Stephen Green links to yet another person giving up on the Libertarian Party
I can’t say I disagree. I haven’t voted for a Libertarian since Harry Browne ran for President in 2000, and I don’t see any reason that I’ll change that practice anytime soon. What a libertarian should do, though, in the face of a GOP that plainly no longer believes in the small government ideas of Ronald Reagan and a Democratic Party that is moving further towards socialism every day, is something I don’t yet know the answer to.
I’ll leave the same comment here that I did at VP:
Interesting that he doesn’t provide any links to back up his indignation.
I’m a long-standing small-l libertarian myself, but I’ve never heard anyone among the Big-L crowd say what he says they said.
There are links provided by other comments to the VP post, but to me it doesn’t matter. My doubts about the LP started after 9/11. There are times when an isolationist foreign policy is just plain stupid, and one of those times is when a terrorist group has decided to start killing your citizens.
In the 2004 election, I voted Libertarian for all statewide offices, and Republican for national offices. I couldn’t support a party that didn’t feel the way I did about the War on Terror, which I felt was the most important issue of that election.
Of course, I was in California, so of all the votes I cast, the only vote that mattered was for Rep. Chris Cox, and he no longer has his seat (sure, it was a promotion in the administration, but that’s no matter). I was suprised when Kerry only won the state 53-46 though…
Not a campaign ad, but a credible national candidate with a strong libertarian track record running for president under the banner of one of the major parties is the best thing that could reasonably happen. Deroy Murdock makes the case for such a person in National Review of all places here.
Capital L Libertarians will have to try and get past the cleanup of Times Square, but frankly, they won’t be critical to Giuliani’s chances in 2008.
Matt,
Thanks for the link. I had no idea that Giuliani was quite a reformer. I knew he really attacked the crime problem in NYC, but I didn’t know he limited the size and scope of government there. This clears up any questions I had about voting for him.
But I don’t know if he can get over the hump with social conservatives. His pro-choice position may be enough to get him deep-sixed. Perhaps Murdoch is right, and if he shows he can destroy Hillary in the Senate, he’ll get a gratitude vote. But if I were him, I’d worry about two things. First, if he destroys Hillary, he might just be opening the door for a social conservative to get the nominee against a greatly-weakened Democratic field. Second, if he gets beat by Hillary, he’s got no chance of winning the nomination in 2008.
Hard to decide who to vote for when our media is rabidly biased. We have launched a new website documenting the bias of one of these newspapers, The Baltimore Sun. Hope you enjoy it!
I don’t sense that Giuliani has any interest in being a legislator. Plus, your lose-lose calculus is probably correct.
There’s a federalist way to de-emphasize his social policy positions. “But as President, I’ll make sure those things won’t be any of my business. My Democratic opponent will make them her business.” I also, probably too optimistically, think that a leader can pull a party along with him. There weren’t many Goldwater/Reagan conservatives before 1980.