute.

Obama's Wars

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Six years ago, Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama walked onstage at Chicago's Richard J. Daley Plaza and launched his national political career. "Although this has been billed as an antiwar rally," the Chicago Democrat said to the assembled, "I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances." He reminded the crowd of his grandfather's service in World War II. He admitted that "the world would be better off without" Saddam Hussein. "What I am opposed to," he said, "is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats."

It was pure red meat, and the anti-Bush, anti-neoconservative crowd ate up every scrap. As Obama navigated a wide-open Democratic primary, he repeatedly pointed to this speech as proof of his fidelity on the war. "It was just, well, a well-constructed speech," the candidate later told his biographer David Mendell. "In some ways, it was not a typical anti-war speech."

This is true. It wasn't a blanket anti-war speech, even though it helped Obama win a U.S. Senate seat and then a presidential nomination through the enthusiasm of anti-war voters. Obama has attracted support not just from the left but also from the traditionalist right and the libertarian sphere on the strength of his early and firm opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Some of those voters have the impression that an Obama vote is a vote against the paradigm of global intervention and preemptive war.

They are wrong. Obama believes all of what he said six years ago in Chicago. He has called for, or retroactively endorsed, interventions in Zimbabwe, Pakistan, and Sudan. He has advocated a humanitarian-based foreign policy for his entire public career. Since coming to the U.S. Senate in 2005, he has built up a brain trust of academics and ex-Clintonites who, like him, challenge the logic of the Iraq war but not the logic of wars like Iraq. John McCain looks at American military power and sees a way to "roll back" rogue states. Obama looks at American military power and sees a way to solve international and intranational conflict, regardless of the conflict's immediate impact on national security. McCain seeks to aggressively confront imminent threats. Obama wants to do the same, while forestalling threats of tomorrow with just as much military vigor.

Steve Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the center-left New American Foundation, has watched with mounting disappointment as Obama clarifies his stance on foreign interventions. "He's not the Obama we thought he was," Clemons says.

Clemons, not alone among liberal foreign policy analysts, believes Obama listens to two groups of experts: liberal interventionists and "progressive realists." The latter group, rattled by the Iraq war, agrees with one of Obama's most traditional homilies from his memoir The Audacity of Hope: "There are few examples in history in which the freedom men and women crave is delivered through outside intervention." But statements like that are not at the heart of Barack Obama's foreign policy. Liberal interventionism is.

It's true Obama doesn't have a long record of foreign policy stances. "He's not fully formed," argues the conservative military historian (and Obama supporter) Andrew Bacevich. "The paper trail is thin," says Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. Nonetheless, the candidate's views are not hard to discern. He believes the United States makes itself safer by promoting "dignity" in other nations through diplomacy and foreign aid. He also believes crumbling societies and failed regimes such as Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe must be confronted by the international community, including the United States, before they ignite and become threats. And while he sees Iraq as a "dumb war," he's game for smart warfare in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama's views started to crystallize when he came to Washington. The new senator fished around for foreign policy talent and scheduled a brief dinner with Samantha Power, a professor at Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and the author of the 2002 book "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide. The dinner went on for hours. Soon Power was taking a weekly shuttle from Boston to Washington to tutor Obama on foreign policy.

Power believes the United States creates long-term problems when it fails to intervene in failing states or to protect threatened populations. "Security for Americans at home and abroad is contingent on international stability," she writes in "A Problem from Hell", "and there is perhaps no greater source of havoc than a group of well-armed extremists bent on wiping out a people on ethnic, national, or religious grounds." That is what Obama now believes. In May 2006, he co-sponsored an amendment to an emergency Iraq and Afghanistan funding bill that added $60 million for U.N. peacekeeping efforts in Darfur. At the same time he was writing The Audacity of Hope, where he reiterated the reasons for rescuing states from failure. "If moral claims are insufficient for us to act as a continent implodes," Obama wrote, "there are certainly instrumental reasons why the United States and its allies should care about failed states."

Obama's advisers don't pretend that their candidate is moving very far from the legacy of Bill Clinton—a legacy of humanitarian interventionism that provided some of the moral and legal justifications for Iraq. The problems of this decade, in their view, came because the Bush administration looked at unilateral action as a first course of action and multilateralism as a patina, gathering allies after military decisions had already been made. That's the reverse of what Obama says he wants: multilateralism first and unilateralism as a last resort.

In the summer of 2007, Obama voiced support for the use of unilateral tactical strikes in Pakistan if the country's government was unwilling or unable to go after terrorists. The resulting backlash from Republicans, fellow Democrats, and pundits was one of the reasons Obama scheduled an October speech at Chicago's DePaul University to defend his foreign policy. "We cannot—we must not—let the promotion of our values be a casualty of the Iraq war," he said.

Anti-interventionists such as Bacevich say the prospective president may yet help end the past two presidents' legacy of intervention. "The idea is not that Obama is some kind of closet conservative," says Bacevich. If elected, "this liberal Democrat has promised to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq," and "if history renders a negative verdict on Iraq, that judgment will discredit the doctrine of preventive war."

But it will not discredit all war, at least not for Obama. The senator believes in humanitarian intervention so deeply that he's already blundered by interfering in the affairs of troubled states. Two years ago, on his first senatorial visit to Kenya, his father's birthplace, Obama delivered a speech at the University of Nairobi that blistered the country's rulers for corruption. Graft, Obama said, is "a crisis that's robbing an honest people of opportunities they have fought for." The speech emboldened the country's opposition, which nearly won the 2007 elections. When reformers didn't win and rioting voters cried theft, Obama begged for calm. "Despite irregularities in the vote tabulation," he said, now is not the time to throw that strong democracy away."

There was a lesson in this, but there was no sign that Obama had learned it: If McCain-style neoconservatism can cause blowback, so can wide-ranging liberal interventionism. The two candidates have a rigidity to their worldviews that's unlike anything we saw from the easily led George W. Bush or the desperate-to-look-tough John Kerry. Obama has taken what he likes from Clinton's brain trust and welded it to his own vision of intervention. Plenty of likeminded liberals agreed with Obama about the Iraq war—that it was an aberration, an unusually bad war botched by a Republican president. They may not necessarily share his views about the next war.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Who Killed Real ID?

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:00:00 EDT

September 11? Don't get Karen Johnson started about September 11. "I simply don't buy that terrorists took the twin towers down," says the Arizona state senator, a 12-year Republican veteran of the legislature. Johnson laughs and sighs. "Come on! World Trade Center Building Seven wasn't even hit by an airplane! To me, 9/11 was a big cover-up."

It's the afternoon of June 18, and Johnson has been having a pretty good day. Hours earlier, Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano signed House Bill 2677 into law, making Arizona the 20th state to adopt a resolution or statute opting out of the Real ID Act of 2005, which mandated that all 50 states and the District of Columbia switch to a standardized, database-compatible driver's license by May 11, 2008.

Arizona's anti-ID law, penned by Johnson, has teeth. State bureaucrats are required to "report to the governor and the legislature any attempt by agencies or agents" of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to cajole some kind of compliance. Gov. Napolitano, elected in 2002, is a rising Democratic star who was reportedly vetted by Barack Obama's campaign as a potential vice president. Johnson's relationship with her own party is somewhat less cozy. She voted against John McCain, Arizona's favorite son, in the state presidential primary and endorsed Ron Paul instead. She has been pilloried for her connections to the ultraconservative John Birch Society and for her very public suggestions—one of them made on the floor of the state Senate—that 9/11 was an inside job. The anti-conspiracy Web site Screw Loose Change calls her a "kook." Johnson can take it: She calls herself a "rightwing nut."

Deride them all you want, but the nuts are winning real victories for liberty, assembling a ragtag coalition that has managed to beat back one of the most egregious recent assaults on individual privacy. "I think Real ID is done in Arizona," says Mary Lunetta, an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) liaison who worked with Johnson on HB 2677. "It's over." Michael Hough, a coordinator for the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, thinks Real ID will meet a similar fate at the federal level. "Even the administration has backed off of implementing Real ID," Hough says. "It's not going to happen as it stands now."

The left/right, mainstream/fringe hydra of a movement to defeat Real ID in Arizona is a template that has worked in state after state. These strange, sweet victories are a sign that the United States is rediscovering its civil libertarian roots after the momentous disruption of 9/11.

A Skeptical Tradition

Americans probably would never have suffered through a debate over national ID cards—much less a bill mandating them—but for the attacks of September 11, 2001. Biometric identification cards have been rejected by panel after panel, pol after pol, pitchfork-wielding mob after pitchforkwielding mob, ever since the technology came online. In 1973, the year that the 12-digit Universal Product Code made its debut, the House of Representatives' Health, Education, and Welfare Advisory Committee rejected a national ID system on the grounds that it "would enhance the likelihood of arbitrary or uncontrolled linkage of records about people."

As the years passed, the consensus held. In 1977 the congressionally mandated Privacy Protection Study Commission, confronting the problem of identity theft, warned that a national ID and database of personal information would create more problems than they solved. It recommended that bureaucrats "halt the incremental drift toward creation of a standard universal label and central population register" until legislators found a way to keep the information secure.

In part, the commission's reluctance reflected the post-Watergate cynicism and paranoia of the 1970s. But its decision was also rooted in a historical and uniquely American aversion to having the central government issue—and demand on request—uniform ID cards. That cantankerous tradition flared up again in the early 1990s, when the Clinton administration's health care plan was attached to a system of biometric cards. Add to that the objections by affected interests such as state governments and "sin" industries, and opposition to a national ID scheme seemed etched in concrete.

Then came 9/11. During 2004 hearings held by the congressionally created National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, centralized ID made a comeback. The 9/11 commission ended up recommending some sort of biometric standardization of identification to prevent terrorists from collecting fake IDs the way some of the 19 hijackers had, although that recommendation was one of the few that didn't make into the December 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act. The law did, however, authorize a Real ID Advisory Committee to research possibilities for national standards. States, tech companies, and congressional staffs started cobbling together ideas.

"This was a state function that we were trying to keep a state function, albeit with national standards," recalls David Quam, a researcher at the National Governors Association who worked on the project. Other advocates shared Quam's localist approach. "The goal was to put the states in charge," says Brian Zimmer, who ran interference on the project between states and legislators on behalf of the House Judiciary Committee before becoming president of the lobbying group the Coalition for a Secure National ID. "The Department of Homeland Security, ideally, wouldn't even be involved with this."

But then the House of Representatives circumvented the process by pushing Real ID to the front of the legislative line. The impetus had little to do with terrorism and much to do with the incendiary politics of immigration.

Swept in by a Tsunami

In January 2005, Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.) called for a Social Security card that would contain a biometric photo ID to prevent illegal immigrant day laborers from using bogus Social Security numbers to get jobs. Dreier, a powerful and telegenic congressman first elected back in 1980, had nearly lost his long-safe seat two months earlier thanks to a national anti-immigration backlash headquartered in his own Orange County district. Chastened, he vowed to crack down on illegal immigrants by making Social Security cards much harder to get, although not, he promised, to the point of transforming them into national ID cards. To allay such fears, Dreier promised to stamp them with a disclaimer: "This is not a national ID card."

The proposal didn't make it to a vote, but the idea wasn't dead. House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) had a more effective strategy. In January 2005 he introduced the Real ID Act, watched it pass the House by a vote of 261 to 161, but saw it die on the way to the Senate. So Sensenbrenner, who had been pushing for some sort of biometric national ID card since the 1990s, attached Real ID to an $83.6 billion March 2005 emergency supplemental spending bill to fund relief in Pacific nations devastated by the December 2004 tsunami. The House passed the package by a vote of 388 to 43, the Senate authorized a version by a vote of 99 to 0, and within two short months Real ID was signed into law by President George Bush. States had three years to develop IDs with machine-readable data (such as a bar code), verified by local departments of motor vehicles, linked together with databases that could be accessed by all other states.

Real ID had problems unrelated to civil liberties. It demanded compliance from the states on a series of hard, nonnegotiable deadlines, the first one coming in May 2008, when citizens of states with below-compliance IDs would run into problems when they boarded planes or crossed state lines. It mandated a national database of biometric information, a technical undertaking for which no federal agency was ready. There was never any serious estimate of how much money states would have to spend to bring their driver's licenses into compliance, and no federal money was allocated for the purpose. States would have to dig into their own funds to radically reform their own ID systems.

Two days after Bush signed the law, the National Governors Association, which had long been lobbying for a national ID card, came out against it. "Several of the requirements included in the Emergency Supplemental," it complained in a statement, "particularly those having to do with verification of documents used to acquire an ID, are either technologically or fiscally prohibitive." The National Conference of State Legislators weighed in against the law too. So the two largest associations of politicians who would have to implement Real ID had hardened into dedicated opponents.

Sensenbrenner, the DHS, and their allies in the tech industry still seemed to have the upper hand. The tone of the press coverage, like the mood among state legislators, was resigned. "Like it or Not, National IDs Are Coming," read a typical headline in the Austin-American Statesman. A Connecticut woman named Mary Long wrote to USA Today in favor of the idea, saying, "I certainly don't mind standing in line longer or providing multiple documents to obtain my driver's license in the interest of a more secure country."

But the new system required more than slightly longer lines. Congress had not appropriated the money needed to initiate the transition from many divergent state IDs to one national standard, a change requiring the root-and-branch transformation of thousands of motor vehicle departments. "The government had no idea what it was getting into," says Quam. "They thought this would cost $100 million, total, and they didn't even give confidence that the money would be coming soon."

Live Free or Die

At the beginning of 2006, the Department of Homeland Security offered New Hampshire and Tennessee $3 million each for a test of Real ID. New Hampshire was exactly the wrong place to begin. The Live Free or Die state, home to the libertarian Free State Project, was rife with anti-Real ID activists. The Granite State ID Coalition, a grab bag of groups ranging from the state Libertarian Party to the liberal Democracy for New Hampshire (founded by the remnants of Howard Dean's presidential campaign), had launched a word-of-mouth effort against the law. Among the gaggle of local libertarian-leaning politicians, it seemed likely that one would arise to carry the anti-Real ID standard.

In March, Rep. Neal Kurk (R-Weare), already a Real ID skeptic, was strolling between the State Capitol in Concord and his office when he ran into a fellow Republican, Rep. Richard Marple of Hookset. "He was an oddball," Kurk remembers, "but I overheard him talking about the Real ID Act and asked what he was working on." Marple showed Kurk his draft of an anti-Real ID bill, a rambling document that listed all of Marple's constitutional objections to the law. "I explained to him that this would never pass," Kurk says, "and that if he wanted it to, I should rewrite it."

Kurk composed a bill opting the state out of Real ID and turning down the $3 million grant—"the bribe," he called it. In committee, his proposal failed by a vote of 12 to 1. On April 14, when the bill was scheduled to be read in the House (despite the vote), Kurk took to the floor to make his pitch.

Yes, he acknowledged, if the Real ID deadline passed without New Hampshire's compliance, the federal government might make good on its threat to bar residents from traveling on airplanes using their driver's licenses for identification. Yes, the state would be turning down a sizable pile of money. "I don't believe that the people of New Hampshire elected us to help the federal government create a national identification card," he said. "We care more for our liberties than to meekly hand over to the federal government the potential to enumerate, track, identify, and eventually control us."

The speech was effective. On May 3, 2006, the New Hampshire legislature passed HB 1582, a bill creating "a commission to study" Real ID and prohibiting compliance until the study was completed. "That $3 million bribe was tempting," says state Sen. Peter Burling (D-Cornish), who sponsored the Senate version of the bill. Later that month, Kurk and his allies got a hallelujah from U.S. Sen. John Sununu (R-N.H.). "The REAL ID Act replaced sound policy with bad policy," Sununu wrote in a column for the conservative Manchester Union Leader.

Kurk's success emboldened the nation's Real ID opponents, who had been nervous about responding to federal threats with constitutional arguments. "I'd point to that speech as the turning point," says Jim Harper, the director of information policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, and a key player in barnstorming against the law. "It was a good speech," Kurk says today. "I freely admit that. But don't give me all the credit!"

Noam Biale, a lawyer who helped launch the ACLU's anti-Real ID project in late 2005, says the measure had "two Achilles' heels." The first was the cost on the federal level. "The second," Biale says, "was state implementation, which gets thorny for a number of reasons, and the civil liberties issue was the big one." In its search for allies, the mostly liberal ACLU often found that activists on the right had started the work already.

The Revolt Spreads

Before Neal Kurk's rebellion began—even before Real ID became a law—a more marginalized segment of the coalition was emerging. Endtime magazine, a 35,000-circulation, Dallas-based periodical published by the eschatological Endtime Ministries, had been churning out cautionary articles about computer ID chips for years. When Real ID passed, Endtime clicked into high gear. "The Real ID card," says Endtime Managing Editor Craig Treadwell, "plays right into the hands of the Beast."

According to Treadwell's apocalyptic theology, during the end days a "mark of the beast" will be forced onto mankind. Millions of Christians avidly believe in this; fear of the mark has girded opposition to UPC symbols, to health ID cards, and to any proposal for a global or national ID card. In mid-2006, Endtime printed a special issue that went well beyond its subscription base. Copies, Treadwell says, were mailed to every member of Congress and every state legislator in the nation. In Oklahoma one copy went to state Sen. Randy Brogdon (R-Owasso), who soon found some secular reasons to oppose Real ID.

"Congress has no authority over what we do with our driver's licenses," Brogdon says today. "It's a flagrant violation of the 10th Amendment. And it blows away the First Amendment rights of my constituents. I have constituents who believe that in the end times, we will have to bear a special mark that will be foisted upon us by the government."

Brogdon's party wasn't very supportive at first. Former Oklahoma Rep. Ernest Istook, a Republican who lost the race for governor in 2006 and then found a sinecure at the Heritage Foundation, attacked politicians who wanted to opt out of Real ID. "When you are out of step with the rest of the country," Istook said in January 2007, "it is not reasonable to think Congress is going to change the law just for you."

Brogdon sold statehouse members on opting out of Real ID by pushing a combination of fiscal concerns and privacy fears. "Congress passed this thing without any debate," he argues. "I just think that's despicable." Even as the state was passing an anti-illegal immigration bill, Brogdon's Real ID revolt sailed through.

From state to state, the same pattern emerged. In Idaho, Republican Rep. Phil Hart, based in the rural area around Coeur d'Alene, was already getting "incredibly negative" feedback from his constituents about the law. To build support for his opt-out bill, Hart invited Cato's Jim Harper to a public forum. Harper took his seat and listened to the speaker before him, state Homeland Security Director Bill Bishop. Harper was stunned.

"I'm there, dressed to the nines to give this speech based on material I've worked on for months," Harper says. "Here's this guy—a great Western guy, with a sheriff mustache—saying it all. Cost overruns. Civil liberties. The flawed national database. That was a point when I realized how pervasive the understanding of this issue was, and how oppositional it was."

The ACLU and Cato became the public face of Real ID opposition, but much of the grunt work was done by activists on the political fringes. Katherine Albrecht is a conservative long active in opposing radio frequency identification (RFID) chips—electronic tracking gizmos that can be implanted in virtually anything. When Albrecht heard about the Real ID Act, she hit the campaign trail, writing articles for websites and magazines like Endtime, giving anti-Real ID presentations to legislatures in states as far-flung as Alaska. "I got a lot of ‘wow' and ‘that can't be true' kind of reactions," she remembers. The John Birch Society contacted its members in every state, provided information for them to dog their legislators, and published anti-Real ID journalism in its New American magazine.

Not even James Sensenbrenner's Wisconsin stomping grounds were safe from Real ID rebels. Republicans controlled the state legislature, but state Rep. Jeff Wood (R-Chippewa Falls) was against Real ID from the start. "I thought it did nothing to prevent terrorism," Wood says. "The only thing you can ever predict is bad legislation, and this took the cake as far as that's concerned."

Wood found a liberal ally in state Rep. Louis Molepske (D-Stevens Point), whose initial worries about Real ID grew as he talked to federal officials. "I was on a conference call with the undersecretary of DHS," he remembers, "and I asked pointed questions he could not answer." Molepske was prodded by his left-leaning constituents to research Real ID and to pass a corrective bill. "I'm blessed to represent a district with a university, with a lot of really smart people who educated me," he says.

Wood and Molepske drafted legislation that took Wisconsin out of Real ID. Sensenbrenner, fuming, said he would travel district to district and campaign against any Republican who opposed the federal law. "I said ‘go ahead,'" says Wood. "I offered to pay for his gas." Wood and Molepske aren't feeling much heat before their September primaries; by the time Sensenbrenner made his threat, no one could mistake which way the wind was blowing.

The Governors' Rebellion

By the start of 2008, 18 states—Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Maine, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington—had passed laws opting out of Real ID or demanding extensions past the May deadline. The Bush administration responded by buckling. On January 11 DHS pushed back the final deadline for compliance by five years, from 2012 to 2017. The central concept of a national database was scrapped for financial and technological reasons: It was just too much for the department to manage, even if a full-scale revolt hadn't been thwarting it at every step.

But Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat, wasn't satisfied. On February 11 he sent (and made public) a letter to 12 fellow governors. The message: Hang tough. "Please do not accept the Faustian bargain of applying for the DHS extension," Schweitzer wrote. "If we stand together, either DHS will blink or Congress will have to act to avoid havoc at our nation's airports and federal courthouses."

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, a Republican, didn't need the pep talk. He had opposed a national ID card for years, starting when he was a congressman in the mid-1990s. "Illegal immigration was used as the trojan horse back then," Sanford remembers. "The new ingredient is post-9/11 fears."

On May 31 Sanford sent DHS his own seven-page letter excoriating the program. Like Schweitzer, he made it public. "Does it make any sense to begin a de facto national ID system without debate?" Sanford wrote. "As a practical matter, this sensitive subject received far less debate than steroid use in baseball." He concluded by telling DHS to be "mindful not to fight yesterday's battle and to always remember that America's greatest homeland security rests in liberty."

DHS responded by pretending Sanford had said something else entirely. "Based on your assurances," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff wrote, "it seems clear that South Carolina is well on the way to meeting requirements comparable to those required by the final Real ID regulation. I will therefore treat your letter as a basis for an extension and hereby grant it."

It was all that Chertoff could do. The May 11 deadline for Real ID compliance had come and gone, and all 50 states had missed it. At the Wisconsin GOP's annual convention in May, Sensenbrenner (who declined to be interviewed for this article) delivered a petulant attack against Assembly Speaker Michael Huebsch (R-West Salem) for stopping Real ID compliance in the state. "We need to act like Republicans and vote like Republicans," Sensenbrenner said. Huebsch, speaking a little later, referred to the Real ID author only obliquely. "We as Republicans," he said, "do not place our faith in government but in each other."

Bucking the System

Arizona didn't play a special role in the death of Real ID. It looked like the other rebellious states; when the momentum shifted from the go-along, get-along ID supporters to people like Karen Johnson, it merely echoed what was happening elsewhere. But it was in Arizona where Real ID opponents proved they'd achieved the upper hand in this debate.

Johnson's coalition brought together every group in the sprawling pro-privacy tent. The ACLU sent letters imploring its 3,000 state members to lobby for an opt-out bill. Bryan Turner, an organizer for the John Birch Society, talked to his own members and twisted arms on Capitol Hill. Citizens who walked into a March 2008 town hall meeting at the University of Arizona heard the ACLU and Katherine Albrecht join Johnson in making the point-by-point, they're-coming-for-your-rights case against Real ID. "It was a wonderful cross-party kind of union," remembers Mary Lunetta, the state ACLU's activism director.

How much of the rebels' victory was their own, and how much was due to the federal government's poor sales pitch? Real ID opponents readily admit that the failure of the feds to offer grants to pay for compliance proved crucial. The feds ultimately offered Arizona $90 million, but it came much too late, the day after the governor signed the noncompliance bill. Johnson doesn't think it would have been enough to change the outcome. "It wouldn't [have been] unanimous anymore," she says. "But we'd still have the majority."

Johnson and others who defeated Real ID have confronted the national security state before and lost, badly. They've watched other unfunded mandates get forced onto states as legislators and governors grumbled, then meekly assented. But this time the states didn't assent.

"This is a major shift we've been seeing," says the ACLU's Noam Biale. "We saw this kind of resistance first with the PATRIOT Act, but this was bigger, and this was more successful. There is a willingness to challenge the national security state that wasn't there six years ago." To the surprise of Biale, it was a challenge that came from libertarians and the religious right as much as—maybe more than—the left.

"We're not Russia," says Neal Kurk, the New Hampshire Republican who played a crucial role in the Real ID fight. "We're not Germany. We're not Japan. There are too many people in this country who buck the system for a scheme like this to succeed."

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Bailout Bums

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:00:00 EDT

To understand how Washington, D.C.’s fiscally conservative and libertarian-leaning Republicans are handling Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's proposed $700 billion bailout of the financial services sector, think of a child who’s just learned that there is no Easter Bunny. Better yet, think of a guy who sunk his portfolio into Lehman Brothers or Bear Sterns and watched everything he was taught to believe about his investments declared moot, wrong, meaningless, at the mercy of the state.

The bailout "does ensure that President Bush will have a legacy,” laughed Fred Smith, the president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a staunchly pro-free markets group, on Wednesday. “It’s a legacy that will discredit every economic concept that we have on the right. It will set back the concept of economic liberty by a century.”

Openly or secretly, a lot of Smith’s fellow travelers in the Beltway agree. Three weeks ago in St. Paul, Republicans released a platform that declared flatly, “We do not support government bailouts of private institutions” and that “government interference in the markets exacerbates problems in the marketplace and causes the free market to take longer to correct itself.”

Yet as the panic over Wall Street woes has mounted, those principles got lost, and a critical number of Republicans are expected to support a $700 billion bailout of failing investment banks being pushed by a GOP president and his money man. Although serious problems with government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have long been evident and despite longstanding anxiety about "too-big-to-fail" market players going belly up, the Republicans were caught flat-footed by recent events.

The experience of the most fiscally conservative members of Congress, the Republican Study Committee (RSC), is instructive. Throughout the Bush years, the RSC has proposed alternative budgets heavy on spending cuts. Now, forced to consider a spending package equal to a million earmarks, it was pushed to the side.

Its members did act fast. On Wednesday, September 17, RSC stalwart Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) released a forceful statement: "The federal government's propensity to bail out failing companies in struggling industries ought to be troubling to all taxpayers....Aside from the fiscal impact of spending money that the federal government doesn't have, these bailouts will likely have the opposite of their intended effect." Flake also took aim at the then-rumored bailout of the automobile industry.

On Thursday, the RSC sent a public letter to the White House opposing any Wall Street bailout: “Regardless of the precautions taken, the risk to taxpayers and to the long-term future health of our economy remain just too great to justify.” But on Friday, RSC Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) put out a tentative, milquetoast statement on the proposed bailout that decried the idea without ruling it out completely. “Though my mind remains open,” Hensarling said, “at the moment I remain skeptical, fearful, and unconvinced that this is the proper remedy for our nation at this time.”

The next day the draft of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s plan was released, with a Tiffany price tag and enumerated powers such as buying up bonds galore and a two-year ban on any real oversight of Treasury’s activity. Former RSC Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.) rejected “the largest corporate bailout in American history.”

But other than that: Crickets. Fiscal conservatives mostly dared not come out swinging against a proposal offered by a White House they had, more often than not, trusted.

This past Monday at 5 p.m., the RSC met to strategize further. Who was opposed to the bailout, full stop? Who had alternatives they could put on the table? According to staff who were at the meeting, the mood was somber, with a majority opposed to the concept of a bailout but without a clear idea of how to challenge it. When the full Republican conference met on Tuesday, there was even less unity. At a Heritage Foundation luncheon, Flake told bloggers that about half of his party’s members opposed a bailout.

While Flake was speaking, a dozen members of the RSC were beginning a press conference in the House to make their suggestions and state their positions. Reporters picked up a pithy one-page memo of RSC proposals, including

—a two-year suspension of the capital gains tax, after which “rates would return to present levels but assets would be indexed permanently for any inflationary gains.”

—full privatization of Freddie Mac and Fannie Me “over a reasonable time period.”

—repeal the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, which the RSC fingered for the Fed’s suppression of interest rates to artificially low levels (although the Act expired in 2000).

—a suspension of mark-to-market regulatory rules (assigning value to a financial instrument based on the current market price).

That was it. The rest of the press conference was, if not a circus, a carousel with a lot of mis-matching horse heads. Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) suggested that business tax cuts could attract investors to our shores bring more revenue from “profits left stranded overseas." Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), a dogged supporter of more oil drilling, claimed that the policies he favored would, conveniently, pull us out of the crisis. “The oil revenues that we could get from ANWR have been scored by the Congressional Budget Office at around $200 billion,” Barton said. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) excitedly agreed with him. ”If we open up these areas for energy exploration, well, Katy bar the door! We’d see this economy turn around immediately!”

Mike Pence, still the only member at the press conference ruling out any yes vote for a bailout, tried 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. But he didn't line up with Pence against any bailout.

The presentation had no notable impact on the debate in Congress. As the Republicans spoke, a few cameramen snickered audibly. When Bachmann called the bailout “the enslavement of the American people,” the snickering reached its loudest pitch. And on the way out, Pence offered reporters more proposals that would probably come to nothing, such as a suspension of the capital gains tax by executive order. "There are learned legal scholars who think that's within his purview as president," Pence explained.

But enough Republicans are ready to support the bailout to make all of this moot. Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.), an Ayn Rand fan and potential future head of the RSC, conceded that his party is divided. “People are struggling with it around here like you can’t believe,” he told me on Tuesday. “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.”

How so? Campbell doesn’t shy from comparing it 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.”

There is an external reason for the division of Republicans right now. They don’t control Congress. The Democrats run both houses and are negotiating with the executive branch. They own the agenda. But it is striking how free-market economics have no place in the current debate. They are not seen as a credible response to a Wall Street crisis, even by the presidential nominee of the Republican Party, who is angrily attacking the "greed of Wall Street." Contra Naomi Klein, an economic shock has sent Republicans skittering away from free-market theories; the last thing the party of small government seems interested in letting markets work. The current political debate, not just between Democrats and Republicans but even among Republicans, is not whether the government should take over mortgage firms, but how effectively it can manage them.

“Nobody trusts Republicans on these situations,” said Fred Smith. “For good reasons.”

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.