Posted to IPR by Paulie
Found on the Constitution Party national webpage
by David Weigel
www.reason.com
A thrilling and dispiriting year for libertarian politics
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 a year 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 of many 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.
“Von Mises book was called Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis and it too had been received with yawns when it was published in English in 1936. “While von Mises really had ‘taught’ at the University of Vienna, his was an unpaid position. The University had turned him down on four separate occasions for a paid position. Not surprisingly, in 1940 the nearly destitute von Mises had emigrated to the United States. In 1945, an unpaid ‘visiting professorship’ was obtained for him at NYU while his salary was paid by “businessmen such as Lawrence Fertig”. Fertig was an associate of the Volker Fund and a friend of Henry Hazlitt, the Fund’s friendliest journalist. In all, they would fund von Mises for 25 years and von Mises never would need a ‘real job.'”
Apparently, this thing against the Austrians and by extension Paul has quite a history. Check some of these out:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gordon/gordon37.html
http://reason.com/blog/show/124353.html
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2008/01/11/ron-pauls-ugly-newsletters/
http://www.karendecoster.com/blog/archives/002714.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gordon/gordon39.html
Eric, just because Sarah’s “tramp stamp” is Harley wings and her being the ex mayor of the meth capital of Alaska does NOT make Palin libertarian leaning.
Palin brought “excitement” to the race merely because she is fairly attractive.
On her positive side, she DOES make Caroline Kennedy look like Miss Teen South Carolina!
PEACE
Ok Trent, I guess we’re done arguing then, if we agree, as we seem to, based on your post #34, that Reason WAS mostly against Ron Paul.
***
Druckenmiller,
I supplied an example of dismissive and disrespectful coverage. See post#14. There have been many others. You have supplied nothing specific in rebuttal – just general stuff like “look at the articles and blog posts about Paul” and Reason “ran very enthusiastic profiles of Ron Paul.”
So you say… but could you give me some examples? Maybe some examples that were actually published during the campaign, if that wouldn’t be too much to ask? I never ran across any of this enthusiastic pro-Paul stuff myself, and I was looking, but I am willing to back down if you can point me towards some of it. I had no problem finding the negative stuff.
You have twice come real close to calling me a liar, and have intimated that I have an axe to grind.
Well, I’m not a liar. I’m occasionally wrong about something, but then I figure it out and correct it pretty cheerfully. No one is perfect. But I do not lie. In fact, I catch liars, and I’m real good at it.
I DO have an axe to grind though, I admit it. My axe is this – I want my f=cking rights back – all of them, and I’m sick of cynical inside-the-beltway faux-libertarian poseurs who don’t stand up for freedom when it counts, and/or those who undercut and ridiculed one of the main spokesman for individual liberty – Ron Paul.
I submit that if they really believed in individual liberty, they wouldn’t have behaved in such a manner.
And that’s exactly what Reason, the Buckley cabal, Cato, NRA, and all the rest have done over the years.
Now come all you damage-control artists, trying to say “No, No, Reason liked Ron Paul, really we did. We said good stuff about him.”
Nah. No sale.
Why bother anyway – unless you’re trying to rewrite history to put Reason on the right side of it? I guess you rightly fear that Ron Paul will continue to be found correct in all his analysis and predictions.
No, one thing is clear – the freedom movement has written Reason and the other “connected” libertarian orgs off, and has decided to form its own new organizations, like campaign for liberty, free of the cynicism, statism and rot that pervade the inside-the-beltway faux-libertarian mags rags and “institutions.”
To tReason, State-o, NRA, Nat. Review: we, the people who want to be free, know better than to ever count on you again. When it’s crunch time, you’ll side with the state and against individual liberty again and again – for sure. You’re just about enriching and aggrandizing yourselves now, and not about freedom anymore at all.
Many people had tried to explain this dynamic of corrupted freedom organizations to me, but I had a hard time believing it myself. But this Ron Paul campaign and also the financial crisis forced many closet statists out into the open, both to oppose him, and to support government intervention and defend the Fed. Finally the anti-liberty inclinations of many supposed “conservatives” and “libertarians”were finally seen clearly.
So now we know.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
I’m a Maverick!
here we go again , Dondero claiming his Republican picks as libertarian . Remember when he said bush was the most libertarian president ever?
I agree with LJ , Palin isnt even close to libertarian.
Palin was not libertarian leaning. She was another big-government GOP mascarading around as a small-government conservative. Why didn’t she bring any of her libertarian views to her debates? I saw a debate between a big-gov democrat and a big-gov democrat lite.
Paul ended up being a non-factor in the Fall election.
Much more significant was Sarah Palin.
Barr was polling 5 to 6% in Zogby up until late August. Then the fateful day of August 29 hit. And McCain stunned the entire nation by picking the libertarian-leaning Alaska Governor.
Immediately, Barr’s numbers dropped to less than 1%.
Libertarians were left with no incentive to vote for the Libertarian Party. Why vote for a third-party, when a major party nominates a Libertarian-leaner for Vice-President?
Apparently someone has his fingers in his ears. “LA LA LA Reason hated Ron Paul regardless of what you say.”
Take a look at the articles and blog posts about Paul and it is so overwhelmingly obvious that you’re lying.
“No, it’s not a lie to say that Reason, as an organization, was mostly against Ron Paul.
The lie is to state or even imply the opposite.”
I never said they werent mostly against Paul. Just that Reason/CATO/ATR/whatever should be called against Ron Paul because they arent monolithic organizations.
Ya know, Jeff4 Paul, I too wish we could just move on, but those wh0 forget history are condemned to repeat it.
Those who expect certain supposedly libertarian orgs to shoulder the load in the future and speak up when it counts will have to forget the historical record of this election cycle.
One of the most solid libertarian candidates ever was running, debating, and raising money like NEVER BEFORE, at a crucial time of history when the very world financial/monetary “system” is coming apart, and also this guy knows more about economics and currency than even most libertarians.
Given these facts, it was telling that there was no solid outside support coming from libertarian organizations for Ron Paul other than Rockwell and the Paul campaign/movement itself.
I myself got what I think may have been the very first endorsement of Ron Paul by Grover Norquist, and that’s all well and good, but at that time, Norquist wasn’t out there actively telling people about Ron Paul, like he should have been – I had to lead him to the subject myself.
I’m sorry Trent Hill and Steven Druckenmiller, but it comes down to this:
I’m saying Reason and Cato (and plenty other orgs besides just them) didn’t stand behind Ron Paul.
You are implying that I’m wrong.
I didn’t say they never said anything good about him, and I never said that no individuals at these orgs liked Paul.
I simply meant that overall, their insitutional stance, especially during the crucial parts of the campaign, was not pro-Paul at all, and included a distinctly hostile and dismissive tone, which I gave an example of above in post #14.
The treatment of Ron Paul by Reason and Cato has already been documented by others, and I had no intention of re-proving it here, but it’s telling that in way of proof, I found one example of Weigel’s dismissive tone against Ron Paul in about 30 seconds and posted it here. Given time, I have no doubt I could have easily reconstructed the entire sordid record of hostile and dismissive coverage of Ron Paul by Reason, but again, why bother? It’s already a known fact.
Reason doesn’t deal in substance anymore, I don’t think, and that’s why none of Ron Paul’s positions were once explored in any substantive way. All the journalism and many of the comments were and are inside-the-beltway gossipy stuff – cynical, bitchy, apathetic, and with no real scholarship.
No, it’s not a lie to say that Reason, as an organization, was mostly against Ron Paul.
The lie is to state or even imply the opposite.
Ron Paul:
1. should have layed off of the gold stuff, that still requires STATE control over the monetary system
2. needed to attend some toastmaster meetings. he had no speaking ability
3. he sucked on immigraton, but look at the whackos he had to pander to
4. his “constitution is god” thing got a bit redundant.
5. he has the political skills of mary ruwart. none. that’s why she sucked at the LP convention
6. he endorsed a theocrat, by the name of Chuck Baldwin, now, THAT was a disappoint.
but other than that, he’s alright.
Ron Paul proved an enormous disappointment to anti-system voters in just about every way one might assess. He was a terrible manager, tentative about running and presented himself on television in such an agitated fashion that one got the impression that someone had stuck his thumb in a light plug. But of all the disappointments none was greater than his refusal to run as a third party or independent candidate. Here Paul showed himself as essentially self-serving. One didn’t have to wait until late Spring to realize that the Paul campaign was an exercise in self-contained narciscism. Ron Paul, is a schmegeggie.
“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;”
It should be noted that Chuck Baldwin failed to get ballot status in several states, including high population states like New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Indiana, Texas, Arizona, and California (where his ballot status was highjacked by Alan Keyes). Missing the ballot in these states killed Chuck Baldwin’s vote total.
Whose time is it Jeff?
Then this kind of blogging is a waste of time. AlphaSierraMsLG
Uh dude you are nice but full of yourself and wrong.
I leaflet , i protest , i petition , i run meetings , i run as a candidate, i speak at events , i walk the districts and do all kinds of things to promote liberty.
I also like to get my blog on sometimes.
blogging and fighting for liberty arent mutually exclusive ya know.
It is with sadness that I read these endless streams on blogs of recriminations and bickering over trivialities of personal conceit. There is little time left to defend the Founder’s experiment in Freedom and Liberty and its proponents spend their time engaging in such banal arguments.
I, for one, concentrate my time educating all comers at the grassroots level and still spend time developing and leafletting at any public location with lots of traffic about the Bailouts, the Fed and monetary system and recruiting people to directly engage with their government for real change. We are working to continue to take over precincts and districts with Constitutionally-minded. fiscally responsible, limited government folks and to prepare them for the coming ravages of the economic system. You folks can continue the endless back-biting and bickering. The rest of us and working to prepare for the Recovery once the Great Unraveling and Reckoning have wreaked their havoc on our lives.
gotta be an impersonation but i could not help laughing.
ROFLMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I eat dick.
and #22 is the impersonator
Do you have a life, besides attacking libertarians? Apparently not
#20 is the impersonator.
This impersonator should be banned.
That’s why Ron Paul didn’t win the GOP nomination 😉
“Baldwin had defeated gadfly Alan Keyes for the C.P. nomination in large part by hinting he could get Paul’s endorsement.”
Dave, that isn’t really true. Keyes lost because he was an interventionist and the Party is not. Baldwin was in line with the Party.
tom, you continue to maintain that Reason as an organization “smeared” Paul and we’ll all know that you’re a liar with an axe to grind.
tomdesabla,
They werent happy to see the New Republic story “Come out” because it didnt have to “come out”–as Ron Paul said, it was old news. Anyone who paid any attention knew that those letters were in a public library and has already been used again Paul previously.
As for Weigel, he covered the story appropriately–if critically.
I kept a pretty good watch on the RP media treatment, and tReason had plenty of snarky dismissive coverage.
Here is an example by a fellow named Weigel:
“About an hour ago I followed Ron Paul outside the Radisson in Manchester, NH to get his response to James Kirchick’s explosive New Republic piece, “Angry White Man.” […]I asked the candidate a few questions as he moved to his car.
Here’s a transcript:
reason: Do you have any response to The New Republic’s article about your newsletters?
Ron Paul: All it is–it’s old stuff. It’s all been rehashed. It’s all political stuff.
reason: Why don’t you release all the old letters?
Paul: I don’t even have copies of them, because it’s ancient history.
reason: Do you stand by what appears in the letters? Did you write these…?
Paul: No. I’ve discussed all of that in the past. It’s just old news.
reason: Did the New Republic talk to you before they ran it?
Paul: No, I never talked to them.
reason: What do you think of Martin Luther King?
Paul: Martin Luther King is one of my heroes because he believed in nonviolence and that’s a libertarian principle. Rosa Parks is the same way. Gandhi, I admire. Because they’re willing to take on the government, they were willing to take on bad laws. So I believe in civil disobedience if you understand the consequences. Martin Luther King was a great person because he did that and he changed America for the better because of that.
reason: You didn’t write the derogatory things about him in the letter?
Paul: No.
(Here is Weigel’s editorial opinion) “Paul’s position is basically that he wrote the newsletters he stands by and someone else wrote the stuff he has disowned.”
***
I think Weigel and Reason were happy to see the New Republic article – they were all over it, and they were wallowing in it like pigs.
Now we are to believe that hey, they supported him all along?
Nah. There is plenty of other evidence of opposition to and lack of respect for Ron Paul out there, but I just wanted people to see that Weigel has been dismissive of Paul before, and took joyous part in stirring up the sh!tfest that was the newsletter rehash/story.
So, ONE person from Cato made an argument, and that makes them the “Stato” organization? I’m sorry, but like I said, the buzzwords of “Stato and tReason” make me zone.
As has been pointed out to you, Reason ran very enthusiastic profiles of Ron Paul and, had you been paying attention, you would know that Reason’s blog ran a lot of very enthusiastic posts about Ron Paul’s run.
Yet you persist in claiming that Reason as an organization opposed Ron Paul, which has gone from a mistaken belief to a flat-out lie on your part.
“Great, so did I, only I’m not part of an organization that belittled him. You are. ”
Actually, while Weigel does still contribute to Reason–he now works for the Economist, which did 1-2 really good profiles on Paul.
Ok, I just have to say “zombie” one more time.
Thanks!
Weigel: “I donated to Paul and voted for him in the D.C. primary.”
Great, so did I, only I’m not part of an organization that belittled him. You are.
***
Oh, do you really “see we have another Autstrian-School RP Zombie in our midst” – Steven Druckenmiller?
(Yawn)
Since I deal in the arena of actual argument rather than personal name-calling, let me submit this evidence against Cato:
On my radio program, Cato scholar Daniel Griswold actually defended sending U.S. taxpayer money to Mexico to defend THEIR southern border. He said it was ok because it “promoted our national security.” This was official Cato policy at the time the immigration bill was being debated.
Now I see that proposed expenditure as wasteful, senseless, and I find no warrant for it under the Constitution.
Who is the zombie?
Cato supports the Fed, which supports propping up zombie banks that are literally walking dead.
That make not make them zombies, but certainly zombie-sympathizers.
I on the other hand support healthy economics, including a healthy, sustainable monetary system, not a zombified one based on worthless paper and unpayable debt.
They who support zombies are the ones who should bear the moniker – not me.
Steven,
I dont think its fair to call them “Austrian-school RP zombies”.
Ron Paul worked well with CATO, Reason, and all the other Koch groups and even invited Grover Norquist (of ATR, Koch funded) to his Rally for the Republic.
And, it would probably be more fair to call them Lew Rockwell or Mises Institute zombies (not that I agree with that characterization) because there is a larger Austrian School than just the orbit of Lew Rockwell/LvMI–mostly over at FEE, which includes Kirzner, Rizzo, and Boettke.
Oh, I see we have another Autstrian-School RP Zombie in our midst, talking about “Stato and tReason”. Those are pretty much personal codewords for “ignore this person”.
“Marxist”
Where??!! Oh, wait. You’re just being propogandistic. You libertarian capitalists and rightwingers are always getting me excited with allegations that “socialism” is just around the corner, then I look around and realize it’s just meant to be slander. *sigh*
“I donated to Paul and voted for him in the D.C. primary.”
Forgot about that David! Am I correct in pointing out that not all people at CATO or Reason opposed Paul?
That was a very accurate and well constructed recap of the politics of the libertarian (note the small “L”) component of the 2008 race. The answer to the question “what was Ron Paul’s success” has less to do about politics and more to do about the war for hearts and minds.
Not only did Paul educate and inform on a scale not seen since Barry Goldwater’s day, but he proved that the young voters are not as brainwashed as the Elite Statists would like us to believe. This invigorated the “old patriots” like myself who had previously schlepped back into the shadows of frustration and pessimism.
All-in-all, Paul’s greatest success was to prove that the freedoms and liberties defined in the Constitution are alive and well in the hearts and minds of a significant number of Americans. This came at a time when it was needed – just before the next New Deal of Marxist Socialism is about to be foisted upon the American Public which is being brought to its knees by the intentional destruction of our economy (a poster child for the Hegelian Dialectic).
The question is: Will it have been enough? …will enough people have been educated and motivated to rise up against this insidious plan to replace our Constitutional Republic with Marxist Statism. That time is drawing very near when the fate of the “great experiment” will be determined.
May God bless our Constitutional Republic.
I donated to Paul and voted for him in the D.C. primary.
So you can name one “employee” at Cato who endorsed Paul – that’s really great.
Unfortunately, stacked up against the whole of their output over the last 18 months – no articles in open support of Ron Paul and also including at least one scathing denunciation of him by no less than Vice President David Boaz, your claim doesn’t carry the necessary weight to rebut me.
Not to mention their pro-Fed position. In case you haven’t noticed, the Fed isn’t working out too well. Ron Paul has been warning about it for 20 years, and Cato has yet to issue their first call for the dismantling of the Fed.
Oh, and you may recall that Don Luskin abandoned the Paul campaign and went over to McCain’s side. So that one doesn’t fly very well either.
No, I’m not trying to turn anything into a sh!t fest, I’m just pointing out that Cato and Reason and National Review have been compromised IN GENERAL, not just during this election cycle. My point is simply that, over the years, they have been proven totally ineffective at increasing individual freedom in our society.
They should have been overjoyed at Ron Paul’s candidacy and should have been constantly reminding people that he was right. The fact that they didn’t and don’t do any of those things just shows how deep the rot in these institutions really is.
Again, you can’t “go to work” if people don’t agree on where to dig the foundations. This is exactly what I’m talking about; this is why the freedom movement doesn’t go anywhere – people don’t agree on what it is.
Ron Paul had the traction he did because he did understand what freedom really is, and he knew where to start reforms – the monetary system. That clarity of understanding he had – people could see it, they could understand it, that’s why he reached people.
You’ve got to get it right, and by “it” I mean the ideological and philosophical basis for your policies, or we’ll all be working at cross-purposes, just as we have been.
No, we WILL come to a reckoning on the ideas of Ron Paul, and just exactly why the existing “freedom” organizations weren’t solidly behind him, as they should have been.
They WILL HAVE TO BE held accountable in the end.
“Cato and Reason and Nat Review – None supported Ron Paul.”
That isnt true at all. A number of employees at CATO, like Michael Tanner, endorsed Ron Paul.
And National Review’s David Kopel and Donald Luskin both endorsed Paul.
Let’s not forget that CATO’s affilliates Reason Magazine and the Reason Foundation both had numerous employees who supported Paul. There is no reason to turn this into a shit-fest. Let’s just get to work.
Yes, the question does hang doesn’t it?
Well, I think that it all depends on what you consider when you look to see what the Paul campaign achieved this cycle. If all you are looking for is votes, then nothing big happened.
If you could somehow measure whether there had been a sudden increase in the amount of exposure of libertarian philosophy into the minds and hearts of the average Joe – then maybe something pretty big did happen after all.
I think there was very little mainstream media coverage of Ron Paul relative to other candidates, and relative to his fundraising prowess. Some people, Dave Nalle for one example, question whether Paul was really blacked out or treated in an unusual manner by the media. I think they are either being disingenious or ignorant, because there are many ways to measure such coverage, and Paul, and particularly his message, was routinely ignored by both left and right.
You could look it up. Just google the “censorship of Ron Paul” and many articles and exposes will come up, including a good one by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Anyway, considering the fact that he didn’t receive any real exposure in the MSM, and that such exposure is worth multiple Billions, as opposed to the paltry millions that candidates raise from donors, he did OK.
Without doing any research, I still feel confident in saying that there are literally hundreds of thousands of people in this country who have been changed forever by Paul’s candidacy this cycle. It doesn’t really take a sage analyst to figure that out really.
I guess old-line libertarians like the State-O Institute and Treason Magazine are just unable to process the fact that Ron Paul and the Austrian School are right, have been right, and will continue to be right about the important things, and that in breaking from Ron Paul’s common-sense philosophy, and standing against him, they have essentially become intellectually bankrupt themselves.
Plus, these entities have to be jealous too, because, it looks to me like Ron Paul has done more to advance the real cause of human freedom in America during this election cycle alone, than they have achieved in all the years of their existence.
The Libertarian Party has lost its integrity and has become irrelevant; worse than irrelevant in fact, it has become synonymous with failure and hangs like an albatross around the neck of everyone connected with it. Indeed, Bob Barr was a worthless, sell-out candidate, perfectly emblematic of the state of the LP.
The fact is that the deck was stacked against Ron Paul just like it’s stacked against freedom in general. The Founders warned about it, because freedom is weak and must be strongly defended by people who understand what it is and what it is not.
If you don’t understand freedom, you can’t preserve it, that’s why these philosophical, (or some might say ideological) debates are utterly crucial to have, so that people might understand why people advocate the things that they do.
The fact is that the thing that’s destroying this country now is exactly the same thing the Founders warned about – statism. Statism, the desire for control of others, is what leads to tyranny.
Statism does not announce itself for what it is; instead it wears many hats and appears in many guises. A foundational stone of tyranny is laid by establishing some kind of monopoly control over the nation’s money supply, ostensibly to help the economy in one way or another.
It has never worked in the long run, because it cannot work in the long run. Human nature being what it is, monopoly control over the money supply always goes out of control and eventually destroys the currency.
It is a singular characteristic of statism that it blinds people from the truth wherever and whenever it can, explaining why orgs like Reason and Cato can think that they stand for a free society, while still supporting and accepting the presence of that monopoly control over money.
Statism has them, and they don’t even realize it. That is one reason why they opposed Ron Paul, because they had given in to statism on the monetary front, and so they feel the need to vilify him for holding firm. He makes them look bad with his opposition to the Federal Reserve.
Yeah, statism is powerful indeed. Both “parties” are in its grip, and so is the mainstream media, the schools, and even the halls of business. Even the supposed “freedom” organizations are corrupted.
Just look at a few examples:
Cato and Reason and Nat Review – None supported Ron Paul.
NRA doesn’t really oppose gun control, and didn’t even file a strong brief against the D.C. Gun Ban when they had their chance at the SCOTUS level.
Conservatives supposedly want small government, yet, since Buckley back in the 50’s, all the way through to Dick Cheney in the 21’st century, have always found an excuse to run deficits.
Always.
For Buckley it was the commies who ensured that “we must have big goverment for the duration” – and for Cheney and Bush it was 9-11, meaning that “deficits don’t matter.”
Still, statism deludes these “conservatives” and clouds their minds. Just this morning, Neocon Chris Plante, morning man at WMAL, which is the premier talk radio station in the D.C. area, forgot all that and said that “nobody in their right mind wants to run deficits.”
Nobody but his conservative heroes, I guess.
Anyway, I think Ron Paul reached a lot of people, and none of them will be turning back. He did what we all need to do – he learned what freedom really was, and he stood up for the truth and proved his case.