Doctor Doctor
James Joyner points out that, when it comes to votes, the Ron Paul REVOLution has flatlined. His tentative theory:
Could it be that hard-core libertarians are just a relatively small group? That, despite being organized and enthusiastic, there aren’t enough of them to elect a president? Barring a better explanation, I’m leaning in that direction.
First off, this is surely true. I would add a few things, though.
1. There are a bunch of different kinds of libertarianisms, only partially compatible. The Paul campaign’s bedrock is the sort of self-professed libertarian who will publish Michael Levin (pdf) in one of his journals and then review him favorably in another. But you can’t imagine Roger Pilon or Brink Lindsay – or me – uniting all of libertarianism under one happy banner with our own runs. I’d wager that none of them (us) would draw even a tenth of Paul’s support.
2. Paul is running in Republican primaries, on a program that amounts to a repudiation of the major tenets of the Republican Party in recent practice. It’s not surprising that the Republican Party electorate lacks a strong constituency for anti-Republicanism.
3. Notwithstanding point 2, the Paul campaign could have done a lot more to maximize the “insurgent vote.” Paul’s recent debate performances have been strong, but reports from primary states say that his ad campaigns soft-pedal his war opposition and constitutionalism in favor of stressing his opposition to abortion and amnesty for illegal immigrants, and, according to one report I saw on Hit & Run (I think), his “respect for military service members.” Thus you see oddities like John McCain beating Paul among what few Iraq War opponents exist in the GOP.
As a major-party primary campaign, the Ron Paul REVOL is a spectacular failure. Fundraising is a means to an end. The end could be the nomination, or it could be showing your power, bringing a bloc of delegates to the convention who must be appeased. Pat Buchanan did this in 1992. Mike Huckabee may do it this year. Barring some real surprises Tuesday night, Paul isn’t going to. In December and early January it was possible to imagine strong performances in Iowa and New Hampshire making him the third option in a narrowing field. But he would have had to win or lose narrowly in highly contested contests, and to pick up supporters from other candidates as they dropped out. It hasn’t happened. This is partly the limits of the appeal of libertarianism that James espies, and partly the errors of the candidate and his brain trust.
There are two other possibilities, though. One is that Paul’s primary campaign represents preparation for a third-party or independent run. In that case, it has served to increase his name recognition and build up a mailing list that could bring Paul one or two percent of the vote in November. I’d be all for this, since I think his conservatism means he’ll draw votes from the GOP, which still needs a good smashing. Even for this purpose, more primary votes would have been better than fewer.
The last possibility is that the primary campaign serves the fundraising operation rather than vice verse. “Ron Paul and Associates” (broadly considered) could come out of 2008 with a bigger mailing list and ready cash that can be used to advance the Mises Institute vis a vis its rivals like “Stato” and “(t)reason.” The Paul campaign has apparently been burning money as it comes in – they’re not hording it from what I can tell – but they’ll still finish the spring with a massive donor list and very possibly a pot full of cash.
Comment by Thoreau —
February 3, 2008 @ 12:31 pm
I think the mistake Paul made was trying to win. Like you said, his most popular message is opposition to the war. But that’s not what he played up in his ads. In his ads he played up abortion and immigration, because he figured he needs to swing right to win GOP primary voters.
That strategy would make sense if he had a shot at most GOP primary voters. What he should have done is focus on states with open primaries and play up his stances on the war and civil liberties. Then he could have won bigger numbers.
He’d still lose the nomination that way, but the nomination was never a serious prospect. OTOH, being the strongest Republican candidate among independent voters would have sent messages about November.
Comment by bbartlog —
February 3, 2008 @ 1:15 pm
Well… by comparison with the other campaigns, they did hold back a bit. Every other campaign except Giuliani’s (which always had a late-state emphasis) burned through almost every penny they took in in 2007. Paul started the year with something like $8 million cash on hand. But I think this was part of an intentional strategy to have some ammunition left once Super Tuesday rolled around. And indeed, if it were all about cash on hand Paul would be in good shape. While McCain has raised more since the beginning of the year (probably $10 million to Paul’s $5 million), he’s probably still behind Paul in cash on hand for the moment.
I agree that pursuing the religious right rather than continuing to drive home the antiwar message was a mistake. Paul *did* start out distinguishing himself primarily by his antiwar stance, but somewhere along the line he or his team apparently decided that he needed to play this down so as not to alienate Republican voters. But to be fair to Paul he does continue to mention the war *in person*; it’s primarily in his promotional materials (ads, mailers) that you see this stategic elision.
Comment by Leonard —
February 4, 2008 @ 10:19 am
There’s also the not inconsequential point that due to the “success of the Surge”, media attention to the Iraq and the war generally is down, and so is voter concern.
But yes, the real thing is that libertarians are a small minority and always will be, barring radical changes in the human species. Not to mention that our politics, unlike others, is not suited to democracy. In democracy, the ability to promise something for nothing is important. Free medical care! Keep you safe! Sounds good! We promise nothing for nothing.
Comment by Barry —
February 4, 2008 @ 11:03 am
I’d emphasize three things:
1) Libertarians are a very small minority. They’d had outsized space on the internet, due to demographics, but that’s been trending down for years.
2) Most libertarian rhetoric from the GOP was BS, as is increasingly obvious. It was mainly to aid certain corporate interests, who don’t want to be regulated. Unless they could expect an advantage, in which case they sent in their lobbyists, and the same GOP politicians who spouted libertarian rhetoric would be muc more accomodating in private.
3) Ron Paul is a paleolibertarian, not a libertarian. Sorry for the bold, that’s pretty obvious if you look at Justin Raimondo or Patrick Buchanan. One of the shocks of the past few years has been reading Pat’s writings, and agreeing with them. It made me want to take a shower, using powerful industrial cleaners. But the fact that Pat, Justin or Ron can make good points on a few things doesn’t mean that they are good guys.
Comment by Leonard —
February 4, 2008 @ 11:37 am
Barry, sure Paul is a paleo… but the question here is does that hurt him, by comparison to other kinds of libertarians? In getting votes, that is. I kind of doubt it… it strikes me that paleos are more electable than cosmos. This is relative; they’re still not very electable but they are just within the realm of possibility in this diverse country. Paul is an example of that. Sure he’s not a Senator… but he is a Representative. What does he offer his constituents?
Comment by Barry —
February 4, 2008 @ 1:48 pm
Leonard, that wouldn’t surprise me. But it might lead to the conclusion that what the cosmo’s liked the most about Ron were things which were not core, and didn’t necessarily help him. The racism and worries about (how should I put it) conspiracies of bankers, and other plain old right-wing fringe stuff, might have been what he was really is.
Comment by lemuel pitkin —
February 4, 2008 @ 2:59 pm
Or you could come at this the other way: Given his low vote totals, Ron Paul has raised an awful lot of money.
Evidently libertarianism is well-represented among the rich. Which is not something I’d have guessed.
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 4, 2008 @ 3:27 pm
That would merit a touché, lemuel, except I don’t think we’ve established that Paul is getting money primarily from “the rich.”
I think Barry may come closer to the mark.
Comment by Gene Callahan —
February 4, 2008 @ 8:35 pm
“worries about (how should I put it) conspiracies of bankers”
Apparently you think talk about banking ‘conspiracies’ = complaining about Jews. I don’t see Paul’s talk having that aspect.
The Fed was created at the behest of the big investment banks. From Wikipedia:
“Centralized banking was met with much opposition from politicians, who were suspicious of a central bank and who charged that Aldrich was biased due to his close ties to wealthy bankers such as J.P. Morgan and his daughter’s marriage to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. In 1910, Aldrich and executives representing the banks of J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, and Kuhn, Loeb, & Co., secluded themselves for 10 days at Jekyll Island, Georgia.[5] The executives included Frank A. Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of New York, associated with the Rockefellers; Henry Davison, senior partner of J.P. Morgan Company; Charles D. Norton, president of the First National Bank of New York; and Col. Edward House, who would later become President Woodrow Wilson’s closest adviser and founder of the Council on Foreign Relations.[6] There, Paul Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb, & Co. directed the proceedings and wrote the primary features of what would be called the Aldrich Plan. Warburg would later write that “The matter of a uniform discount rate (interest rate) was discussed and settled at Jekyll Island.” Vanderlip wrote in his 1935 autobiography From Farmboy to Financier :
I was as secretive, indeed I was as furtive as any conspirator. Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would have been wasted. If it were to be exposed that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress…I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyll Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System.—
So major investment bankers created the Fed in a secret conspiracy! And this is in one of the creators own words. Furthermore, it looks to me (by name at least) that only one of those conspirators was Jewish. We could call it a WASP banking conspiracy.
And the reason they created it was to have an agency that could bail them out when they got bitten by risky loans. And what has the Fed done, again and again? After the 87 crash, after Mexico, Russia, the dot-com boom, and the housing bubble? Bail out the banks. What causes Jim Cramer to explode on TV? If he thinks the Fed is not bailing out the big banks fast enough. What does the Fed chariman do when he retires? Consults for big investment banks. (And earns $100,000 per speech he gives them.)
This is a ‘conspiracy’ going on right in front of our eyes, and noting that it is taking place has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. It’s just a big industry doing its best to get State protection from failure. Does anyone who comments at this blog, liberal or libertarian, really want to contend that this doesn’t happen all the time? Then why should the investment banks, of all industries, be the pure, virtuous exception?
Comment by wellbasically —
February 4, 2008 @ 10:02 pm
I bet Ron Paul never expected to be competing with Obama for independent voters.
So the newsletter thing and the republico-centric ads prove that at heart, Ron Paul is a conservative Republican, but worse, a Hoover-style austerity budget balancing Republican.
For him to go after the Fed, the banks etc was right, but he garbled it though his distrust of the national debt.
Comment by Stephen W. Carson —
February 6, 2008 @ 10:05 am
So what are you saying exactly? That Lew secretly engineered the various mass donation days (Nov. 5th, the Tea Party, etc.) so that he could build up his mailing lists?
If he did then he is a genius. What success the campaign has had has seemed spontaneous and unexpected to me.
Comment by TGGP —
February 6, 2008 @ 2:30 pm
According to Marcus Epstein, Peter Brimelow has spoken at Cato sponsored events. Cato’s Clint Polick gave a positive review to a book by Jared Taylor. So perhaps the different sides of libertarianism aren’t that different after all.
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 6, 2008 @ 2:53 pm
Teej: Not sure how you figure that or what you think it means if true. Got a link to Bolick’s review? I’d be interested to read it.
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 6, 2008 @ 2:54 pm
Steven: What do you mean by “secretly engineered?”
Comment by TGGP —
February 6, 2008 @ 7:39 pm
I did some googling for “Clint Bolick” and “Paved With Good Intentions”, which mostly resulted in links referring to Bolick as a thoughtful conservative critic but without showing what he actually said. This page has a blurb from him. I googled the blurb, which only resulted in other pages using the blurb but not containing the full review. It apparently appeared in the Wall Street Journal around when the book was published and their full archives may not be available online.
Comment by Stephen W. Carson —
February 7, 2008 @ 10:43 am
OK, I’m lost. Please just spell out what you believe happened. Here is my guess at events (I have no inside info):
Lew et al. talked Ron Paul into running for president as a Republican. I am not privy to motivations but I assume it was the usual motivation for such a thing: Have a candidate who represents something like our views (in this case libertarian views) so we don’t have to choose between cheering for Bush over Kerry or vice versa or some other sickening set of “options”.
The campaign muddled along gaining some enthusiasm and then this Lymon (sp?) guy came up with this Nov. 5th thing and everyone was stunned by the amount of money raised and the number of people who donated. People saw some real mass enthusiasm for libertarian ideas (at the very least principled anti-war ideas) and thought maybe this could just keep building, drawing in conservatives with real limited gov’t convictions, liberals and other wanting to stop the war, etc. A broad coalition of people wanting to reverse the direction the US gov’t has been going, even if few would agree on libertarian anarchy as the logical end-point.
My own take is that a lot of this goodness happened. Just not near enough this time to sweep Ron Paul into office. But more happened than I ever dreamed possible. I hope Ron Paul or someone similarly radical tries again for 2012… Whatever the case, I hope this is the beginning, not the end, of widespread knowledge of and support of libertarian ideas.