Reason Magazine - Staff > David Weigel

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.

Soundbite: Pop Christianity

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:05:00 EDT

In 2005 Daniel Radosh visited his wife’s family in Wichita, Kansas, and tagged along to a Christian rock festival. It was a bizarre experience for a journalist who thought he knew every cranny of pop culture: He was surrounded by fans screaming for bands he’d never heard of. “The key moment for me,” Radosh remembers, “was when one of my sister-in-law’s friends ran back after a set and said ‘That was awesome! They prayed like three times in a 20-minute set!’ I had to know what it meant to judge a band by how hard it prayed rather than how hard it rocked.”

Three years later Radosh has produced Rapture Ready! (Scribner), a humorous travelogue-cum-study of this “alternate universe.” He doesn’t attend a single church service. He goes instead to the Christian professional wrestling rings, stadium-sized passion plays, and rollicking rock festivals that make up the $7 billion Christian pop culture industry.

Q: Since the 2004 election we’ve seen umpteen books about evangelical Christians and their political influence, most of them written to spook secular Americans. What do you learn from exploring this culture that you don’t learn from exploring religious politics?

A: If somebody memorized the Constitution and watched C-SPAN every night and knew all the voting records of every senator but had never heard of Elvis Presley or Oprah Winfrey or Jerry Seinfeld, I think you could make a case that that person didn’t know much about America. We hear about evangelicalism as a religious movement, as a political movement; if you don’t know who [evangelical superhero] Bibleman is, or who [thriller writer] Frank Peretti is, or if you’ve never heard Christian comedy, you really don’t understand what’s going on in these peoples’ lives.

Q: You visited the oldest remnants of Christian pop culture, like the Great Passion Play in Arkansas, and it seems like the newer culture is leaving behind a much more conservative, much less tolerant way of life. What parts of that are being ditched in the new Christian pop culture?

A: It’s not a function of new and old as much as corporate vs. non-corporate. Companies like Thomas Nelson or Zonderman are wary about treading on many political or theological toes. The more independent voices within Christian culture, whether it’s something that existed before mass-market entertainment like the Great Passion Play, or whether it’s the Christian indie rock scene which does not get played on radio—they tend to be much more a reflection of people’s honest personal beliefs and honest spiritual beliefs. You’ll hear Christian rock bands that are militantly anti-abortion or militantly pacifist.

Click above to watch Daniel Radosh discuss his new book on Christian pop culture, Rapture Ready. Go to reason.tv for more information and to include this video on your website.

Q: What is more racially segregated, mainstream culture or Christian culture?

A: Definitely Christian pop culture. There’s no question about it. Mainstream pop culture isn’t any glorious field of interracial harmony, but the industry is dominated by hip hop and R&B and has been for 15 years now. The Christian music scene, which in almost every way is reflective of the mainstream music scene, has almost no hip hop acts to actually chart.

Q: Is the debate over whether or not you can commercialize Christianity pretty much settled?

A: It’s settled, but that was to be expected if you look at the history of American evangelicalism. When radio was invented there was a segment of the Christian population that said because the Bible says Satan is the prince of the air, and because radio uses airwaves, it must be a tool of Satan. But evangelicalism is by definition engaging in culture. Radio became American culture. There was just no way that Christians were going to turn their backs on that.

The broader debate is settled, but there’s a new debate bubbling up from younger Christians, saying, you know, we need to be more thoughtful about culture. We can’t just adapt every cultural form, take a rock song and change “my baby” to “my Savior.” The way that one honors God is by being authentically creative.

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.

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.

Same rEVOLution, Different Day

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

On June 12, one year and three months after launching his presidential campaign on an episode of C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, Ron Paul took the stage at a late night Texas rally, outside of the state party’s convention, and called it quits.

It was greeted, by the media, with a paper-and-pixel yawn. The Houston Chronicle reported that Paul “officially unplugged his dormant Republican presidential campaign” and pointed out that he was late to the speech. “Ron Paul ends his campaign—for real this time,” snickered a blogger at The Washington Post.

Paul had an an easy answer to this: Ignore it. "We are miles ahead of anything I ever dreamed of in this movement!" Paul told a cheering crowd. He said, for the umpteenth time, that he'd never even expected this campaign to catch on. He wanted to educate people. "If you’re going to have a revolution," he said, "people need to be educated to understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. The rest is all"—he waved his arm as if warding off a malaria-carrying insect—"fluff."

If "the rest" is fluff, it would be a break for Paul. By the traditional measures of a presidential campaign, Paul blew it. He raised $35 million, of which all but $4.7 million was spent by campaign's end. For this he got 1.2 million votes and as few as 35 delegates to the Republican convention. Paul, being honest, had never expected to win. Rarely did he sound as awkward as he did as when George Stephanopolous prodded him to admit that he wouldn't be the nominee. "You'd bet every cent in your pocket?" asked Paul. "Yes," said the ABC anchor. "Oh," said Paul. "OK."

Now that the campaign's over, Paul feels a little more free to tell the truth. "This is actually a racheting up of what were doing before," Paul said in a Thursday phone conversation. "There are more people who believe in the freedom agenda than voted for us in the primaries. I’ve been saying the same thing since 1974, you know, but something... happened this year. I can’t explain what it was, but the young people understand these issues better than anyone thought, and they are not going away."

The "second phase" of the rEVOLution is the Campaign for Liberty, a more explicitly political organization (a 501c3) than many people believed Paul would launch. It is not, as was speculated, a paleolibertarian publishing house. It is not yet, as feared, a donation or employment plan for Paul's friends and family; the only confirmed transfer from Ron Paul 2008 to the Campaign for Liberty is communications director and (as of Sunday) Paul grandson-in-law Jesse Benton. "Together, we will educate our fellow Americans in freedom, sound money, non-interventionism, and free markets," Paul wrote in an inaugural message to supporters. "We will write commentaries and broadcast videos on the news of the day. And I'll work with friends whom I respect to design materials for homeschoolers."

The Campaign, then, is the kind of thing Paul's more strategy-minded die-hards have clamored for since Super Tuesday. That was when it became clear, thanks to the GOP's winner-take-all primary rules and the exits of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, that Paul could not enough accrue enough delegates to become a convention kingmaker.

"The presidential bid went on a little too long," said Trevor Lyman, the P.R. whiz who pushed and popularized the various moneybombs that netted Paul nearly $12 million. "It gave a lot of people false hope; I'm not talking about me, but about people who honestly thought if Ron stayed in the race he could beat McCain. There was a lot of wasted energy there. Of course, the people in those final primary states got together and got organized, so maybe even that could end up being for the good." The day after we spoke, Lyman joined the Campaign for Liberty blog team.

According to Paul, staying in the race so long was a way to get the base politically activated. "We have something like 22,000 precinct captains now!" Paul said on Thursday. Jesse Benton doubled his exuberance: "If we had 100,000 precinct captains, we could take over the country."

So is it an educational effort? Is a political effort? The tug-of-war between those concepts illustrates the problem Paul's movement encountered all along. His supporters could elucidate the reasons why they loved their candidate better, probably, than any group of supporters in 2008's twisty political history. The education stuck; in some cases, it was hardly needed. It translated only to enough votes to turn Paul into a national figure and rattle Republicans, however briefly, about the fidelity of their libertarian wing. What Paul's supporters proved adept at, in the end, was filling the cobwebbed ballrooms of GOP caucuses and conventions and matching or overwhelming the party regulars to win platform fights and delegates. If the Campaign for Liberty trains people to do that, in between readings of Murray Rothbard, it could terrify Paul's party in the best way.

Or it could fall flat. Occasional reason contributer Jim Henley pointed out in a blog post that, apart from the numbers of supporters and precinct campaigns the Campaign wants to reel in, "all the elements of the 'Mission' of CFL are kept prudently nebulous. That means there never needs to come the awkward time when donors and observers point out that CFL has inarguably failed to meet some goal."

The Campaign is, still, less than Paul's army expected from this campaign when they flooded his coffers. On Thursday, I put the question to the candidate: Were those tens of millions of dollars that went to Ron Paul 2008 put to good use? "I hope so," he said. "They trusted me. We did our very best. And I'd say that in the category of spending, we were the best campaign, as far being the stewards' of peoples' money." Trevor Lyman agreed. "The moneybombs were worth it for the coverage alone," he said. "The Ron Paul Blimp was nearly as good on that count; I've seen serious estimates that it was $2 million in exposure and earned media."

The fundraising numbers and the ambition of the Campaign for Liberty raises another question. In January, Paul took a public relations hit when controversial sections of his old Ron Paul Political Reports were reprinted by The New Republic. Those same passages had dogged Paul in his 1996 congressional comeback. What had Paul learned from the experiences of Ron Paul and Associates that would guide him in his new venture. "I’m only responsible for what I do and what I say," he said. "I've been saying the same thing since 1974, and I've gotten a bit better at it." That was all he'd say on the matter.

The question running through all of this was how intimately Paul would be involved, or wanted to be involved, in the future of his movement. He's striking a difficult balance on this, too. Paul clearly wants to retain the notoriety he's gained as a spokesman for libertarianism. "A lot of those Meet-Up groups have turned into book clubs," he said on Thursday, with a grin I could detect even across two bad cell phone connections. When it comes to raw politics, Paul, rather passively, is hoping his followers don't just cling to his name. He rejected the idea of writing in his name on the November ballot, a concept that's stayed popular with many Paul voters despite the Libertarian Party and Constitution Party's pitches for their votes.

"I don’t think that’s very productive," Paul said of a write-in campaign. "They could do it, of course, but in most of the states it won’t count. If they can change the rules in a primary and not count all the votes, imagine what they could do with write-in votes!"

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Union Rules

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

If you ever want a window into the needs and desires of the labor movement, you should listen to Stewart Acuff. And if you get within 50 yards of Acuff, you’ll be listening: The snow-bearded activist, now the AFL-CIO’s director of organizing, projects his voice like an opera singer. He grips the podium, white-knuckled. He clasps his hands, then pulls them apart with a snap. When I saw him at the Take Back America conference in Washington in March, his reedy voice grew rougher and louder as his speech went on.

“My brothers and sisters,” he said, “if we go into 2008 with an even larger mobilization of workers behind this legislation, with even more commitment to win the election in 2008, and put this on the agenda in 2009, I’m here to tell you today that we will pass this legislation, in the House, overwhelmingly! We will pass it in the Senate! We will defeat a Republican filibuster! And we will have a president who signs the Employee Free Choice Act! And we can get back to the business of restoring the American dream for millions and millions of workers!”

What’s the Employee Free Choice Act? If you aren’t a lobbyist in Washington, a union worker, or an employer nervously trying to prevent your staff from organizing, you might not have followed the twisty history of the latest attempt to increase private-sector unionization. “Card check,” as it is usually known, would allow employees at a company to bypass secret-ballot elections and declare their intent to unionize by simply signing cards. If adopted, it could portend the most revolutionary change to labor law since the 1940s.

The battle over card check is part of a much larger story of Campaign ’08: the coming-out party of Democratic interest groups. For the first time since 1992, Democrats are eyeing complete control of the executive and legislative branches, with all of the spoils of appointment and legislative scheduling that would entail. Unions want to grow their numbers. Green industries want tax incentives. Trial lawyers want a ceasefire in the war on torts.

If these groups could actually form a line in January, the unions would be at the front. Card check was the brainchild of organizers who had watched their numbers tumble as manufacturing jobs moved out of the rust belt and successive conservative administrations made it tougher to organize. President Bill Clinton, signer of NAFTA, did little to stop the skid from labor’s point of view. The organizers have learned their lessons, pushing members of the House and Senate—including the junior senators from New York and Illinois—to commit in writing to card check.

“When we started working on this legislation five years ago,” Acuff said at Take Back America, “people in Washington said it would never be taken seriously, never pass the laugh test.” Bills were introduced in 2003, 2005, and 2007. The first two times, they never reached the floor, with Republicans arguing that labor organizers usually win unionization elections anyway and that 90 percent of those results are approved by the federal government’s National Labor Relations Board within two months. In 2007, with the Democrats in charge of the legislature, the same bill passed the House easily and won 51 votes in the Senate, but that wasn’t enough to proceed to an up-or-down vote. All along, the effort has faced a veto threat from President Bush.

Things are different now. Democrats believe that as many as nine Republican-held Senate seats are vulnerable in 2008. The AFL-CIO, Change to Win, and allied unions plan to spend $360 million on the 2008 election. That’s around $200 million more than the unions spent in the Kerry-Bush race. As Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slug it out for the nomination, the AFL-CIO is running a $53 million campaign attacking John McCain—portraying him as a right-wing ideologue who co-sponsored the Secret Ballot Protection Act, the GOP’s attempt at making kryptonite against card check.

All that union money comes with a promise: What’s good for unions will be good for the Democrats. Greg Tarpinian, a Change to Win organizer who spoke at the Take Back America panel, pointed out that union membership was one of the strongest determinants for a voter choosing a Democratic ballot. “If union membership was 10 percent in Ohio in 2004,” he argued, “John Kerry would be president.”

If card check passes, Tarpinian has only one worry: the ability of the National Labor Relations Board to “keep up with the demand” for brand new unions. Those new brothers and sisters of the labor movement will start paying dues; said dues will find their way to new Democratic campaigns like salmon finding their way upstream.

Republicans and business lobbyists are watching all of this with a sense of resigned horror. They know Democrats will have the votes, and they believe that the end of secret ballot elections will be not just bad for business, but bad for democracy. They also see card check as the tip of a spear. One Republican staffer worried to me about collective bargaining rights for public employees. “Do we really want fire-fighters to start striking?” he asked.

The unions stand to be the biggest beneficiaries of an all-Democratic Washington. Affordable housing advocates, meanwhile, want the 2007 Federal Housing Finance Reform Act, which created a $3 billion fund bankrolled with tax revenue and the profits of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, to be spent on more housing units instead of held up by concerns over budget deficits. Trial lawyers have paid their dues: The American Association for Justice spent $6.3 million to elect Democrats in 2006 through its political action committee, the most of any single PAC. For the first half of this decade, the plaintiffs industry fought a rearguard action against the tort reform movement, which Republicans have been using to limit the size of settlements. Trial lawyers lost a big battle when the Senate passed class action lawsuit reform in 2005, but they haven’t given much ground since then. When the Democrats come back, plaintiffs expect to go back on offense.

The Consumer Product Safety Reform Act, passed this year, is a model of what to expect in a Democratic future. The law doubled funding for the eponymous safety commission to $155 million by 2015, set no caps on damages, and empowered state attorneys general to make federal cases if they have “reason to believe that the interests of the residents of that State have been, or are being, threatened or adversely affected by a violation” of consumer safety. It passed the Democratic-controlled Senate by 79-13, aided by the scare over tainted toys from China.

But unions outmatch every other member of the Democratic coalition in demands and expectations. Now is their time. One organizer told me that a Democratic comeback would mean that the party had “no more excuses” for not giving them what they wanted. At Take Back America, Acuff said the party should gift-wrap anything wavering Republicans want if it will get the bill to a floor vote. “If we have to build a bridge somewhere to get it passed, then build the damn bridge!” he said. “If we have to rename a highway after somebody, rename the highway!”

Another activist, relaxing after a day of sessions and meetings, regaled me with stories of how businesses bust unions, how the National Labor Relations Board punctures budding movements, and how essential it was to change the system. He repeated my question back to me. “If we get a Democratic president, are we going to pass card check?” He leaned back and grabbed a Miller Lite from one of his brothers coming back from the bar. “If the sun comes up in the morning, we’re passing card check.”

David Weigel is an associate editor of Reason.

R.J.'s Law

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Sixteen years ago, R.J. Feild was born to a heroin-addicted welfare mother in Southern California. Brought into the world underweight and premature, he has trouble walking, and his bad eyesight makes it hard for him to read. He was, however, able to enter an essay contest sponsored by Assemblyman John Benoit (R-Palm Desert) called “There Oughta Be a Law,” in which the winner’s proposed bill would be brought to the floor of the California legislature. Feild’s essay suggested giving random drug tests to welfare recipients and stripping benefits from people who tested positive.

He won the contest. “You can’t make up this story,” says Assemblyman Benoit. “The beauty of this bill is that it comes from a real-life, lovable young man who’ll the suffer rest of his life for mistakes of his mother. When you see him make this argument, you can’t help be sympathetic to it.”

“R.J.’s Law,” as submitted by Benoit, is actually a little less strict than what the 16-year old proposed. It offers people who fail the drug test a choice between losing their benefits and entering rehab, although if they test positive in rehab they’ll be out of luck. “I live in a political world,” Benoit explains. “We should give these people a chance to walk down the right path. Of course, if they walk off that path, then we can’t help them.”

Benoit’s detractors point out that welfare program managers are already empowered to test recipients if they suspect they’re using drugs. Benoit doesn’t think that’s enough. “The average lady behind a counter is not trained to recognize the symptoms of drug addiction,” he says. “You need occasional random sampling. It works for professional baseball players, it works for the clerks at Wal-Mart, and it will work here.”

R.J.’s Law might not pass the Democrat-dominated legislature, but Benoit is optimistic. He is pondering another “There Oughta be a Law” contest this fall, when kids return to school.

How Barr Brought It

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 27 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

reason Associate Editor David Weigel traveled to Denver over the Memorial Day weekend to cover the Libertarian Party's national convention, which culminated in former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr and Wayne Allyn Root being selected as the presidential and vice-presidential standardbearers for the nation's third-largest party in the 2008 presidential election.

Read all of Weigel's coverage in sequence:

"Who Isn't Trying to Take Over the Libertarian Party?: Scenes from the LP's most newsworthy convention in years" (May 23)

"Anarchists of the World, Unite!: The Libertarian Party's radical candidates aren't conceding anything to the media-appointed frontrunners" (May 24)

"Three Hits and a Miss: The Libertarian Party debate elevates Barr, Kubby, and Root, while Ruwart underperforms" (May 25)

"Citizen Bob: How Bob Barr and Wayne Allyn Root took over the Libertarian Party" (May 26)

And don't miss his blog entries during the convention, which can be read here.

reason.tv interviewed Barr before the convention. Watch the 15-minute video by clicking here.

Citizen Bob

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 26 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

The Bob Barr campaign couldn't have plotted it any better. The former GOP congressman-turned Libertarian Party contender announces his candidacy two short weeks before the LP convention, and grabs more free media than 2004 nominee Michael Badnarik received in a year. He arrives in Denver amid bellyaching and heckling and a sea of "Mary!" stickers, and gets reporters talking about the drama of a deadlocked Libertarian convention. C-SPAN stays glued to the proceedings for all of Sunday, through six ballots that turn out closer than the results of an Olympic track meet. And when it's all over, Barr gets both the nomination and a running mate, Wayne Allyn Root, whose views comport comfortably with Barr's own.

The results may have been ideal for Barr, but they weren't plotted out that way. Early in the balloting on Sunday, Barr's strategists—and the candidate himself—thought the Radical Caucus might have beaten them. The boos and catcalls that came when Barr supporters staged a whooping march around the convention floor were louder than they expected. The 25 percent Barr scored on the first ballot was lower than everyone expected. "The Barr campaign needs to be a steamroller to win this," Steve Kubby strategist Tom Knapp said early in the day. "They needed to win 40 percent to keep people from peeling off."

Barr didn't steamroll, instead grinding out a series of ties with radical favorite Mary Ruwart before the Las Vegas businessman Root dropped out and sent his support Barr's way, wrapping up the nomination.

Here's how Barr/Root won the nomination:

A Changed Party. The groundwork for Barr's win started building after the 2004 debacle, when Michael Badnarik ran an underwhelming purist campaign that satisfied no segment of the party. An estimated 2,000 people left the LP then, and activism dropped off substantially. The strongest anti-Barr candidates, Kubby and Ruwart, were old faces who'd run for the vice presidential nomination in 2000 and 1992, respectively. Ruwart had also run for the presidential nomination in 1984.

Mea Maxima Culpa. Barr could not have won if, like fellow major-party defector Mike Gravel, he'd jumped into the party right before the convention. Instead the Georgia congressman once famous for prosecuting the impeachment of Bill Clinton built credibility with the delegates by being able to refer to his two years in the party. When he mentioned this fact in his debate performance and pre-vote speech, some of the less-active delegates who'd been surfeited with anti-Barr rumors of "hijacking the party" were surprised. Barr complemented with a few staged "road to Damascus" moments in front of the delegates; standing up at the debate and apologizing for part (not all) of the Defense of Marriage Act, claiming he wished he'd joined the LP sooner. "I may not have committed as early as y'all," Barr said in his nomination speech, "but don't cast me aside because I'm a latecomer!"

The Media Drip, Drip, Drip. The press helped Barr in two ways. It was obvious even to Barr's enemies that the media had more interest in him than in anyone else; Mary Ruwart's pre-speech montage of clips, which included the iffy likes of a Longevity Magazine cover story and "Libertarian says return tax dollars" clips from previous unsuccessful runs for office, made Barr's exposure look that much more impressive. Then, Ruwart took a pounding from the media that even her throatiest backers couldn't ignore. LP activist Barry Hess could dismiss Barr as a creature of "the old media," but by the time delegates were voting on the fourth ballot, The Washington Times had run a story on the convention that mentioned Ruwart's unforgettable argument about child pornography, and whispers were flying around the convention hall.

The Lackluster "Stop Barr" Movement. Barr's enemies printed a series of fear-mongering leaflets for delegates, one going after his un-Libertarian voting record, another painting an Orwellian future of the party re-branding as "New Republicans" if Barr won. But they didn't do the harder work of digging through Barr's un-Libertarian statements, which in fact multiplied as he did his pre-convention media tour. The impact of, say, a YouTube video splicing together Barr's waffling answer on Hannity and Colmes about drug legalization, his comment that Republicans would split their tickets for him (voting against lower-ballot Libertarians in the process), and other heretical stuff could have been devastating. As it happened, there was no compelling, real-time evidence for delegates to contradict Barr's humble convention persona.

Fair Play. All weekend, the convention swirled with rumors that a crush of Barr delegates would show up at the 11th hour to rig the vote. Over 1,000 delegate slots were open, and less than 650 had registered by the end of Saturday. The word was out for other campaigns' delegates to deny credentials to latecomers. In the end Barr's campaign took advantage of a few empty slots in Southern states, but that was matched by the arrival of a few Ruwart and Kubby supporters who signed up to stop Barr. "It was a legitimate victory in the sense that there was not significant packing," said party co-founder David Nolan, a Kubby supporter, "and what packing there was came from more than one camp." Barr campaign manager Russ Verney said that his team only brought around 50 delegates to Denver, and won the rest of their support in the Sheraton, via one-on-one campaigning and arm-twisting.

With Enemies Like This.... Fringe candidate Christine Smith did Barr a favor by using her allotted, post-elimination speaking time to rant and rave before a national TV audience about Barr's "neo-con" conspiracy. Plenty of delegates had become familiar with, and repelled by, Smith's self-aggrandizing rudeness and all-around weirdness. Ruwart until that moment had been gaining strength by appearing a victim of public bullying and LP-trashing by Barr supporters. But for the crucial 15 minutes of Smith's rant, Barr seemed like a victim himself of people who were making the whole party look bad.

The Ghost of Losers Past. Anti-Barr (and, to a lesser extent, anti-Root) campaigners never convincingly argued that some other candidate could get more votes in November. The closest anyone came was Mary Ruwart's theory that disenchanted Hillary Clinton voters would be casting about for a woman to vote for, but that reeked of liberal gender politics and alienated as many people as it won over. The Barr-or-Ruwart choice was not zero sum: It was between a square peg candidate who could get a record number of votes and a round peg candidate who would probably get the 300,000 to 500,000 votes that the party has won since 1984. Ruwart's ill-advised Sunday leaflet, advertising endorsements from 1984 candidate David Bergland (228,111), 1992 candidate Andre Marrou (291,627), and 2004 candidate Badnarik (397,265), only emphasized that point.

What didn't help Barr? The 11th hour endorsement of oddball Daniel Imperato clearly didn't. After Imperato backed Barr, his sole supporter from Arkansas voted for Imperato on the first ballot anyway. On subsequent ballots, he backed Mary Ruwart. The much-discussed support for Barr in the national party probably cut both ways. It helped Barr that national officials considered him the strongest candidate. Former executive director Shane Cory worked for Barr on the convention floor, and at Sunday's victory banquet, party chairman Bill Redpath reminisced about bringing Barr into the party, waxing: "I've been saying all along we're going to have a hell of a presidential ticket this year." But all of that support just strengthened the resolve of the anti-Barr contingent. "If the nomination was stolen," David Nolan said, "it was stolen in the national office."

But even Nolan, the strongest and most-respected voice in the anti-Barr camp, was optimistic about the ticket once the dust settled. He could see Barr/Root drawing a Nader 2000-like 2 million votes; his worry was simply that Barr, like Nader, wouldn't follow through with party building after the election, thus wrecking the LP. Party unity, which was hard to find amid the raucous boos of Sunday, started to evolve a few hours after the ballots were counted. There was talk of Barr endorsing Steve Kubby, who narrowly missed the VP slot, for a 2010 run for governor of California.

And there was startlingly optimistic talk of the party banding together to prevent Republican efforts to kick them off ballots. Why was that optimistic? Because this year the LP finally has a candidate that could swing the election.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason. Read his first three dispatches from the LP convention here, here and here.

Bonus video: On Tuesday, May 20, reason hosted a debate about "The Future of Libertarian Politics" featuring LP presidential hopefuls Wayne Allyn Root, Mike Gravel, and Bob Barr (Mary Ruwart was invited but unable to attend). Video excerpts of the conversation are below (approximately 10 minutes long). For more information, go to reason.tv.

Three Hits and a Miss

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Sun, 25 May 2008 13:40:00 EDT

The timing was perfect. Presidential candidate Mary Ruwart, a favorite among the Libertarian Party's Radical Caucus, was 15 minutes into a hard-hitting speech and Q&A with delegates at the contested LP convention in Denver, and she'd just finished enumerating what it is she couldn't stomach in a prospective running mate. In short, she couldn't stomach Bob Barr. As if on cue, Barr's twang exploded over a next-door soundsystem.

"All right!" he said, whooping up dozens of his cowboy-hatted delegates. "Are we ready to go?"

Ruwart's face froze into a devious, oh please kind of smile as Barr briefly addressed his throng. Fired up and ready to go, he marched them past the exhibit area and over into the main convention hall to deliver delegate tokens guaranteeing Barr a place in the Saturday night debate and a nominating speech at the Sunday presidential contest. As the procession went past, Neal Stephenson, a supporter of longshot candidate Christine Smith, loudly sang John Williams' "Imperial March," the song playing when Darth Vader enters the room in Star Wars.

Jim Peron, working the Laissez Faire Books table, opted for less subtlety. "Fuckin' traitors!" Peron yelled. "Go back to the GOP!" As Barr's crowd entered the hall, Peron joined in a burst of sarcastic applause and cheers. "Hooray!" yelled a phalanx of delegates. "They're leaving the convention!"

Barr, of course, was not leaving. When the 1 p.m. deadline for the LP debate came, the former Republican congressman delivered 94 tokens to win inclusion. Mary Ruwart and Wayne Allyn Root handed in exactly as many tokens. Barr and Ruwart, though, had both passed a few of their tokens to friends they wanted to see make the debates (in Barr's case it was Mike Gravel; in Ruwart's it was Steve Kubby). Barr's decision, in retrospect, seems like a strategic coup. Ruwart's decision is harder to game out at the moment.

What actually transpired at the "C-SPAN debate" surprised most of the delegates I talked to afterward. With a few exceptions, their reaction was four-fold: Root, brash and funny, looked more than ever like an effective cheerleader for the LP. Kubby, against all odds, stole the show again and again. Ruwart, poised but bland, underperformed the expectations many delegates had for her. And Barr, faced for the first time by his fellow candidates and a puckish moderator, thrived under the pressure.

Every chance Barr got to finesse or apologize for one of his past Republican mistakes−the Defense of Marriage Act, the PATRIOT Act, the drug war−he grabbed with both hands. The only direct hit he sustained came from the audience, after Barr referenced the "tens of thousands" of innocents serving time on drug charges. A voice from the back of the room cried out, "How many did you put in there?" But the debate rolled on.

Barr was able to thrive because of a rule that was little-noticed outside of candidates' headquarters. Personal attacks, which had flown back and forth throughout the week in alternative debates and speeches, were semi-off-limits. If one candidate challenged another by name, the attackee had 30 seconds to respond. So the closest thing to candidate swipes at Barr were the occasional nameless allusions by George Phillies to a political action committee (PAC) that "gives to libertarians," plus Steve Kubby's glancing reference to Barr voting for the PATRIOT Act. If you weren't aware that Barr's PAC spreads cash around to the big two parties, Phillies' attack wilted on arrival.

The by-a-nose frontrunner benefited, too, from the rollicking performance of Kubby. The marijuana activist only made it to the debate with an assist from Mary Ruwart's extra tokens, but had told delegates throughout the day that as long as he could get on stage, he could win the nomination. In fact, he might have done well enough to surge into the top four.

Kubby scored the biggest laughs of the night. After comparing government intervention in the environment to "the fox guarding the chicken coop," he said: "I'm a libertarian! The only way I'd accept that is if the chickens are armed!" And Kubby powerfully reminded delegates why the medical marijuana issue is not some fringe or abstract concern: "I've gone to jail for liberty. I've nearly died for liberty!"

As much as Kubby soared, Ruwart sputtered. All weekend long, she had been the primary beneficiary of a backlash against "Republican converts." But in the debate she mixed rote libertarian answers with over-the-top claims of political power, such as her vital role in "fighting the PATRIOT Act." (Even though Barr voted for the Act in 2001, Ruwart let him pivot to his verifiable claim that he allied himself with civil liberties groups since then to roll the law back.) Again and again, and in a press conference after the debate, she claimed that disappointed Hillary Clinton voters looking for a female candidate would gravitate to her. Leaving aside the fact that Cynthia McKinney might win the Green Party nomination, the Libertarian Party is a terrible place for gender politics. "That's not how we want to appeal to voters," said Virginia delegate Aaron Sime.

Three of the other candidates failed to break out. Phillies appealed to his long-running campaign organization and party credibility, factors that will become irrelevant as soon as the party hands its torch to one of the candidates. Michael Jingozian gave one of his best performances in a year of campaigning, but sounded out of his depth, unfamiliar with the Tragedy of the Commons, musing about electing other third party candidates in addition to Libertarians. Gravel had too many opportunities to share his less libertarian views, compensating a few times by repeating his mantra: "Freedom, freedom, freedom!" ("He's not all the way there yet," went a common post-debate refrain.)

It was Wayne Allyn Root who most complicated Barr's plans. Root's vein-throbbing, high-decibel TV-pitchman's answers divided the crowd, but by far the larger segment thought he stood out in a party that has opted for drab candidates since anyone can remember. Not since Ron Paul shouted down meatheads on the Morton Downey Jr. Show has an LP candidate radiated such energy. After the debate, in a sprawling hospitality suite stuffed with free drinks and troughs of Italian food, Root complained that it was agonizing to sit down for two whole hours. "I'm a prize fighter!" he said. "I need to move around!" Manny Klausner, a longtime Reason Foundation trustee and former reason editor who is giving Root's nominating speech, thought that his candidate won the test of delegates imagining their candidate making the Libertarian case on TV. "You don't want a lecturer doing that job," Klausner said. "You need a cheerleader."

As the campaigns scattered to talk and party with delegates, the conventional wisdom calcified. Barr staff, who have never expected to win on the first ballot, worried about surviving a three-way race between still-beloved Ruwart and stronger-than-ever Root. Kubby supporters started dreaming of a longshot win. Libertarian Party co-founder David Nolan, who has been supporting Kubby, was seen in the hospitality suites saying that Kubby and Root were on the rise. Michael Cloud, the long-time activist who's still controversial for his role in the Harry Browne campaigns, rushed to Barr's suite to give him advice on floor management ... then teleported to Root's suite to check out the other star.

Ruwart's supporters, as they had the night before, waved off the expensive suites and gathered in The Supreme Court, a hotel bar with a live funk band. "Look, she's not a thrilling candidate," said a California delegate. "She's a candidate who won't make us look bad or drive us even further to the right." And that's the paramount concern for Ruwart backers, many of whom wear buttons with Barr's named crossed out. They know what "pragmatic" party leaders want. They've watched the party platform continue to shrink in length and boldness. They saw party Treasurer Aaron Starr and some Ohio delegates turning red as Starchild, the mono-named concubine for California, gave media interviews in a tie-dyed unitard and floppy psychedelic top hat festooned with a feather boa. Late at night, free from the party's schoolmarms, Starchild took boozy snapshots with giggly girls in cocktail dresses, and bumped and grinded with hotel guests.

"Give it up!" said the band's bassist when Starchild temporarily shimmied offstage. "Give it up for Austin Powers!" Hey, these people are used to being misunderstood.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason. Read his first two dispatches from the LP convention here and here.

Anarchists of the World, Unite!

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Sat, 24 May 2008 15:04:00 EDT

"It's the first presidential campaign button with a marijuana leaf," says Steve Kubby, grinning ear to ear. He whips out a tiny Kubby '08 pin with red letters pasted onto a familiar green leaf. Alabama political operator Steve Gordon, the suddenly controversial (after selling his Third Party Watch website to longtime GOP direct-mail activist Richard Viguerie) former Libertarian Party political director who's working for presumed frontrunner Bob Barr, takes the pin and thanks him. "I know you can't wear it," says Kubby, "but take it as souvenir."

Fluorescent yellow "Kubby 2008: Let Freedom Grow" signs have sprung up in Denver over the past 24 hours, at the beginning of the LP's most high-profile gathering in years. Kubby, a medical marijuana activist who has staged various battles with California and federal authorities, has been hobbled during this ripe year for Libertarians by an adrenal cancer that has taken a serious toll on him. "I raised travel funds, and then he couldn't travel," laments Kubby organizer and blogger Thomas Knapp. "If he'd been able to campaign, he'd be in Mary Ruwart's position right now." That is, Knapp argues, Kubby would be the preferred candidate of the LP's radical bloc.

As the convention fills up−almost 600 delegates have registered now, more than 250 of them on Friday−it's becoming clearer that this is not a Bob Barr coronation. Delegates are tolerant people who can sit through a pointless convention floor vote or a ramble from longshot Daniel Imperato, but they prefer to hear from candidates who say what they really think. Kubby and Ruwart do that.

On Friday morning, Kubby happily recalled the "Libertarians for Truth" forum, where Democrat-turned-Libertarian presidential candidate Mike Gravel asked an audience to consider cases when military force was necessary, and received a sour reception. Kubby and Ruwart, on the other hand, smacked the question out of the park. “There is no ethical argument to support government's use of force,” Kubby said to zealous applause. As Ruwart patiently explained how libertarian philosophy negated Gravel's answer, Kubby grinned. When she finished, he gave her a friendly pat on the back.

Kubby's alliance with Ruwart is the single most direct threat to a Barr nomination−the outcome that most outside media still think is assured. A motion to make it harder to participate in Saturday's "C-SPAN debate" failed, making it easier for the two radical candidates to share support and propel each other into the fray. If Kubby has a surplus of debate tokens (candidates need tokens from 10% of delegates to participate), he'll give them to Ruwart; she'll do the same if the situation's reversed. If one of the campaign is falling short and the other's on the bubble for the nomination, the struggling campaign will endorse the surging one.

Knowing this, you'd think that the radical caucus would be confident. It isn't. The whiff of a Barr conspiracy permeates radical meetings. Late Friday, every campaign except Barr's gathered for an unofficial, un-televised debate. Nearly 200 people, most of them delegates, spilled in and out of the smallish venue and cheered as Mike Gravel took a wholly un-Barrish position on immigration (no border walls for him) and Kubby thwacked the frontrunner for his PATRIOT Act vote back in 2001. Outside, Kubby supporters speculated that Barr was hoarding tokens that he'd never use for the debate. He's skipped every previous debate, the theory went, so why participate in that one? (Barr's people were flabbergasted by this: "We'd go to all this effort and forfeit the debate?")

"Paulie Cannoli," a Kubby supporter and blogger who'd been unceremoniously de-credentialed by Third Party Watch, joked around and proposed that radicals make an end run around Barr. "Give him all the tokens," Cannoli said. "Let him take the stage all by himself. Then get all the candidates back in here and tell C-SPAN!" Cannoli, who brandished the media credentials of former LP Executive Director Shane Cory (a man about as popular in this circle as Donald Rumsfeld), handed out Kubby buttons and asked for support: "A token for the tokin' candidate!"

While his opponents debated, Barr held court one floor above in a sprawling hospitality suite crammed with booze (if you had cash or a ticket) and snacks (if you had neither). If he didn't get a chance to impress delegates in the debate, he made up for it here: A self-proclaimed "bisexual pagan" named John Karr proclaimed himself a likely Barr voter because the former Georgia congressman could run the strongest campaign. When the candidate stood up on chair to address the crowd, he argued for his "background and credibility" while strategically trashing his former party. "In just two days here," Barr said, "I have had more and deeper discussions of the substance of American politics, and of the Constitution, than in 30 years of Republican politics!"

Barr didn't sway everyone in the room. Michael Kielsky, a "hardcore" Arizona delegate who sported one of the radicals' "Libertarian Wing of the Libertarian Party" buttons, gave Barr some credit for moving in the right direction. But Kielsky was still backing Mary Ruwart. A few more floors above the party, the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered members of Outright Libertarians were partying and chewing on a big rumor: Two hundred-odd unexpected delegates would arrive from Ohio and South Carolina on Saturday or Sunday. Supporters of the Outright candidate, George Phillies, were spreading the word so that enough radicals would be in the hall to vote down credentials for the meddlers. "If they get in," said California delegate Chris Madsen, "we're looking at a first ballot Barr victory."

"If Barr gets this nomination, he'd better know that he can't count on an electoral vote majority," said Massachusetts delegate and Phillies supporter Arthur Torrey. "I'm on the slate to go to the Electoral College, and I will be a faithless elector." That's not an empty threat: The only electoral college vote the LP has ever received was from a faithless Richard Nixon elector (and future LP presidential candidate) who went for 1972 candidate John Hospers. Torrey's a pagan with a gay sister, so his support isn't really gettable for Barr. "You can't tell me my religion is evil and my sister can't get married and expect to ever get my vote."

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason. Read his first dispatch from the LP convention here.

Who Isn't Trying to Take Over the Libertarian Party?

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 23 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

You see right there, in between the cameras? Under the boom mike, in front of the fetching female interviewer in the cowboy hat? There's Bob Barr, holding court and basking in the glow of the national political press. When Barr walked onto the exhibit floor of the 2008 Libertarian Convention, a trail of six campaign staffers followed behind him—the kind of showy political operation that gives outsiders the impression that the former Georgia congressman is the obvious frontrunner in the race to head up the biggest third-party challenge in this year's presidential campaign.

A few feet away in the Denver Sheraton, Barr's opponents are shaking their heads, sharing "can-you-believe-this" looks. "Talk to some delegates, already!" says Jim Casarjian-Perry. A Massachusetts delegate for candidate George Phillies, Casarjian-Perry had, moments earlier, pinned Barr over whether he sticks by all the propositions of the Defense of Marriage Act, which Barr authored. Casarjian-Perry lives in Massachusetts, is married to his partner, but is unable to change his new, hyphenated name on his passport or driver's license. He wasn't at all satisfied by the purported frontrunner's answer.

"Barr doesn't understand basic libertarian principles," Casarjian-Perry says. In Phillies, this delegate (an elected city government official) sees a candidate who's laying the groundwork to elect libertarians who do understand those principles. "If [Barr] makes it to the final ballot," he says, "I'm ready to vote for none of the above."

It would be a bit much, right now, to call the 2008 Libertarian nomination fight "heated" or "bitter." The delegates trickling in to Denver, ever-aware that this city hosted the embryonic stirrings of the party 36 years ago, are happy to see each other. They're gorging on free food, face-to-face conversations with people they've known only online, and brainy discussions that aren't so easy to come by back home.

Still, there's a battle gearing up, and not just over the headline fight over who will win the nomination. Two years ago, the self-described "reform caucus" of the party took over a convention in Portland and shaved the platform from 61 planks to a pocket-sized 15. The non-aggression principle in the party's declaration survived, but only narrowly. Even before Bob Barr entered this race, radicals, who estimate they have one-third of conventioneers firmly on their side, were planning to use Denver to "Restore '04" and resurrect the older, more far-reaching platform.

The specter of a recent Republican transplant leading the LP has cranked up this platform fight to 11. A flyer labeled "CALL TO ACTION: The Libertarian Party—Not For Sale!" is being distributed around the Sheraton, spelling out a six-point theory of the right-wing takeover strategy. "The Barr campaign's principals are veteran ‘partyjackers,'" says the flyer. Smoking gun? The appearance at the convention of conservative direct mail pioneer Richard Viguerie, who is filling a speaking slot that was once going to go to radio host Neal Boortz. "If [Barr and Viguerie are] successful, the Libertarian Party will become just one more mouthpiece for malcontent Republicans."

The rumors are unstoppable. A supporter of candidate Steve Kubby hears that close to 150 new party members crawled out of the woodwork to register Thursday. "They're Barr delegates," he speculates. "When they hold the vote to expand the number of delegates, vote 'no.' You see them trying to give the vote to someone you don't know, vote 'no.'" The story that someone is push-polling for Tucker Carlson to enter the race at the 11th hour is getting more laughs than anything else, but it jibes with the spirit of the moment. Hey, who isn't trying to take over this party?

The beneficiary of all of this, for now, is the soft-spoken and generally beloved candidate Mary Ruwart. As Barr fielded a mix of harsh and softball questions from delegates, Ruwart walked around the Sheraton finding fans. "No one is happy about the tone," Ruwart says. "I was at the 1983 convention [where the party split over the nomination of David Bergland], and it was so spiteful and destructive that I was almost done with the party." It took decades of running unity campaigns to make her optimistic again. The pre-convention attack on Ruwart's anarchist position on child pornography, and the tone of the campaign since then, has worn on her. "This might be more heated than 1983," Ruwart says. "I hope it won't be." (Copies of Short Answers to Tough Questions, the book with the passages that started the controversy, are still on sale at Ruwart's convention booth.)

The Barr campaign doesn't want a bloodbath either, which is why it's trying to out-organize and out-argue the skeptics. Barr's floor campaign is certainly the most sophisticated, which doesn't surprise many people here. From an upstairs suite, headquarters cranks out flyers, keeps track of delegates, prints drink tickets, and collates the tokens needed to get into the official Saturday night debate. The value proposition of a Barr candidacy is taking hold.

"I want us to broaden the base," says one Texas delegate and reform caucus stalwart. "I've been a Ruwart fan for a long time but she can't do that. But Barr can get 3 to 5 percent of the vote and make McCain rue the day he stopped being a conservative." Wyoming party chair Dave Herbert simply wants to "get some votes," and Barr or Wayne Allyn Root offer the best prospects for his dream of an election thrown into the House of Representatives.

This segment of the party—the ones who care first and foremost about electoral punch—worry that a debate over ideological purity will wreck their momentum. Talking to Whitney Gravel, whose recently Democratic husband Mike's bid is beset by some of these same gripes, Americans for Prosperity's Richard Burke developed a theory. "The purists don't want a political party as much as they want a church," he said. "They need a place to worship."

At the end of a first-night mixer, two delegates who'd heard all the negativity tried to stay positive. "One thing you can say is that the top five, six candidates this time are all better than the three we had last time," said one. The second delegate swirled his drink and agreed. "I don't think Gravel's really a libertarian, but it says something that he joined the party. We nominate one of these guys, build on that, and get an even better field next time." The two then started chewing over perennial dream canddiates, Gary Johnson and Ed Thompson.

If that's the attitude that catches on among LP delegates, it will get harder and harder for the party not to nominate the Georgian heretic surrounded by all the cameras.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

You Won't Fool the Children of the rEVOLution

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:30:00 EDT

Before there was Ron Paul the New York Times best-selling author—go on, keep rolling that around on your tongue—there was Ron Paul, the Texas congressman who made floor statements in the House of Representatives when no one was listening. Before that there was Ron Paul, the roving libertarian politico and the publisher of countless monthly newsletters written in a voice curiously wittier than his own. And before that there was Ron Paul, founder of the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, table-pounding advocate for the gold standard, a lecturer to anyone who would listen.

Paul is 72 years old. He has been reading libertarian philosophy for close to 50 years and writing it for more than 30. That his labors should finally bear fruit now, at the end of a presidential bid where he succeeded beyond a fool's dream by simply reiterating all those decades' worth of opinions, carries a kind of irony. All of the quirks of his presidential bid make more sense. Why did he give the same dense, 40-minute speech at every stop? Why didn't he get into the muck with the rest of the GOP candidates, even when he started to out-fundraise them? Hey, he was trying to tell you people: He wasn't running for president; he was spreading a message.

It is impossible to imagine his new book, The Revolution: A Manifesto, selling in droves, or even being published at all, if Paul had not run his quixotic presidential race. We have proof. Sharing the shelves with Paul's book is another political tome that, if you based your judgments on the elite-media love machine, you'd assume would be racing up the charts. Republican Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel's policy sheaf-cum-memoir, America: Our Next Chapter, (with the additional and aggrandizing subtitle Tough Questions, Straight Answers) comes after three fat years of Sunday show bookings, warm profiles in magazines such as GQ, and unkillable rumors that he was about to announce a presidential bid. Released two months ago, the book is already forgotten.

Hagel was supposed to be the Republicans' anti-war presidential candidate. Failing that, he was supposed to be the natural vice-presidential candidate of a third party "unity" candidacy. The praise and hopes cascaded because Hagel, who voted for the 2002 Iraq resolution, was nonetheless the highest-profile and most-credible (by dint of his service in Vietnam) Republican critic of the war in Iraq.

High-profile does not necessarily mean high-minded. In an early, critical profile of Hagel, National Review's John J. Miller bitingly labeled the senator's attacks on Bush policy as "Hagelian dialect" and "declamations that may sound weighty when spoken but become insubstantial on the printed page." God only knows why Hagel decided to prove this by putting words on a page. There are two recurring motifs in America: Our Next Chapter, and both are devastating to Hagel's image as a deep political thinker.

The first is simple banality. There is enough corn in these pages to solve the world food crisis and forge ethanol with the leftovers. "I remember the first time that I had a real sense of the stakes in global power politics," Hagel writes. "I was in Mr. Sheridan's history class at St. Bonaventure High School, in Columbus, Nebraska." How does he view the Senate? "The floor...is a more majestic setting than a crab bucket, but the behavior of the inhabitants is quite similar."

The second Hagelian device is what I'd call the "outsight"—the opposite of an insight, already quite obvious to readers but thuddingly profound for him. Yes, Hagel was right about Iraq, but the way he writes about foreign policy starts you wondering if he just lucked out this time. "Like its rival India," he writes, "Pakistan is an enormous, sprawling, chaotic land." Albeit one-quarter the size of India and the victim of four successful military coups to India's none. When Hagel isn't thumbing a world almanac, he's recounting the meetings he's held with world leaders, diplomats—people who, in their wisdom, agree with him about most things.

Hagel writes like this because his ideas are not powerful enough to inspire much more. He is not a non-interventionist; his big insight about America's proper place in the world is that the world is changing. "Of course I want our country to ‘win,'" Hagel writes, "but we must ask precisely what does ‘winning' mean and we need to ask that question before the first shot is fired." But this is the only problem Hagel sees with intervention. He has nothing to say about the interventions of the 1990s, even though he voted against them after entering the Senate in 1997. Hagel is a big believer in soft power. But if pushed, he says, "We would mount preemptive strikes against our enemy." The problem with the Iraqi preemptive strike was that the enemy we should have been preempting was stateless. This isn't much of an ideology. It's John Kerry's 2004 platform.

By contrast, Ron Paul's The Revolution could have been written if the congressman had passed on 2008. Paul's arguments about the money supply, foreign policy, and the Constitution have been honed for decades. The only new thing between these covers is confidence. "I have never seen such a diverse coalition rallying to a single banner," Paul writes of his campaign. "Republicans, Democrats, independents, Greens, constitutionalists, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, antiwar activists, homeschoolers, religious conservatives, freethinkers...these folks typically found, to their surprise, that they rather liked each other."

The Revolution is filled with long quotes from Paul's favored philosophers and economists. It is one giant annotation to his campaign speeches. It's also a correction to some parts of his campaign. The people who thought Paul's aggressive Tom Tancredo-esque push against illegal immigration was a mistake are proven right: There is almost nothing about immigration here. There is nothing you could call right-wing populism, and while this will probably become the most popular work of Murray Rothbard-inspired libertarianism, it rejects Rothbard's late-life strategizing about the benefits of resentment politics. The Revolution is as colorblind and class-blind as any Sesame Street script. The only people readers are told to resent are the politicians and the media bosses—whom Paul compares to Pravda editors—who tell Americans there is no alternative to fiat currency and American empire.

Hagel and Paul both confront readers who, like the rest of the country, have absolutely no confidence in their leaders and no trust in what they say. Hagel tells them to buck up: "The urgency of our unsettled times demands that America acts wisely, with resolve and a common purpose." Paul tells them that they're being lied to, and he's here to tell the truth. "Few Americans realize just how costly our foreign policy is," Paul writes, referring to human lives as well as trillions of dollars. "The terrorists have played us like a fiddle." Americans are also misinformed about how our current health care system evolved, or why their dollar is worth less. They're being lied to about trade: "True free trade occurs in the absence of government intervention in the free flow of goods across borders." Paul attacks the World Trade Organization because it "makes trade relations worse by providing our foreign competitors with a collective means to attack U.S. trade interests." In each case, a foreign or elite power is hoodwinking Americans into trading the system of the Founders for a system making them less free.

Paul never sounds as certain as when he gets to link this all to monetary policy. He's rarely less convincing. Paul sees a direct link between central banking, fiat currency, and the economic crises that he argues wreck the average American's prosperity and empower thugs. A financial collapse, he prophesies, "becomes more likely every day." He proposes legalizing precious metals as currency and killing sales and capital gains taxes on metals to stave off the crisis. It's all packaged as a monetary twist on Pascal's wager: "If we're wrong, then all we've done is eliminate some taxes on gold and silver. No harm done." This is awfully optimistic. The 19th century's booms and busts were far more damaging to livelihoods and to economic systems than anything in the fiat money era. They provided much steadier footing for radical movements. Paul's overheated worry about a Weimar Republic-style collapse kicks the legs out from underneath the argument.

That's what doesn't work. Paul's narrow-eyed certainty about the elites' concealment of the truth can be irritating, especially when he marshalls so many libertarian thinkers—Nozick, Hayek, Mises—to undergird an occasionally specious ideology. But it is an ideology. Paul has a grand unified theory to offer readers, knowing full well that he's opening minds, not programming them. Hagel offers his readers safe ideas and easy paeans to "leadership." Paul offers readers, first and foremost, the lesson that "leaders" and universally accepted concepts shouldn't be trusted. It is worried and informed neostructuralists who can change things, not historical "great men." If Ron Paul doesn't provide perfect solutions, he certainly provides a blueprint.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Free Market Clintonism, RIP

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:30:00 EDT

Hillary Clinton was angry about free trade, and she wanted Wisconsin to know it. “I’m tired of being played for a patsy,” the candidate said, 48 hours before the state’s Democrats would hand a 17-point landslide to Barack Obama. “It’s time we said to the rest of the world, ‘If you want to have anything to do with our market, you have to play by our rules.’ ”

That may have been red meat for a hungry crowd in the economically depressed upper Midwest. But Clinton sang the same tune in an interview with the liberal Capital Times newspaper in Madison, railing against a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), one of her husband’s most famous economic initiatives.

“It did not fulfill its expectations and caused a lot of consequences that we’re going to have to deal with,” she told the paper. “I have clearly stated for a number of years that we need to have the kind of pro-American smart trade that comes from looking at the trade agreements we’ve already passed, evaluating them and revising them so that they’re more in keeping with…the standards that we expect.”

The main selling point of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, ratcheted up after Barack Obama started scaring her up a ladder, had been her “35 years of experience,” along with a certain nostalgia for the 1990s, which both Hillary and Bill smugly described on the campaign trail as having been “pretty good.” The linchpin of that claim was the economic boom of the Bill years. Yet last fall Hillary began to soft-pedal or sweep under the carpet the very policies that made the boom possible.

NAFTA was a critical moment in Bill Clinton’s presidency, a New Democratic victory over the old union elements of the party. When Clinton signed the final treaties in 1993, he warned that no government action “can change the fact that information can flash across the world, that people can move money around in the blink of an eye.” He compared trade skepticism to the ways of old and dying industrial nations: “If we learn anything from the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the governments in Eastern Europe, [it’s that] even a totally controlled society cannot resist the winds of change that economics and technology and information flow have imposed in this world of ours.”

As recently as 2006, Hillary Clinton positioned herself as the heir to this trade-accommodating policy. She was not a “die-hard free-trader,” she said at the time, but she also wasn’t “an unreconstructed protectionist with very little regard, frankly, for how trade agreements are actually working.”

It’s not a mystery how NAFTA is working, actually. America’s GDP and industrial production have grown about 50 percent since the trade pact took effect. Total U.S. unemployment was 6.9 percent in 1993, before NAFTA went into effect; today it’s 4.9 percent. Hillary Clinton once considered this an accomplishment.

But then came the 2008 presidential campaign. In a November 2007 Iowa speech to the United Auto Workers, Clinton called for a “time-out” to “take stock of where we are on trade.” As the mortgage default wave gathered momentum in late 2007 and early 2008, Clinton proposed freezing adjustable rates by legislative fiat. To help eliminate the gender gap in salaries, Clinton endorsed the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would require a federal study to pave the way for an eventual legislative fix.

Barack Obama, meanwhile, matched her stride for stride toward the old economic left. Before the January 3 Iowa caucus, the Iowa Fair Trade Campaign, a union-backed group that describes NAFTA and the World Trade Organization as “a proven failure for working people,” asked the candidates to explain their trade stances. Obama promised that revisiting NAFTA was “one of the first things I’ll do as president,” language in line with what he’s said to other audiences but a lot tougher. (Clinton has vowed to review trade agreements every five years.) Obama also played up his support for the Fair Pay Act, which makes it easier for employees to sue for pay discrimination based on gender.

As the campaigns headed to the populist temptations of Wisconsin, Ohio, and Texas, Clinton put out word that she was never on the record agreeing with her husband about NAFTA. The evidence, apparently, is on her side. In For Love of Politics, Sally Bedell Smith’s 2007 biography of the Clintons, former U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor claims he had to convince Hillary Clinton that NAFTA would be good for the country.

“If she would somehow come out and tell the real story of what she fought for in the White House,” Hillary biographer Carl Bernstein said in February, “and failed in a big argument with her husband, she would end up moving much closer to those Edwards followers.”

That’s what Democratic economic politics, and especially trade politics, have been about in 2008: pleasing the John Edwards voter. The slick-talking North Carolina trial lawyer did not win any primaries this year, but he did intuit that the new Democratic majority in Congress was far more trade-skeptical than the one that Bill Clinton split in half to pass NAFTA. Former Rep. David Bonior (D-Mich.), who led his party’s charge against the NAFTA vote in the 1990s, was Edwards’ campaign manager. Before Edwards dropped out Bonior told me the public’s distaste for outsourcing and allegedly rising prices for consumer goods was much more obvious now than when Edwards first ran in 2004.

Jeff Faux, who was president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute during the NAFTA fight, speculates that Hillary Clinton has seen the same trend. “Unlike her husband,” Faux says, “who got his political education in Arkansas, she got hers campaigning in upstate New York in 1999 and 2000, in her Senate race. She saw those areas that had been hit by NAFTA. She had to deal with people in mill towns who lost their jobs.”

Now Faux, who had been as marginalized within the Democratic Party as Bonior in the early 1990s, couldn’t be happier. When Hillary Clinton talks about a “strategic pause” on trade deals, she is using terminology that skeptics have employed since at least 2005, when Faux lobbied Clinton before her vote against the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

The candidates’ leftward tack was encouraged by the tight Democratic nomination fight. In early February, Clinton’s campaign made it clear that she would need the party’s “superdelegates”—bigwig pols who can vote at the convention without regard for the primary results—to win the nomination. The Associated Press reported in mid-February that among the superdelegates were “leaders still angry that Bill Clinton championed the North American Free Trade Agreement as part of his centrist agenda.”

There you have one of the lessons of this race: When Obama said, in January, that Ronald Reagan had been a “transformative” president in a way that Bill Clinton had not, he was right. Even if Hillary Clinton wins the party’s nomination, she will not do so as a candidate of a lasting Clintonism. The only 1990s economic policies that either Democratic candidate professed to believe in are the slightly higher tax rates that followed President Clinton’s 1993 increase. On health care, the candidates proposed bigger and more expensive plans than the last Democratic president ever pondered during his last six years in office. President Clinton once mulled putting Social Security funds in the stock market; candidates Clinton and Obama proposed funding it through transfer payments from here to
eternity.

Knowing all that, the distance Hillary has traveled from free trade to protectionism is no less shocking. Ten years ago, giving advice at a conference for developing economies in Africa, she warned that countries where the skeptics held sway were going to be left behind. “Look around the globe,” Clinton advised. “Those nations which have lowered trade barriers are prospering more than those that have not.”

It was true in Africa; it’s true in America. It will be true when, as seems likely, one of these Democrats gets the nomination and moderates his or her rhetoric. The crucial issue is how much of that rhetoric was mere pandering and how much represents a true political sea change.

David Weigel is an associate editor of Reason.

Downloading Lies

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:53:00 EDT

In 2005 the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) released a study of movie piracy that estimated how much money was being lost to copyright infringement. “The typical pirate is age 16–24 and male,” the MPAA reported, adding that “44 percent of MPAA company losses in the U.S. are attributable to college students.”

MPAA members used that impressive statistic to lobby Congress and universities for tighter controls on college Ethernet networks. College students became the bogeymen in the download wars, blamed for the movie business’s troubles.

But it turns out the number was wildly off. In January 2008 the MPAA admitted that the share of movie pirating losses attributable to college students was more like 15 percent, about one-third the figure offered in the 2005 report.

People familiar with the study say researchers assumed every film that was illegally downloaded otherwise would have been purchased—not rented, but bought at full price. Spokespeople for LEK, the consulting group that did the research, refused to comment on the size of what they called a “human error” or on how the new calculation was made. LEK has not corrected any other part of the 18-month, 20,600-subject study and has not made the full data cache public.

The MPAA has apologized for the flawed report, but during the two and a half years that the incorrect information was touted, it was cited in at least two congressional hearings on intellectual property. Those hearings produced the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007, which requires colleges and universities to adopt strict antipiracy policies. Neither Congress nor the MPAA seems interested in revisiting that law.