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List: Rough Gravel

info@reason.com (Mike Gravel) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In April 2006, former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel became the first official candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Two years and only about 25,000 votes later, he left the party to seek the Libertarian nomination. “I’m a classical liberal,” Gravel said during an April interview. “All of those other candidates, they scared the hell out of me.”

Gravel grumbled his way through every Democratic debate until October, when he was excluded because of his low totals in the polls. reason asked him for three lessons he learned from his experience as a major-party candidate.

1. Debates are unfair. “We haven’t seen real debates. The debates have been designed to sell the anchors of the networks—not a debate between candidates. That final debate [between Clinton and Obama] in Philadelphia was a farce.”

2. Little guys always get shafted. “Before I’d arrive at the CNN and MSNBC debates, I’d ask: ‘Are you going to provide equal time?’ They’d say yes. So why do you think I was so mad when they finally called on me? I was standing on the edge of the stage, getting no questions! How would you feel if you were being lied to and you couldn’t go over and punch the guy who’d lied to you in the mouth?”

3. Democrats are bad news. “I was sucking up their air, so they wanted me out of there. I don’t want anything to do with the Democratic Party.”

The Tao of Chuck

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Chuck Baldwin, presidential nominee of the Constitution Party, was somewhere in Arizona when I called for him, touring the border, seeing for himself that dusty expanse where Mexican immigrants violate our national sovereignty. He was en route to Utah, talking to small-town newspapers and religious types who can't stand John McCain, when his campaign called back. “He does two or three radio interviews every day,” said a campaign communications director. “He does local TV, interviews with local press. But we’ll work you in.”

I was stuck in my office that night, working away on an entirely different project. It jolted me when the campaign called back. “Chuck will be free tomorrow morning. He’ll be driving, so he’ll be on a cell phone. Is that all right?” I looked at my clock. The call had come minutes after 1 a.m. There are energetic campaigns, and then there is this campaign.

But where is all that energy going? To pluck the phrase off one of the innumerable Ron Paul T-Shirts: Who is Chuck Baldwin? He’s the pastor of Crossroad Baptist Church, which he founded when he was 23 years old. He's a political activist whose first toe-dip in the business came in 1980, when he took a leadership role in Florida's branch of the Moral Majority. He hosts a radio show that's beamed to stations in every corner of the Redneck Riveria, and writes weekly columns with themes such as "No Sanctuary for Illegal Aliens in Our Church" and "Terri Schiavo Isn't the Only One Dying—So Is Lady Liberty!" ("Her feeding tube, the feeding tube of constitutional government and bedrock principle, has been removed.")

At the end of April, Baldwin officially became the nominee of the Constitution Party, founded (as the U.S. Taxpayers Alliance) in 1990 as a vehicle for the avuncular conservative movement broker Howard Phillips. Phillips hustled around the country uniting disaffected right-wingers, Christian nationalists, and anti-tax activists in populist third parties that, in 1992, put him on the ballot as their presidential candidate. Cash-poor, the Phillips campaign got attention by running ads that spliced images from Nazi concentration camps with pictures of aborted fetuses. It was good for 43,000 votes. In the three following presidential campaigns, Phillips’s party could never place better than a distant fifth.

Baldwin, who was part of the last Constitution Party campaign—he was its 2004 vice presidential candidate—thinks the ground has shifted. “We’re spreading the message of constitutional government,” Baldwin told me as he sped through the Salt Lake City exurbs. “Ron Paul was the only candidate in the two major parties that carried that message, and now I’m carrying that message.”

But what message is that, exactly? Those disaffected citizens who gave their votes and their money to Ron Paul—one million of the former, more than a hundred thousand of the latter—already have a legion of candidates groveling for their support, claiming ownership of the Ron Paul brand. There have been dozens of congressional candidates. There was Mike Gravel, who speculated that, "if Ron Paul could raise all that money with his libertarian message, I think I could raise a lot of money." There is Ralph Nader, who in his dotage assumed that opposing the PATRIOT Act would be enough for Paul fans to overlook the fact that he's Ralph Nader. There is Bob Barr, who inspires Libertarian Party conversions and bitter online denunciations in roughly equal measure.

Baldwin's not a late-comer to the Ron Paul cause. In 2002, he was using his radio show as a bully pulpit to turn voters against the Iraq War and the neocons. He wrote column after column in 2007 endorsing Paul, recording an ad and a video message in the lead-up to the Florida primary. Today, Baldwin appropriates the Ernest Hancock "rEVOLution" logo and courts support on Ron Paul fan sites. But Baldwin appeals to a very specific segment of the Ron Paul base. They're national sovereignty voters, people who see and feel their livelihoods under threat of a crushing, encroaching world government. Baldwin took their measure in a mid-2007 column that attempted to explain who Ron Paul's donors were.

They are rank-and-file, tax-paying citizens who are sick and tired of out-of-control federal spending and deficits....They have had it with this phony "war on terrorism" that sends trillions of dollars to nations throughout the Middle East, but refuses to close our own borders to illegal immigration. They have had it with the "war on drugs" and the "war on terror" being used as excuses to trample people's freedoms....They have had it with Bush's North American Union....They have had it with the Military-Industrial complex that desires to build international empires at the expense of the blood and sacrifice of the American people. They have had it with David Rockefeller and his Council on Foreign Relations [CFR].

I was curious about this last bit, so I asked him: What's so scary about the CFR? "Some people who belong to it may not really understand the true intention of the CFR," he explains. "I remember reading what a former member of it wrote: He thought the CFR was pushing America towards global government, and I concur with that. I think the overall agenda that drives the CFR is the overall merger of the US into regional and ultimately global government. And I don’t think they have the interests of the United States at heart."

The evidence for the stuff that really worries Baldwin doesn't appear much in the mainstream media. But it's there if you look for it. "I think only a blind man doesn’t see it," Baldwin says. "Its been out in the open ever since the first George Bush pledged allegiance to the New World Order. By 2015, I’m told, the powers that be want to merge Europe and America. But when I’m sworn in as president, the New World Order comes crashing down."

Arguments like that haven't hurt Baldwin. Quite the contrary: His cinching the Constitution Party nomination had a lot to do with this kind of against-the-world populism, which Party members believe has been given new life by the Ron Paul campaign. Howard Phillips himself nominated Baldwin over Alan Keyes (who, while approaching Herschel Krustofsky in his level of clownishness, still had a chance at the prize) by telling delegates "a friend of Ron Paul" could help the party tap into the rEVOLution. "In his heart Ron Paul knows that Chuck Baldwin is right," Phillips said, "and that if the Paul people are to support anyone it's Chuck Baldwin."

Since then, Paul's coalition has moved in a predictable manner. The more libertarian-minded members have organized a Republican Party insurgency or sidled up to Bob Barr. The more sovereignty-minded members have lined up with Baldwin. Texas radio host Alex Jones, the Paul backer who sees the influence of the Bilderberg Group behind every corner, quickly endorsed Baldwin as an alternative to "that CIA agent" Barr. "I wouldn’t trust Bob Barr as far as I could throw him," Jones said. "I trust you. Ron Paul better put his support behind you once he’s out of it."

Baldwin's view of the financial industry is darker than Paul's, and it comes from a different place. Where Paul worries about the influence of the Federal Reserve, Baldwin compares "international bankers" to "the money changers in the temple," rousted out by Jesus. "It's been the desire of some, throughout history, to merge the world economically," Baldwin says. "This is all driven by greed, money, and power. The thing these people always lacked was the technology to make this possible. Now it's there, and there are forces in business and in government that desire to create a global economy, and you can’t have a global economy unless you have gobal government to run it."

Anyone who backed Paul to inject libertarianism into the national debate will blanch at this. That doesn't matter to Baldwin. While libertarians squabble about whether Paul was a boon or a blow to their ideas, Baldwin has reaped the benefits of the best exposure that national sovereignty conservatives have gotten in decades. "About half of our volunteers came out of the Ron Paul campaign," he speculates. Baldwin, along with Howard Phillips, will be one of the hot-ticket speakers at the July 12 "Revolution March" in Washington, D.C. Bob Barr will not be there; Ron Paul will be on the podium. And more than 12,000 people have pledged to come.

What claim does Baldwin have on those voters? A pretty serious one, actually. The Paul campaign became a vessel for some brands of cosmopolitan libertarianism, and in states like Nevada and Montana, where Paul placed second and won the independent vote, he pulled in anti-war voters who'd given up on the Republican Party. But the coalition was so fractious that its members are moving back to their regular political poles. Paul is disinterested in "leading" them, hoping instead on another outbreak of spontaneous order. Paul's campaign was a booster shot for Baldwin's brand of conservatism; in the end, it might be one of the campaign's most lasting impacts.

"We’re going to criss-cross the country," Baldwin says. "We’re going to take our message of freedom and liberty, putting Washington back in order economically, closing our borders, repealing NAFTA, and restoring constitutional government all across America. This is just the beginning."

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Are You Experienced?

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:03:00 EDT

Last week on Face The Nation, Wesley Clark said crashing a jet doesn't qualify John McCain to be the next president, and hawkish conservatives everywhere clawed at their breasts and howled "Traitor!"

Mark Hemingway at NRO's The Corner, who is one of the more relaxed members of the McCain cabal, didn't go so far as to defend the record of National Review's barely-breathing second-choice nominee, but he did passively entertain a fantasy of pushing Clark off the national stage and (presumably) on to a tuba player in the orchestra pit.

Clark is a little rough around the edges, but I agree with David Reese at the Huffington Post that standing idly by while McCain lists "crashed an expensive plane" on his resume would have a devastating trickle-down effect on potential appointees:

Riding on a rollercoaster and flying out of your seat but then landing on a waterslide and sliding down to into the water and almost drowning but then being rescued by an Elvis impersonator: QUALIFIES YOU TO BE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR....

Getting really, really drunk at Thanksgiving and crying, "Why was I never good enough for you, Dad?" and then literally eating a banjo, and then saying, "Am I man enough NOW, Dad? Now that I've eaten my banjo-- the one thing I loved, the one thing you could never understand?": QUALIFIES YOU TO BE CHAIRMAN OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE.

Read the rest of Reese's qualifications here. Peruse reason's McCain archive here.

Hat tip to my associates at The F*ck Squad and Bill Watterson.

Obama's Toothless Second Amendment

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:00:00 EDT

"What works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne," Barack Obama said after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Washington, D.C., gun ban. The Illinois senator was talking about gun control laws, but he could just as well have been talking about his interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Although the amendment protects an individual right to arms, Obama says, it permits "common-sense" gun control, a category that for him seems to include every existing restriction on the possession and use of firearms. That view not only does not fly in Cheyenne (and in many other places where presidential candidates aspire to win votes); it was decisively rejected by the Supreme Court.

"I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms," Obama said after the ruling was announced, "but I also identify with the need for crime-ravaged communities to save their children from the violence that plagues our streets through common-sense, effective safety measures. The Supreme Court has now endorsed that view."

Not quite. The Court concluded that the D.C. gun law, which "bans handgun possession in the home" and "requires that any lawful firearm in the home be disassembled or bound by a trigger lock at all times, rendering it inoperable," violates the Second Amendment because it effectively prohibits keeping guns for self-defense.

Last November, by contrast, Obama's campaign told the Chicago Tribune "Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional." The candidate was so upset about that misrepresentation of his views that he sought to correct it—seven months later. A few hours before the Supreme Court pronounced the D.C. gun ban unconstitutional, an Obama spokesman told ABC News his campaign's November statement to the contrary "was obviously an inartful attempt to explain the senator's consistent position."

That belated blurification was an inartful attempt to avoid explaining the senator's consistent position, which he has repeatedly confirmed. In a February 12 interview, Leon Harris of WJLA, the ABC affiliate in Washington, said to Obama, "You support the D.C. handgun ban, and you've said that it's constitutional." Obama nodded, saying, "Right, right." Three days later, at a press conference in Milwaukee, Obama cited the D.C. law as an example of gun control that's consistent with the Second Amendment.

Obama's view is similar to that of Justice Stephen Breyer, who dissented from the Supreme Court's decision. Even if the Second Amendment protects an individual right to armed self-defense, Breyer said, that right has to be weighed against "other important governmental interests." And since a gun law like D.C.'s might reduce violent crime (never mind the lack of evidence that it actually has), the courts should yield to legislators' judgments about how best to strike the balance.

Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia replied: "We know of no other enumerated constitutional right whose core protection has been subjected to a freestanding 'interest-balancing' approach. The very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government...the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon. A constitutional guarantee subject to future judges' assessments of its usefulness is no constitutional guarantee at all."

This decision does not bode well for Chicago's handgun ban, which was challenged in federal court the day after the Supreme Court's ruling. Since the Court held that D.C. violated the Second Amendment by banning the sort of gun most people prefer for home defense, the only real question in the Chicago case is whether the amendment applies to state and local governments as well as federal domains such as the District of Columbia.

It seems likely that the right to arms—which, Scalia emphasized, stems from the basic right of self-preservation—will be added to the list of civil liberties that the 14th Amendment compels states and municipalities to respect. If so, Obama's vision of a toothless Second Amendment will not prevail for much longer even in Chicago.

Another Provision of the Incumbent Protection Act Falls

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:23:00 EDT

On Thursday, the same day it upheld the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, the Supreme Court upheld the First Amendment right to freedom of speech by rejecting one of the most blatantly self-serving provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. The same legislators who did not like being criticized on radio and TV close to elections also were dismayed by the prospect that their huge electoral advantages as incumbents might be overcome by wealthy challengers freely spending their own money. Hence Congress decreed that in such races the less wealthy candidate would be allowed to collect three times the standard limit from each contributor, although his opponent would still be bound by the usual rules.

Without speculating about the motivation for such decidedly unevenhanded treatment, the Court ruled that it violates the First Amendment. "We have never upheld the constitutionality of a law that imposes different contribution limits for candidates who are competing against each other," Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. Under "millionaire's amendment" to the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, he noted, candidates who want to spend their own money on their own campaigns must "choose between the First Amendment right to engage in unfettered political speech and subjection to discriminatory fund-raising limitations."

This burden, Alito added, "is not justified by any governmental interest in eliminating corruption or the perception of corruption," the rationale the Court has cited in upholding campaign contribution limits. Instead the government argued that "asymmetrical limits are justified because they would 'level electoral opportunities for candidates of different personal wealth.'" Alito found this rationale troubling:

The argument that a candidate's speech may be restricted in order to "level electoral opportunities" has ominous implications because it would permit Congress to arrogate the voters' authority to evaluate the strengths of candidates competing for office....Different candidates have different strengths. Some are wealthy; others have wealthy supporters who are willing to make large contributions. Some are celebrities; some have the benefit of a well-known family name. Leveling electoral opportunities means making and implementing judgments about which strengths should be permitted to contribute to the outcome of an election. The Constitution, however, confers upon voters, not Congress, the power to choose the Members of the House of Representatives.

Obama's iPod

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Rolling Stone, which endorsed him for prez earlier this year, has an interview with Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). The big hook? What's on his iPod:

Growing up in the '70s, Obama said, he listened to the Rolling Stones, Elton John and Earth, Wind & Fire. Stevie Wonder is his musical hero from the era. The Stones' Gimme Shelter tops his favorites from the band.
The Illinois senator's playlist contains these musicians, along with about 30 songs from Dylan and the singer's Blood on the Tracks album. Jazz legends Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Charlie Parker are also in the mix.

Obama is also partial to rap, with the following proviso:

"I am troubled sometimes by the misogyny and materialism of a lot of rap lyrics," he said, "but I think the genius of the art form has shifted the culture and helped to desegregate music."
He said hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and rappers Jay-Z and Ludacris were "great talents and great businessmen."
"It would be nice if I could have my daughters listen to their music without me worrying that they were getting bad images of themselves," he added.

More here, via USA Today.

Excerpts from Rolling Stone Q&A here.

Needless to say, this sort of exercise is as useless as it is attention-grabbing.

Back in 1993 (wasn't that a time!), Andrew Ferguson looked at the soft-rock predilections of Bill Clinton for National Review. It's still worth a read.

60 Percent of Americans Won't Read This

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:01:00 EDT

A new study out from Pew finds that only 40 percent of Americans get news about the presidential campaign from the Internet. Useful for all of us pixel-stained wretches to keep in mind.

But the numbers are changing fast:

At this point in the 2004 election cycle, 31% of Americans had used the internet to get political news and information. The jump to 40% who say this now is even more striking because the population of online political users already exceeds the number of Americans who had used the internet for politics in the entire 2004 campaign. Moreover, the proportion of Americans getting political news and information on any given day in the spring of 2008 has more than doubled, compared with a similar period in 2004. In May and June of 2004, about 8% of adults were using the internet on a typical day to stay in touch with political developments. In April and May of this year, 17% of adults are getting political news online on a typical day.

And maybe, just maybe, Obama Girl actually is going to decide the election:

35% of Americans have watched online videos related to the campaign and 10% have used social networking sites to engage in political activity.

Via The Weekly Standard blog

Just Another Hustler in the Hustler Kingdom

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:30:00 EDT

Less than two months ago, after former Rep. Bob Barr started to edge into the Libertarian Party's presidential race, I had an idea. Former Sen. Mike Gravel, a former Democrat, was already gunning for the nomination. It wasn't every year that politicians of the Left and the Right ditched the parties they'd spent their entire careers in to become Libertarians. I started planning an event with both candidates, jokingly promoting it on Facebook as a "great debate."

I got a call from Wayne Allyn Root.

What's this I'm hearing about a Libertarian debate?" Root said. "How are you going to have a Libertarian debate without the guy who's going to be the nominee?"

He laughed, but he was serious about this. When I wrote an early prognosis on the Libertarian race, I said Root—a sports prognosticator and gambling guru who's hosted TV shows, radio shows, and motivational speaking junkets—was running third behind Barr and movement speaker and author Mary Ruwart. Root had called to point out that he, not anyone else making a run at the nomination, was on the phone with delegates every spare minute he had. Every minute, at least, that he wasn't spending with me. "I'm calling up every one of these people who will actually be voting for the nominee!" Root said. "I talk to 25 or 30 of them every day!"

Root did talk to those delegates, missing only a handful, leaving messages on their machines. And he charmed his way into the forum I set up with Barr and Gravel. I watched as reporters flipped out cameras and digital recorders to capture the wisdom of the former senator and the lion of the Clinton impeachment, then saw Root struggling to convince them that he, too was a frontrunner. The day after the forum, Root called to laugh about the Washington Post's photo of the event, which cropped him out. "I'm going to frame that and put it on my wall." He laughed again.

In Denver, as the LP settled on its ticket, Root got his bragging rights. On the party's fifth ballot, he fell short of the party's nomination but held a stockpile of delegate votes that made more than the difference between Barr and Ruwart. He took the stage, pumping his fists. "I want to spend the next year learning from the master," Root said. "Barr/Root '08! Come on, let's bring it home!" The guy the national media mostly ignored ended up on the highest-polling (at this moment, at least) Libertarian ticket since the Reagan years.

Wayne Allyn Root is a failure. He'll tell you as much. He's "the world's most successful failure," a man who stumbled from job to job, succeeding at none of them, before he found the one that made him a millionaire. He used to be a Republican, then decided to become the Libertarian Party's presidential nominee. When he fell short, he threw his votes to Bob Barr and became the ex-congressman's running mate. What Wayne Root wants, Wayne Root gets. Sort of.

The little attention that the LP's ticket has received has centered, mostly, on Barr. The evolution of a Republican drug warrior into a Libertarian war horse is an odd, twisty story. Root's story is almost as entertaining. He is, in his own words, "the world's most successful failure." His first general-interest book (he's written six of them, most about the art of gambling) was titled The Joy of Failure, and it revealed how he'd basically talked his way into a glamorous career with a bullish sales plan papering over his lack of qualifications.

As Root tells it, he tried, and failed, at thirteen different careers. He was rejected from law school. He failed as a realtor four different times, blowing tens of thousands of dollars on brochures for properties no one bought. He managed a Manhattan restaurant, then "got bored and quit." He became an entertainment agent, signing one client, and snagging him one job—in six months. His biggest innovation was "Ivy League Home Cleaners," a maid service staffed with college graduates, none of whom, quite understandably, wanted to become maids.

Root's breakthrough came when he realized what he really wanted: to be a sports prognosticator. He decided to become "greatest sports prognosticator in the world," officially, sending out hundreds of press releases with that tagline, assuring reporters that they had to know about Wayne Allyn Root. Thanks to a few newspapers with feature holes to fill, the P.R. offensive paid off. Root founded a company (which failed) and wrote a book on risk (also a failure), but every little piece of credibility got him closer to TV personality status. Once he made it on TV, he was in: No one could take his fame away from him. His formula for success, he discovered, was something he could bottle and give to everybody. He taught it to his wife when she put on 80 pounds during her pregnancy. "She started living my program. The pounds started to melt off!"

With all of that behind him, how could Wayne Root not get into politics, the domain of district attorneys and trial lawyers and promotion-seeking chiefs of staff? "My entire life has been a PERFECT preparation for politics," Root told the Gambling Newswire in 2005. "I've spent the last 20 years giving interviews with the media. I'm on national TV more than any politician in the state of Nevada!" (This was before the still-mystifying triumph of Sen. Harry Reid.) In 2005, Root published a sort of sequel to his first self-help tome dubbed Millionaire Republican, telling readers that "thinking like a Republican," taking risks and cutting throats, was the surest path to success.

Some sections of the book didn't hold up so well. "This professional prognosticator," Root wrote then, "believes that the GOP will dominate American politics (on all levels) for the foreseeable future." But by mid-2006, Root was telling Republicans that they were throttling their message and their voters by building up big government, and by cracking down on gamblers. By early 2007, he was exploring his Libertarian Party bid. And by the time he took the stage with Bob Barr, on a national political ticket at last, Root was crowing about making his old party irrelevant, for reasons no other Libertarian had thought of. Like:

"There are 50 million poker players in this country, and 12 million online poker players. For the first time, they have a candidate they can support!"

And:

"I am the first small businessman to run on a national ticket!"

And:

"I'm a home school parent, and education is, to me, the civil rights issue of our time!"

The Pulitzer-winning historian Walter McDougall has diagnosed the United States as a "nation of hustlers." He means it in a good way; Americans are Horatio Alger heroes, constantly scheming and one-upping and finding new ways to win. If you're a skeptic, you might think see Root's success as a confluence of lucky breaks, impossible to repeat for anyone not gifted with superhuman salesmanship or—as my colleague Jesse Walker has put it—"the deportment of a Ronco pitchman with a squirrel in his pants." If you buy McDougall's theory, stop rolling your eyes at the guy. Wayne Allyn Root wants you to be able to become the next Wayne Allyn Root. And you should take him up on it.

"I'm an S.O.B.," Root likes to joke. "A son of butcher. America needs an S.O.B. in the White House!"

David Weigel is an associate editor of Reason.

This article originally appeared at The American Spectator.

No Sir, Mr. Mugabe

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:52:00 EDT

The New York Times reports that "Queen Elizabeth II has stripped Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's strongman president for nearly 30 years, of his honorary knighthood as a 'mark of revulsion' at the human rights abuses and 'abject disregard' for democracy over which he has presided." I have a couple of questions about this.

First of all, "honorary knighthood"? Aren't all knighthoods honorary? Does that adjective signify that Mugabe, strictly speaking, did not meet the course requirements? Does it mean he did not slay enough dragons or rescue enough damsels?

Second, Mugabe got this "honorary knighthood" and kept it for 14 years despite illegitimate elections, intimidation of the press, massive larceny and land grabbing, violent repression of homosexuality, and the arbitrary detention, torture, and murder of political opponents, including military assaults on the the Ndebele tribe that killed tens of thousands of civilians. What was the final straw, as far as the queen was concerned?

On Monday Mike Riggs considered the prospects for a coup in Zimbabwe.

Would President McCain Obey the Law?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:00:00 EDT

In asking Congress to allow warrantless surveillance of Americans' international communications, President Bush is seeking permission to do something he believes he does not need permission to do. Like a parent confronted by a defiant teenager, Congress is giving in while insisting it isn't.

Federal law already says the government may listen to the phone calls or read the email of people in the United States only if it follows procedures established by statute. The amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) approved by the House last week say it again. Twice. In effect, Congress is saying, "We mean it. Seriously."

In Congress' defense (did I really say that?), it's hard to think of an effective statutory response to a president who, like Bush, feels free to ignore the law when it forbids him to do what he thinks is necessary to fight terrorism. The only solution to that problem is to replace Bush with a president who is more inclined to respect the rule of law and the separation of powers.

Although he may change his tune if he's elected (especially since he'll face a Democrat-controlled Congress disinclined to check his power), Barack Obama at least claims to believe in these principles. "As president," he told The Boston Globe in December, "I will follow existing law, and when it comes to U.S. citizens and residents, I will only authorize surveillance for national security purposes consistent with FISA and other federal statutes."

The Illinois senator disappointed many of his supporters by backing the FISA amendments, which not only approve warrantless wiretaps but grant retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies that assisted the Bush administration's illegal post-9/11 surveillance program. Still, he emphasized that Congress has the authority to restrict or rescind the president's spying powers.

"Under this compromise legislation," Obama said, "the president's illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be over. It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance, making it clear that the president cannot circumvent the law and disregard the civil liberties of the American people."

By contrast, Obama's straight-talking opponent, John McCain, has vacillated on this issue and now seems unwilling to give a straight answer to the question of whether, as president, he would obey the law. "I think that presidents have the obligation to obey and enforce laws that are passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, no matter what the situation is," McCain told the Globe in December. "I don't think the president has the right to disobey any law."

Yet a McCain adviser contradicted that position in a May letter to National Review Online, saying the Arizona senator believes "neither the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people...understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001." He added that "John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from [terrorist] threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution."

The reference to Article II implies that the president has constitutional authority to flout statutory restrictions on wiretaps, the very position that McCain disavowed in December. Pressed by The New York Times to explain the blatant contradiction, a campaign spokesman wrote in an email message, "To the extent that the comments of members of our staff are misinterpreted, they shouldn't be read into as anything otherwise." Thanks for clearing that up.

In response to the Times story, McCain himself claimed "it's ambiguous as to whether the president acted within his authority" when he ordered the warrantless wiretaps. No more need be said on the subject, according to McCain, because we should "move forward" instead of "looking back." The question for voters is whether they want to move forward with a president whose commitment to obey the law is ambiguous.

Democratic Convention Update: Organic Fanny Packs and a Ban on Fried Food

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:49:00 EDT

In case you were worried about how Democratic convention planning is going in Denver: Don't worry. A "Director of Greening " has been hired, so everybody can relax.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the Democratic convention's "lean 'n' green" catering rules:

No fried food. And, on the theory that nutritious food is more vibrant, each meal should include "at least three of the following colors: red, green, yellow, blue/purple, and white." (Garnishes don't count.)

But everything isn't always sunshine and radicchio in Denver:

The host committee for the Democratic National Convention wanted 15,000 fanny packs for volunteers. But they had to be made of organic cotton. By unionized labor. In the USA.
Official merchandiser Bob DeMasse scoured the country. His weary conclusion: "That just doesn't exist."
Ditto for the baseball caps. "We have a union cap or an organic cap," Mr. DeMasse says. "But we don't have a union-organic offering."

I'm sure Ms. Robinson will be able to handle these challenges. After all, what better preparation could there be for running the Verdant Directorate than a degree in environmental studies from UC Santa Barbara, a guest role as "Barbara" on West Wing season 3, episode 4 ("Ways and Means"), and an appearance as Party Guest/Bridesmaid in Nutty Professor II: The Klumps?

Well, two out of three ain't bad.

Long-Tail Politics Watch

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 10:22:00 EDT

It's an interesting year indeed when the nation's senatorial nominees include both a Ron Paul Democrat and a socialist Republican.

Discussing the 'Maverick'

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:05:00 EDT

...

The Feminist Mistake

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

The end of this interminable Democratic primary was to be inevitably followed by a week of incoherent postmortems detailing the real reasons for the demise of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.). How could it be that Mrs. Clinton—a woman of significant experience, possessing that Clintonian political acumen—flamed out so dramatically?

Recall that back in 2005, Dick Morris, the prostitute-loving former adviser to President Clinton, prophesied that "as of this moment, there is no doubt that Hillary Clinton is on a virtually uncontested trajectory to win the Democratic nomination and, very likely, the 2008 election." But Republicans need not despair, Morris wrote, because "her victory is not inevitable. There is one, and only one, figure in America who can stop Hillary Clinton: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice."

The following year, conservative columnist John Podhoretz played the dangerous game of premature political prognostication as well, with the release of his book Can She Be Stopped? Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States...Unless. In fairness, it would have demanded Nostradamus-like powers of prediction to imagine Clinton upended by a junior senator from Illinois, peddling a particularly audacious brand of hope.

But for many obituarists it wasn't the finely-tuned campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) that dashed Clinton's plans of resettling into the White House. Nor was it her deeply unpopular vote to authorize the Iraq War. Instead, the answer was more obvious: An electorate—and pundit class—imbued with sexism, both conscious and unconscious, conspired to keep a women out of the Oval Office.

In the wake of her defeat, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof lamented that, like Obama's effusively praised speech on race, Clinton failed to start a similar conversation about gender. Indeed, "In polls, more Americans say they would be willing to vote for a black candidate for president than for a female candidate." This is true, but Kristof fails to note that the differences are slight. According to a recent poll conducted for The Washington Post and ABC News, 88 percent of respondents said that they were either "entirely" or "somewhat" comfortable with an African-American president. When asked about is they were comfortable with the prospect of a female president, the number dipped slightly to 84 percent.

As political commentator George Will recently observed, Americans would quite assuredly vote for a woman, it's just they weren't particularly interested in voting for that woman. But the modern woman-hater, Kristof explains, is a rather different breed: "The catch is that abundant psychology research shows that we are often shaped by stereotypes that we are unaware of." In other words, many might think they were rejecting Clinton based on a set of political criteria, but Democratic primary voters might, in fact, be struggling with a seething sexist subconscious. (Kristof's subconscious, of course, is more Betty Friedan than Harvey Mansfield.)

Over at The Nation, it was the back-slapping cable news fraternity that was activating our subconscious sexism. "Hillary Clinton's loss has renewed critiques that American political media is slanted, sexist and dominated by men," wrote Ari Melber, the magazine's "Net movement correspondent." "While Clinton and Obama broke barriers in the Democratic primary, swiftly dispatching white male senators with more government experience," Melber huffed, "the race was still refereed, scored and narrated by white male commentators," because "the elite opinion media continues to employ, groom and promote a commentators corps that is disproportionately white and male." (As one commenter on The Nation's website dryly noted, Melber's own magazine, a 180,000-plus circulation purveyor of elite opinion, is also disproportionately staffed by sinister white men.)

The Nation's Katha Pollitt went one further, arguing that "Clinton drew out the nation's misogyny in all its jeering glory and put it where we could all get a good look at it." Yes, the entire nation's misogyny. Pollitt called out MSNBC's left-wing host Keith Olbermann as the Archie Bunker of the punditocracy, citing his hyperventilating attacks on Clinton as an example of "men's terror of women." And those members of the sisterhood, such as Washington Post style writer Robin Givhan, who made snide comments about Clinton's sartorial deficiencies, were engaged in rank "female sexism."

And it was only a matter of time until former Clinton's campaign manager Mark Penn raised the specter of sexism. As Clinton forged ahead, all but eliminated from the race, Obamaphilic pundits and members of the Democratic party beseeched her, for the sake of unity, to accept the inevitable. "No male candidate," Penn told GQ, "has ever been told to drop out. Ever."

If we concede to Penn the broadest possible definition of sexism, and acknowledge that Clinton faced real challenges as the first formidable female presidential candidate in American history, it is nevertheless remarkable how difficult he finds it to cite specific examples of gender discrimination. When asked by GQ "where he saw sexism," Penn upbraided Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) for comments made about Clinton publicly crying in New Hampshire, saying that a "double-standard" was being applied to her because of her gender. While no other candidate wept in front of television cameras on the campaign trail (making it, I suppose, a single-standard), Penn surely remembers that the last candidate who cried during the New Hampshire primary—Democratic candidate Ed Muskie in 1972—never recovered from his supposed display of weakness. Whether or not this is a fair judgment of one's fitness for the presidency, it is difficult to claim that Edwards' comments were sexist. Recognizing that Penn was serving up pretty thin gruel, the GQ interviewer interjected helpfully that the subtle anti-women campaign was perhaps "hard to put into words."

But none of this "sexism" could be counteracted by organized, activist feminist groups, says writer Linda Hirshman. In Sunday's Washington Post, Hirshman mapped the fractious women's movement that failed to coalesce around Clinton's campaign. The absurdities and esoterica of the "millennial feminists" produced internecine warfare and factional fighting not seen since the Spanish Civil War. In the trenches of the gender war, the slights cited by Penn are deemed inconsequential, as is the candidate on the receiving end of them. Hirshman quotes one activist: "I...don't believe that simply putting a womyn's face where a man's face once was is going to solve our problems...by Real Womyn I am talking about womyn of color, incarcerated womyn, migrant womyn, womyn at the border, womyn gripped in violence, rape, and war.'" (For those whose university experience predated the ubiquity of Woman's Studies departments, the misspelling of 'women' is deliberate, a semantic kick in the patriarchy's groin.)

The Democratic primary was a lose-lose proposition for the image of American tolerance: If Senator Obama lost, ours was an irredeemably racist country. Senator Clinton lost, and we are infected by sexism. But whether viewed through the prism of radical gender feminism or a boy's club media conspiracy, the truth is considerably less complicated. The vaunted Clinton machine—devoid of fresh ideas and facing a dynamic, inspirational opponent—simply couldn't compete. Blame the media, blame the patriarchy if you so desire, but the truth is that Americans wouldn't mind a woman as president. Just not that woman.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor at reason.

Friday Funnies

info@reason.com (Chip Bok) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Obama as the End of Identity Politics as We've Known Them

info@reason.com (Terry Michael) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

We are nearing the end of American identity politics as we know it.

Bearing that gift to those who prize the individual over the tribal is a messenger who shared a Hyde Park neighborhood with Milton Friedman, though with a public record that suggests he is more statist than classical liberal.

But Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), can’t be categorized that simply. He is, rather, an intellectual and ideological work in progress. Not stuck in cable-babble caricatured time, he may be traveling the circuitous path many “liberal-tarians”—or libertarian Democrats like me—treaded as we grew and found our way back to the self-reliant values that informed our pluralistic democracy. We lost those values in the Industrial and Progressive eras, when advocates of centralized planning prized society’s perfection over individual liberty. While Obama’s positions don’t exactly channel the Cato Institute, his departure from usual Democratic Party left-liberalism is reflected in the left’s suspicion of him for not having all the 162-point plans of Sen. Hillary Clinton, or spewing the syrupy populism of trial lawyer to the underclass, Sen. John Edwards.

To me, this suggests the beginnings of a journey away from the Great Society mind-set of the Democratic Party. I was a 1960s teenage political junkie who wanted to complete the New Deal, with wealth redistribution and “social justice” managed from Washington. I morphed into a 1980s DLC centrist, embracing mushy “progressive” politics as a halfway house from statist liberalism. Now in my own sixties, I have rediscovered the founder of my party, Thomas Jefferson, in an information era in which we are desktop-empowered to seek our own way and make our own choices, much like the agrarian age inventors of our political system.

I can’t claim to know exactly where Obama is on this ideological continuum. He may not even know. But in his personal evolution, he has moved from the white world of boy Barry in Hawaii and Indonesia, to left-liberal enclaves at Ivy League colleges engaging with young conservatives, to a kind of noblesse oblige organizer bearing the white man's burden (half, in his case) on the streets of Chicago. He went from a young state legislator too aloof, in too much of a hurry for his colleagues in Springfield, to a failed U.S. House candidacy against former Black Panther Bobby Rush, hobbled by an inability to translate the language of the Harvard Law Review to the vernacular of the street. From that latter experience, he drew lessons allowing him to grow as a politician, hearing and incorporating some of the style of the black preacher—including the one who was to later cause him so much grief. He returned to Springfield after that failed congressional bid a different man.

He seems to be a grounded but still searching, an intellectually curious 46-year-old, with a breadth and depth of life experience that will help him make informed choices in a pluralistic democracy that demands its leaders split a lot of differences.

Compromise is a word doctrinaire libertarians find more appalling than appealing. But there's a lot that is appealing in Barack Obama.

Look at his health care plan. While it certainly won’t satisfy free-market purists, it relies on private insurance coverage, encourages portability and choice, promotes competition, and allows purchase of prescription drugs from other countries. It wasn’t by accident he proposed fewer government mandates for purchasing coverage—and was pummeled for it in every debate by the politician who, back in 1993, seemed to seek personal control of a big chunk of our economy. Though drugs and crime can be political minefields for an urban black candidate who has acknowledged marijuana and cocaine use, Obama has no hard line positions in favor of neo-prohibition and has made promising comments about pulling back from America’s status as one of the world’s most prolific jailers. Immediately, his election will restore America's reputation around the world as an opponent of interventionist elective wars.

But perhaps most important to libertarians, his election will put the Jesse Jacksons, the Al Sharptons, and the white identity politics liberals out of business. No longer will they be able to peddle victimology or mau-mau their way through the political landscape, demanding diversity training, minority contracts, or other tribal reparations from bigots they find behind every bush. The myth of unassimilable “minorities” dies when a majority white nation selects a leader “of color,” just as religious social distance was diminished when a majority Protestant country chose a Catholic a half-century before.

There is no perfect leader in the wings. I'll settle for one whose election will signal the end of the world of racial politics as we know it. And, with a nod to R.E.M., I'll feel fine about it.

Terry Michael is director of the non-partisan Washington Center for Politics & Journalism. He came to Washington in 1975 as press secretary to newly elected progressive Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), was a press spokesman (1983-87) for the Democratic National Committee, and now offers “thoughts from a libertarian Democrat” at his blog.

Are You Glad Hillary Is Gone?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 07:49:00 EDT

From an AP account of the end of the line for Hillary Clinton's White House bid:

There was also an overwhelming need for closure, odd for a very close race even in the context of recent history, when Gary Hart and Ted Kennedy took losing nomination fights to the summer conventions. As one veteran political reporter wondered recently: why would journalists seem so eager to see the best story of their life end?
"I've always felt that it was not the job of reporters to be like `The Gong Show' and hoot candidates off the stage," said John Harris, editor in chief of the Politico Web site.
Between the fascination of many reporters with Obama and constant counting of his slow march toward the required number of delegates for the nomination, the Clinton campaign has some legitimate gripes about the way they were covered, he said.

What say you, Hit & Run readers?

More here.

reason on Hillary Clinton.

A Liberal Like No Other

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 07:00:00 EDT

I was just getting used to the idea that Barack Obama is an America-hating left-winger bent on socialism and surrender. Then along comes Ralph Nader, who says the problem with Obama is that he's an obedient steward of the status quo, doing the bidding of greedy corporations. Naderites, conservatives, and many others agree he's a menace. They just can't agree on why.

Obama has said, in reference to his broad appeal, "I am like a Rorschach test"—meaning that his admirers have a knack for seeing in him exactly what they want to find. But the inkblots work the other way, too: People who dislike him have detected a multitude of reasons to justify their animus.

To Hillary Clinton's supporters, he was always a dreamy innocent who would be ground up by the Republican attack machine. To some critics, he's a sleazy Chicago pol. When he ran for Congress against a black incumbent, he lost because some voters thought he was too white. In some primary states this year, some voters thought he was, well, not too white.

By the time this campaign is over, he'll be called everything but a child of God. Some of it will be true, some of it will be false, and much of it won't matter.

One of the favorite Republican themes will be labeling him the most liberal senator, as ranked by the National Journal. Now, it's true that Obama—how to put it?—votes eerily like a Democrat. But it's hard to believe he's really more liberal than Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Chuck Schumer, Barbara Boxer, Russ Feingold, or Bernie Sanders.

By more comprehensive measures, he's not. According to one scholarly analysis of all non-unanimous votes, Obama is only the 10th most liberal senator. Still, there is no doubt he's a liberal of one shade or another. If he's elected, you should not expect a reduction in taxes, spending, regulation, federal power, or Birkenstock sales.

Obama insists his views are more complicated than simple labels convey. But while McCain has often defied his own party's orthodoxy, Obama has declined to do so.

As liberals go, however, opponents of Big Government could do worse. On economic matters, like the mortgage crisis, he's more respectful of property rights and free markets than, say, Clinton. His health care plan rankles many liberals because it doesn't force everyone to buy insurance.

While Obama has criticized various free trade agreements, he's also written that in today's world, "it's hard to even imagine, much less enforce, an effective regime of protectionism."

Some of the positions that get him tagged as liberal confound traditional categories. Among the members of Congress who share his support for withdrawal from Iraq are Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who favors dismantling most of the federal government, and Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, who was secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan.

These days, 20 percent of Republicans say we should bring the bulk of our troops home within a year. They can attest that opposing the war doesn't make you a liberal any more than eating nuts makes you a squirrel.

That's one reason the liberal label may not be quite the ball and chain Republicans hope. If "liberal" is taken to connote gay marriage, socialized medicine, and unilateral disarmament, most people won't find it appealing. But Obama does not espouse those. If it is taken to mean trying something different from the last seven years—or offering a plausible alternative to war, inflation, and a housing bust—they will be receptive.

Back in 1980, everyone knew Ronald Reagan was too conservative to win. But when non-conservatives were presented with a conservative who was likable, temperate, and occasionally eloquent, many of them found they could vote for him. What Obama has going for him, more than anything, is a quality of calm and thoughtful gravity, which offers a refreshing contrast to President Bush's inarticulate defensiveness and McCain's stubborn pugnacity.

I disagree with Obama's positions more often than not, but reducing a political leader to the sum of his positions is like judging the value of an artwork by adding up the cost of the canvas and paint. Obama didn't get where he is by being a liberal like any other. He got there by being a liberal like no other.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Michelle, Ma Belle, These Are Fears That Go Together Well

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:27:00 EDT

Our own Dave Weigel has said most of what needs to be said about the latest Michelle Obama rumors, but Robert A. George has a post worth reading as well:

This is the '08 version of a really weird conservative urban legend that pops up every four years. The names change, but the basics remain the same: 1) It always involves the wife of the Democratic presidential candidate; 2) It always portrays the wife -- not the candidate -- committing some anti-American, unpatriotic act.

I was first exposed to this during the 1988 campaign when the line was, "There's a picture out there of Kitty Dukakis burning the American flag...just wait til that comes out..." (that one got out of hand when a GOP senator actually believed it and called a press conference to say he would soon produce the evidence -- which never materialized). Four years later, "There's a picture out there of Hillary Clinton burning the American flag...just wait 'til that comes out..." In 1996, the Hillary thing repeated itself. In '04, there was a similar one about Teresa Heinz Kerry.

Differences this year: Because of the racial angle and Jeremiah Wright, Michelle Obama -- and Louis Farrakhan, for good measure -- are blaming "whitey." Because of YouTube, it's a clip, not a photo. Oh, and it's also real early: This urban legend isn't supposed to start making the rounds until September or so. Perhaps it's because this one has "crossed over" -- Larry Johnson is a lefty blogger partial to Hillary, so he's caught up in the feverish wish that this might be true. Sorry, Larry, don't hold your breath.

George's last paragraph gets to why I never found this rumor credible. There was too much in the story; it felt like someone's racially charged imagination got carried away. Michelle Obama denounced "whitey" -- and Farrakhan was there! And it was at Trinity Church! And remember that stuff Sister Souljah said about black-on-black crime? Obama said it too! (In other news, I hear there's a dynamite tape out there of John Kerry, Jane Fonda, and Dan Rather sharing a laugh after they spit on a Swift Boat veteran.)

Jim Geraghty has more:

Just as Robert George wrote this post on Ragged Thots about urban legends and Democratic nominee's wives, I was talking to someone who spent a good chunk of the 1988 campaign trying to track down a long-rumored photo of Kitty Dukakis throwing feces at the American flag in the 1960s. He never found it, and doubts that it ever happened, but he kept running into people who were convinced they saw it....

If we come out and see the tape, I'll be happy to say that I was wrong, and that I was too skeptical. But the Internet is full of these kinds of vague stories and rumors, stories where the evidence "will be revealed at the right time," which is always some unspecified point in the future, never today.

Final thought: You know those people who think any attack on Hillary Clinton just has to be a sign of sexism? What do they think of these attacks on Michelle Obama?

Permanent rEVOLution

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Amit Singh is 33 years old. If you were tending a bar when he walked in, you’d probably card him. Before his April speech to a slowly filling restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia, he ambles around the room, grabbing shoulders, shaking hands, smiling sheepishly. Friends who have shown up to support the unassuming defense industry engineer sit nearby, bemused.

“When he first showed me his website,” says Orrin McNamara, one of Singh’s neighbors, “I said: ‘Is this a joke? Amit for Congress?’ Seriously, I thought it might have been a joke.” He ponders for a moment. “I don’t know what the joke would have been.”

A bit after 7 p.m., Singh walks to the podium and sounds like what he is: a Republican congressional candidate. He talks about a “new vision for a brighter future.” Boilerplate, candidate-from-a-kit stuff. Singh smiles and darts his eyes down when he draws applause and laughs nervously when he takes a swipe at his Democratic incumbent. He doesn’t sound comfortable—until the speech shifts.

“We’ve seen how the politics of fear chip away at freedom at home,” he declares, sounding suddenly sure of himself. “Where are the defenders of freedom today? Where are our Thomas Jeffersons? Where are our Barry Goldwaters? There are a few defenders of freedom, but they are outnumbered, and they need our help.”

Singh has one particular defender of freedom in mind: Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). It was Paul’s libertarian-minded presidential campaign that got Singh into politics, first as a donor, then as a Virginia volunteer, and now as a candidate for Congress. A month after watching Paul score 4.5 percent of the vote in the Virginia primary, Singh threw his hat into the ring for the 8th District congressional seat.

By the end of the 2008 elections, as many as 40 self-proclaimed Ron Paul Republicans will have run for national office. The reception they are getting from their state parties ranges from warm embraces to Terminator-like efforts to destroy them. After a year of supporting a presidential candidate the party’s gatekeepers treated like a radioactive performance artist, the Paulites are used to ridicule. They want to carve out a permanent place in Republican politics, regardless of whether the party wants them to be there.

The Ron Paul Republicans come in two breeds. The first and largest category—about half the candidates collected on the aggregating site PaulCongress.com—are utter long-shots. They live either in districts where Democrats could hold fundraisers for the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and still win by landslides or those held comfortably by old-line Republican incumbents. David Wasserman, the House race editor for the Cook Political Report, says these candidates shouldn’t get their hopes up. “You can argue that it says something about the state of our democracy, the nature of the way districts are drawn, or the nature of incumbency,” Wasserman says. “We shut out a lot of viable people in these safe seats.”

Maryland’s Peter James lives in one of those districts of doom, a snaky, overwhelmingly Democratic gerrymander in the black suburbs of Washington, D.C. In the run-up to the February 12 primary elections there, James did the grunt work of organizing the Montgomery County Ron Paul Meetup group while hitting the pavement to win the Republican nomination for Congress. He spent $6,000 and all the free time a computer consultant can wrangle to win a primary against two other candidates—one of them another Ron Paul Republican.

“We had some Libertarian Party activists, some conservative Republicans, and about a third of the people we had were liberal Democrats who didn’t like their party’s candidates,” James says. “I’d go up to someone and tell them I was running for Congress. They’d ask the party. I’d say, ‘Republican.’ They’d say, ‘I can’t vote for you.’ Then I’d say, ‘I’m a Ron Paul Republican.’ And they’d say, ‘Oh! Well, I like him.’ ”

Maryland is ground zero for Ron Paul Republican candidates. Six of the state’s eight congressional districts are held by Democrats; four of the six Republicans running to challenge them were volunteers for Ron Paul. The Maryland Republican Party, which was kicked to the curb in the 2006 midterms, is happy to have them. “We welcome everyone to the Republican Party,” says state party Executive Director John Flynn. “We’re in the minority! Two years ago we didn’t even field candidates for two of these races, so the Ron Paul Republicans are really adding something.”

Like the man who inspired them, Paul’s flock deviates far from the Bush-era GOP’s platform and organizing tactics. When I ask Peter James what he has done to coordinate with the other three Maryland Ron Paul Republicans, he says they’ve talked about launching a viral video or a newspaper. One of James’ “main issues” is “providing an alternative currency,” not exactly a mainline Republican talking point. Flynn doesn’t mind; he shrugs that it’s “one of Peter’s issues.”

Other state parties are less welcoming. John Wallace is a 64-year-old New York real estate broker who started working for Paul, in part, because “he was the only one talking about the North American Union,” an alleged plot to merge the U.S. with Canada and Mexico. Wallace jumped into a primary for a suburban seat that Republicans lost in 2006; the party was backing the millionaire former party chairman Sandy Treadwell to try to seize it back. “I’ll go to one of these county meetings,” Wallace says, “and people will say to me: ‘My God! You’re right on the money. That was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.’ Then they’ll head back to the table and vote for Treadwell.”

Ron Paul himself has endorsed just four of his followers-turned-candidates, and one of them, Jim Forsythe, dropped out of his New Hampshire congressional race in April because he lacked funds and name recognition. The others—including New Jersey’s Murray Sabrin and North Carolina’s B.J. Lawson—have drawn opposition from local Republicans unwilling to take the Paul plunge. (Paul has also endorsed Peter James.)

Paul’s reticence stems from not wanting to see his name attached to some candidate with whom he might not agree. “If you have some name recognition and some money, you have to be careful,” he says. “To say, ‘I’m a Ron Paul Republican,’ and to expect some money and an endorsement from me—I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

The other breed of Ron Paul Republican is neither tolerated as a sacrificial lamb nor pushed away as a nuisance. He is the candidate with a fighting chance for a seat the Republicans genuinely hope to contest. Amit Singh isn’t counting on a Paul endorsement as much as he’s trying to create a local version of the Ron Paul revolution. Mark Ellmore, the Republican candidate who lost the 8th District nomination in 2006 and has been running for it ever since, warns that Singh will “have trouble securing the Republican base,” but that’s as far as the insults go. “Ron Paul supporters are absolutely great for the Republican Party,” Ellmore says.

So while national Republicans never took Ron Paul seriously, Virginia Republicans are sizing up Singh with interest. An internal poll shows him in striking distance of a primary win. Statewide Republican leaders, warm to the idea of an Indian-American candidate, are considering official endorsements.

Ellmore’s hail-fellow-well-met attitude is something new for Ron Paul Republicans. They have spent a year being mocked while posting campaign signs, hustling into straw polls, and Googlebombing the Internet. If they had dissolved after the GOP nomination was locked up, that’s where their legacy might have ended. Instead they’re putting together the first outlines of a political bloc, one that’s increasingly independent from the activities of Paul himself. Even if none of them wins this November, they’re beginning to force the party to take them seriously at last.

David Weigel is an associate editor of Reason.

John Edwards: Rhetoric, Flatulence Not Enough; WSJ: Copyediting, Proofreading Not Enough

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:09:00 EDT

From the Cato Institute's David Boaz comes this hat tip about an anti-Barack Obama debate point made many moons ago by presidential sweepstakes loser John Edwards:

"Rhetoric is not enough. High flatulent language is not enough," says Edwards from a debate appearance.

Read that, from a Wall Street Journal blog, here.

Sadly, and like too many really great stories, this one is simply wrong. In the video clip the Journal embeds right there, Edwards plainly says "high falutin.'"

And that's your Thursday morning comedown.

Note to Dems: Stop Yapping about Willie Horton and the Swift Boat Vets

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 08:41:00 EDT

Libertarian Democrat and reason contributor Terry Michael writes thus about the Willie Horton ads against Mike Dukakis and the Swift Boat ads against John Kerry in Politico:

Evil may have lurked in the souls of those GOP operatives, and Democratic consultants may have been constrained by nominees unwilling to dirty their hands. But it wasn't why we lost.
What the Republicans really did was to rope a couple of dopes. That's the lesson Barack Obama should learn from the fate of Dukakis and Kerry. Engage with McCain on things voters care about and talk honestly about what they don't like about Republicans. But don't make excuses about dirty GOP tactics to explain why the electorate rejects Democratic candidates, when what voters really eschew then and now is failure of judgment, lack of common sense and intellectual dishonesty.

More here.

Bob Barr on The Colbert Report

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 07:02:00 EDT

Here's the video for Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr's appearance on The Colbert Report, whose teaser for the segment notes, "Stephen asks Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr if he's afraid the government will make him register his mustache."

It's all good. And pretty funny.

Watch it here.

More reason on Barr.

Barr talks on reason.tv:

A Time to Fight...the War on Drugs, Among Other Things

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:42:00 EDT

Flipping through A Time to Fight, the new book by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), reason contributor Daniel McCarthy finds some passages about drug policy he considers encouraging, saying they indicate "a better, more humane policy than what the Clintonites and Republicans are offering," one that's "about as good as what Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr has been saying lately." I disagree.

Webb's observations about opium in Afghanistan are perfectly sensible as far as they go:

The reality is that the opium production in Afghanistan is an example of basic market economics at work. The Afghanis grow opium, sometimes in fields so vast that they resemble the rice paddies of Vietnam, because there is a foreign market for their crops, a market that they could not duplicate with any other known product.
If you want to reduce the opium cop, you'll have to find a way to reduce the demand for heroin at its destination point.

Here Webb gets points for candor, I guess, but it's sad that politicians are deemed praiseworthy simply for acknowledging the plain truth. And when it comes to policy prescriptions, Webb does not sound any better than Barack Obama or, for that matter, a "compassionate" drug warrior like Joe Califano, president of the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse:

The time has come to stop locking up people for mere possession and use of marijuana. It makes far more sense to take the money that would be saved by such a policy and use it for enforcement [against] gang-related activities. We should also fully fund the increasingly popular concept of drug courts, where drug offenders are allowed to enter treatment instead of prison and have their drug offense expunged from their records if they successfully complete treatment....

Drug addiction is not in and of itself a criminal act. It is a medical condition, indeed a disease, just as alcoholism is, and we don't lock people up for being alcoholics. Most Americans understand this distinction, even though the political process seems paralyzed when it comes to finding remedies to address it. Our country urgently needs more funding and more treatment centers for treating this disease, not more prison cells for punishing people who have fallen into conduct that, at bottom, is more harmful to themselves than it is to our society.

That first sentence would make sense if it had been written, say, 40 years ago, when simple possession of marijuana was still a felony in most states. Nowadays, it is not true that the government is "locking up people for mere possession and use of marijuana," if by "locking up people" Webb means sending them to prison (as opposed to making them spend a night in jail after arresting them). If Webb had said "the time has come to stop arresting people for mere possession and use of marijuana," that would represent progress, since around 830,000 people still get nabbed for marijuana possession each year, an experience that entails substantial costs, even if they don't include serving time. But any politician who today says people should not go to prison merely for smoking pot is not advocating any real change in policy.

Califano, who passes off minor twiddling with the status quo as a "revolution" in his prohibitionist screed High Society, would also be perfectly comfortable with the rest of Webb's comments, equating drug addiction with disease and justifying forced re-education of drug users. As I said in my review of Califano's book, this pseudomedical talk is a way of asserting that drug users' wishes and choices need not be respected because they are symptoms of a disease. Even if we accept the disease model of addiction, Webb and Califano display an irrational prejudice against certain kinds of addicts. After all, neither advocates forcing alcoholics into "treatment" under threat of imprisonment (unless they commit a crime such as driving while intoxicated).

For that matter, neither advocates alcohol prohibition based on the observation that some people drink too much. Yet both are committed to the continued arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment of people who participate in the production and distribution of the currently illegal intoxicants. These are the people who represent the vast majority of the half a million drug offenders who are currently behind bars in this country. According to Califano, they deserve sympathy only if they happen to consume the product they sell. Because then they're "sick," you see.

John McCain is certifiably awful on the drug issue, refusing even to say that states should be free to set their own policies regarding the medical use of marijuana, a popular, eminently conservative position that would not require him to say anything nice about cannabis. Obama, by contrast, has promised to stop interfering with state decisions in this area, and he otherwise sounds at least as good as Webb. He seems similarly confused about which drug offenders go to prison, saying (through a spokesman) "we are sending far too many first-time, nonviolent drug users to prison for very long periods of time" (emphasis added). A few years ago, he said he thought marijuana laws should be "decriminalized," which at the very least ought to mean citing pot smokers instead of arresting them, but lately he has waffled on the question. Bob Barr, a former hard-line prohibitionist, has been evasive about the drug policies he supports at the state level, but he seems to favor ending the federal war on drugs, which would be a huge improvement, leaving states free to experiment with various approaches. That goes much further than either Webb or Obama has ever suggested.

Rant: The War on Renters

paul.thornton@latimes.com (Paul Thornton) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

One of the biggest obstacles to my dream of owning a home any time in the near future would be the election of Hillary Clinton.

Or Barack Obama.

Or John McCain.

All three senators hope to move into new digs come January, but they want the rest of us to sit tight and stay put. While you won’t hear the Oval Office wannabes coming out explicitly in favor of the astronomically high home prices that stand between renters and ownership, each candidate seeks to prevent the housing bubble’s post-boom correction from flooding the market with millions of relatively cheap properties.

In their concerted attempt to “keep Americans in their homes,” Clinton, Obama, and McCain have called for the federal government to spend billions of dollars to curtail foreclosures and shield Americans from the consequences of their own risky investment decisions. Makes you think the candidates are on your side.

Not if you’re a renter. Foreclosures boost the supply of housing at a faster than expected clip. With supply for potential buyers (i.e., renters) increasing, home prices stand to fall (albeit modestly) to less insane levels, particularly in overheated areas such as Southern California, the region I call home. That increasing supply of housing and those lower prices could be why a Zogby poll released in April showed that, despite the economy’s tailspin, most Americans think now is a good time to buy a home.

And here, dear renters, is where our electoral triumvirate comes in to foil us.

Clinton’s proposal is the most far-reaching. The junior senator from New York would stop foreclosures by fiat—a proposal that wins the “I Didn’t Know a President Could Do That” award—and spend around $30 billion on restructuring troubled mortgages. Obama stops short of Clinton’s 90-day “moratorium,” but the Illinois pol also wants to inject $30 billion into the mortgage market.

Until the middle of April, McCain was alone among the major presidential aspirants in calling bullshit on this idea. The Arizona senator’s line on the mortgage meltdown—that he would refuse to “play election-year politics with the housing crisis,” as quoted in the Los Angeles Times—showed such deference to the free market, it was too good to last. So it didn’t. By April the straight talker was peddling his own multibillion-dollar borrower assistance package—which, he insisted, would help only “deserving” borrowers, of course.

Lost in the rush to help troubled borrowers is an understanding of what this crisis isn’t: a situation in which “Americans are losing their homes.” More accurately, borrowers who can no longer afford their mortgage payments are becoming—gasp!—renters. “Americans are living in other people’s homes” doesn’t quite tug at the heartstrings the same way, which is part of the reason you’re not hearing about it.

Also lost in the flood of campaign promises is the housing bubble’s true crisis, which barely anyone in Washington cares to mention. In 2001 renters who wanted to buy a house in Los Angeles County could expect to spend about $200,000, roughly the area’s median home price at the time. By the peak of the housing bubble in 2007, the median price had shot up to about $550,000, which the California Association of Realtors estimated would easily take more than $100,000 in annual pre-tax income for a family to afford.

Wrap your civic-minded intellect around that one: more than $100,000 a year to afford a modest home. Candidates, there’s your crisis—and thankfully, the market is already taking care of it, through the correction of foreclosures and the resulting increase in the supply of available housing. All a President Clinton, Obama, or McCain would have to do is watch from the Oval Office as that great American dream of homeownership becomes more and more accessible to the likes of me. Unless, that is, the next president is against affordable housing.

Paul Thornton is an assistant articles editor at the Los Angeles Times editorial page.