Reason Magazine - Topics > Rudy Giuliani

Super-Villain Team-Up: Rudy Hearts McCain

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 21:11:00 EST

It's no Dr Doom-Red Skull matchup, but pretty freakin' close: both Fox News on the televisual projection device and Time are reporting Rudy Giuliani, his pandering having failed, dropping out tomorrow to endorse seeming juggernaut John McCain. How the frontrunners have fallen; will this change any one's reliance on pre-anyone-voting national polls in future elections?

UPDATE: Rudy just got a big larf by belatedly adding Ron Paul to his list of honorable opponents he was tipping his hat to, then saying that Paul "won all the debates" if you check those (I paraphrase) "things where people call in after the debates."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Previous update done overlapping Matt Welch's blogging of same thing, above.

Rocketship Rudy Sets His Sights on Mars!

kleinp@spectator.org (Philip Klein) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:00:00 EST

Tampa, Florida--"I hate pandering... have all my life," Rudy Giuliani once told Newsmax. "It's one of the worst characteristics that politicians have--pandering to people...There's a dishonesty in that that really offends me."

That was in 2006. This year, the former mayor of New York City is trying to win an election. With his national lead eroded and his presidential candidacy on the brink, Giuliani has staked everything on winning today's Florida primary. In the process, he has developed a strange new appreciation of the space program and the perils of the homeowner's insurance market.

"We're going to get to Mars before anyone else gets there," Giuliani boasted at a rally on Monday by the Orlando Sanford International Airport. "And we're going to reestablish our space program and eliminate that gap, so we can get our people up to the space station ourselves. That's something I learned about here in Florida, and I am committed to doing it."

Beyond supporting an industry that is an important part of the state's economy, Giuliani's main gambit to win votes and influence people in the Sunshine State has been getting behind something called the National Catastrophic Fund. Under this proposal, the federal government would help in the event of a major natural disaster, which would spread risk and thus allow insurers to offer more affordable homeowner's polices to residents of hurricane-prone Florida.

"The idea is to be there with a backstop that will allow a private market to work so that people who have risk will pay more but at least they'll have insurance that [isn't] excessive," Giuliani explained last week.

Contrary to Giuliani's assertion, the private market in Florida is functioning quite efficiently, because it is sending homeowners the signal that it'll cost them if they choose to live in an area in which there is a high risk of a hurricane. To artificially lower insurance rates would only encourage more people to move to the state, meaning more costly storms in the future. Giuliani's response to critics is that the federal government ends up stepping in anyway, so being proactive is actually the more fiscally conservative thing to do.

At every campaign stop "America's Mayor" has been touting the fact that he is the only Republican in the race that supports the National Catastrophic Fund, and he took out a television ad educating voters on his position. During last Thursday's debate, when Giuliani had the opportunity to ask a question to one of his rivals, the former prosecutor grilled former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney on his lack of enthusiasm for the giveaway.

Yet Giuliani has received very little in return for taking such a strong stand on the fund and the desperate need for a publicly funded Mars expedition. His poll numbers have continued to dwindle in the state, and Florida's GOP Gov. Charlie Crist, a leading proponent of the idea, ended up endorsing Sen. John McCain, who said no to the fund.

To be sure, not all economic pandering is created equal. While Giuliani doesn't have much to show for his efforts, Mitt Romney's latest incarnation as a born-again John Edwards has paid enormous dividends.

After defeats in Iowa and New Hampshire, where he had spent tens of millions of dollars, Romney's chances of capturing the Republican nomination seemed slim. But in Michigan, he won by promising to save the auto industry and fight for every job, and he has continued to echo populist themes in Florida. At campaign stops here, Romney talks about the "economic squeeze" and "help[ing] middle class families make ends meet."

After spending most of last year running away from his Massachusetts health care plan, Romney now fully embraces it, defending the various mandates that are part of the program. He has been promising that as president, he'll work to get every American insured.

Not only is Romney pushing the idea of universal health care, but according to a report in the Politico, his campaign has attempted to woo senior citizen voters in Florida with robo calls attacking the frontrunner McCain for voting against "the AARP-backed Medicare prescription drug program."

That multi-trillion-dollar entitlement program has served as a monument to President Bush's betrayal of limited government principles, and the AARP has been the biggest obstacle to achieving entitlement reform because of its use of scare tactics directed at its elderly members. The idea that Romney, who is trying to portray himself as an economic conservative, would employ similar scare tactics to assail a rival for opposing the boondoggle is staggering. Yet many conservatives have concluded that Romney is their last hope of stopping McCain, whom they dislike on immigration, campaign-finance reform, and other issues. So they are giving the former Massachusetts governor a free pass on his dash to the left on economic issues.

In the primaries so far, McCain himself has avoided the type of economic pandering that his rivals have engaged in, and it has been greeted with mixed results. He had a better-than-expected showing in Iowa despite his opposition to ethanol subsidies. And his refusal to endorse the idea of a catastrophic fund didn't cost him the endorsement of Gov. Crist. In the span of a few weeks, he improbably went from also-ran to the head of the GOP pack, both in Florida and nationally.

Which isn't to say he hasn't paid a price in the campaign.

"We went to Michigan, and we told them the truth," McCain recounted at a Tampa rally Monday night, referring to his acknowledgement that auto industry jobs leaving Detroit weren't coming back. He then joked, "They didn't like it much."

Philip Klein is a reporter for The American Spectator.

Discuss this story at reason's Hit & Run blog.

Giuliani the Thug

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 08:19:00 EST

Incredibly damning piece on Hizzoner in today's New York Times. You may know of Giuliani's history of smearing victims of police brutality while he was mayor. The most famous case was Patrick Dorismond. After Dorismond was wrongly killed by NYC police, Giuliani released the man's juvenile record, which by law was supposed to remain sealed. Giuliani said Dorismond "is no altar boy." Actually, Dorismond was an altar boy.

But today's Times piece looks at the depth of Giuliani's vindictiveness, and his willingness to use the power of his office to ruin the lives of those who dare to cross him:

In August 1997, James Schillaci, a rough-hewn chauffeur from the Bronx, dialed Mayor Giuliani’s radio program on WABC-AM to complain about a red-light sting run by the police near the Bronx Zoo. When the call yielded no results, Mr. Schillaci turned to The Daily News, which then ran a photo of the red light and this front page headline: “GOTCHA!”
That morning, police officers appeared on Mr. Schillaci’s doorstep. What are you going to do, Mr. Schillaci asked, arrest me? He was joking, but the officers were not.
They slapped on handcuffs and took him to court on a 13-year-old traffic warrant. A judge threw out the charge. A police spokeswoman later read Mr. Schillaci’s decades-old criminal rap sheet to a reporter for The Daily News, a move of questionable legality because the state restricts how such information is released. She said, falsely, that he had been convicted of sodomy.
Then Mr. Giuliani took up the cudgel.
“Mr. Schillaci was posing as an altruistic whistle-blower,” the mayor told reporters at the time. “Maybe he’s dishonest enough to lie about police officers.”
Mr. Schillaci suffered an emotional breakdown, was briefly hospitalized and later received a $290,000 legal settlement from the city. “It really damaged me,” said Mr. Schillaci, now 60, massaging his face with thick hands. “I thought I was doing something good for once, my civic duty and all. Then he steps on me.”

The article also notes that aides to Giuliani attempted to pressure NYU's law school to fire Joel Berger, a civil rights lawyer (with whom I've worked in the past) who had the temerity to take on police brutality cases against Giuliani's NYPD. Giuliani's office threatened to terminate a legal clinic set up with the school unless it terminated Berger. The article also discusses a black police officer fired for speaking publicly about police brutality, a social worker fired for criticizing the way the city handled a case resulting in the death of a child, and all sorts of petty political squabbles ending with Giuliani inflicting disproportionately harsh punishment on the people he perceived to be his enemies.

Jimmy Breslin has described Giuliani as "a short man in search of a balcony." Imagine what the guy could do with the powers of the office of the presidency.

Dave Weigel's recent reason cover opus on Giuliani here.

Winning New York Was Never Part of Rudy's Strategy

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 15:26:00 EST

The nightmare scenario of a Clinton/Giuliani matchup next November is looking less and less likely. Judging from the primaries so far, Ron Paul has a better shot at the Republican nomination. Now a new poll finds the former New York City mayor and hero of 9/11 trailing John McCain by 11 points in New York.

Sure Loser Ron Paul Crushes Sure Frontrunner Giuliani--And Not Because Giuliani Gave Up

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 01:54:00 EST

Interesting analysis over at LewRockwell.com breaking down Iowa caucus votes per campaign appearances there.

Surprisingly, given the common belief that of course Giuliani did so disastrously in Iowa because he didn't try, he made nearly as many campaign appearances there as McCain did--35 to McCain's 38. And Paul beat Giuliani so thoroughly with far fewer personal apperances--only 27.

In fact, if these judgments were made objectively based on apperance and cash, not just Giuliani partisans' excuses for his dismal showing, it might be Paul, and not Giuliani, who seemed to be barely trying in Iowa. Giuliani, in only the first 9 months of 2007, spent $237,000 in Iowa.

I was unable to get Paul's campaign to respond to a question about how much he spent there in that period, or to find today updated spending numbers for the candidates broken down by state to the caucus day. The official FEC filings for Giuliani and Paul do have categories for "allocations of primary expenditures by state," but both are blank. If any commenters know more on this, have at it. With Giuliani's appearances exceeding Paul's by 30 percent, and Paul doing more than three times as well in the votes, would Paul's spending need to have exceeded Rudy's by more than 300 percent to add believability to the "Rudy did poorly because he didn't try" notion?

One big difference between eccentric loose cannon Paul and highly respectable frontrunner Giuliani is that Paul has oodles of non-campaign workers out there plumping for him, so official campaign cash spent isn't the best measure of real on the ground effort, so I'll give Rudy that.

In votes-per-appearance, Paul pulled 429.5 to Giuliani's 114.6. Only Huckabee beat Paul for votes per appearance.

Here from Media Matters a longer debunking of the "Giuliani didn't try in Iowa" idea.

I think one lesson is that the incredibly extended pre-campaign, with all the requisite predictions and pre-judgements about what is sure to happen, is bad for political analysts' necks, having to snap back so violently from when everyone with any sense knew it would be a Clinton-Giuliani matchup.

Some Positive Thoughts About Negative Campaigning

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 12:03:00 EST

Negative campaigning has a bad reputation, routinely being disparaged as juvenile taunting that serves only to degrade public discourse. A New York Times headline the other day noted "Bickering and Negative Ads in Countdown to Caucuses," as though these were the moral equivalent of an old married couple grousing about that mess in the kitchen.

Even devoted practitioners feel the duty to deplore negative campaigning. After commissioning an ad accusing Mitt Romney of grievous departures from conservative wisdom, Mike Huckabee was so remorseful that he refused to run it—though he managed to disseminate his charges in a news conference where he sorrowfully screened the spot for the news media. Explaining his newfound magnanimity, Huckabee asserted, "It's never too late to do the right thing."

But what was so terrible about the ad? It merely said that as governor of Massachusetts, Romney raised taxes, left a budget deficit, provided abortion coverage in his universal health care program, and failed to carry out a single execution—all of which appear to be grounded in fact, and any of which a few voters would find interesting.

The spot thus passes the only two tests voters should apply to any campaign attack: Is it true, and is it important? Accusing Romney of having devil's horns would be unacceptable because, though significant, it's not true. Accusing him of owning too many sweaters, though true, would be over the line because it doesn't matter.

It would be nice if politicians were all saintly figures who invariably do the right thing. Since they are not—and since Americans often disagree on what constitutes the right thing—negative campaigning serves the helpful function of illuminating facts that a) people are likely to care about and b) the targets would prefer we didn't know. In fact, if it weren't for attacks on the air and on the stump, our campaigns might have all the nutritional content of a Coke Zero.

What would we glean about the current candidates from watching only their own positive ads and presentations? That Hillary Clinton has unmatched experience in government and is a good listener to boot. That John Edwards is tireless in fighting for You. That Mitt Romney loves his highly photogenic family. That John McCain is a common-sense conservative.

That Mike Huckabee is unabashedly in favor of Christmas. That Rudy Giuliani will kill terrorists with his bare hands. That Barack Obama's serene wisdom would make Gandhi look like Bill O'Reilly.

Compare those blinding revelations with what we know about the same candidates from unflattering portrayals offered by their opponents and other uncharitable souls: Clinton's experience is greatly exaggerated. As a state senator, Obama's Zen-like approach to divisive legislation often led him to vote neither "yes" nor "no" but "present."

Giuliani has a history of support for gun control and abortion rights. Huckabee has changed his position on illegal immigration. Edwards has changed his position on the Iraq war. Romney has changed his position on everything.

Any of these particular discoveries may strike you as good, bad or irrelevant. But the only reason they get attention is that they furnish some voters with information that will influence their vote.

I don't want to be entirely positive about negativity. Political attacks can also be nasty, unfair or even outrageously false. When a top Clinton campaign official wondered if Obama might have been a drug dealer in his youth, the suggestion was all three. But rather than damaging Obama, the claim backfired, forcing the aide to resign.

That episode goes to show something else good about even the most indefensible attacks: They often tell more about the attacker than the attackee. The smear of Obama reminded some people of Clinton's pattern of ruthlessness toward her enemies—a pattern at odds with the image of quiet strength and personal warmth she has worked so hard to cultivate.

When Huckabee asked whether Mormons (such as Romney) really believe that Satan is the brother of Jesus, he did voters a similar service. Mormons say this is a mischaracterization, and I'm not qualified to address questions of theology. But true or false, it's about as relevant to a candidate's fitness for office as whether he believes in purgatory. And by raising it, Huckabee made himself sound like he should be running for pastor, not president.

Thomas Jefferson once said that he would prefer newspapers without a government to a government without newspapers. Given a choice between politics with no negative campaigning and politics with only negative campaigning, I suspect he would prefer the latter.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Scenes from the Ron Paul Revolution

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 07:15:00 EST

Note: Watch reason editor Nick Gillespie debate Bill O'Reilly on Ron Paul's candidacy at Fox News.

On the morning of October 30, a large group of people gathered outside The Tonight Show’s Burbank studio. According to GloZell, a local eccentric who attends every taping of the show, only the lines attracted by Hollywood heartthrobs such as George Clooney, Justin Timberlake, and Daniel Radcliffe had ever come close to matching the crowd’s size and enthusiasm. But this throng had gathered to cheer Ron Paul, a 72-year-old obstetrician and Air Force veteran turned Texas congressman. Paul was there to hawk not a movie or a record but his long-shot campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

During the broadcast, host Jay Leno respectfully attended to Paul’s calls for hard money, withdrawal from Iraq, and a flat income tax of zero. Offstage, Leno got Paul to autograph his copy of the congressman’s recent book, A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship.

Later in the show, while performing “Anarchy in the U.K.” with a reunited Sex Pistols, punk icon Johnny Rotten gave Paul a thumbs-up and a “Hello, Mr. Paul,” later adding, “When are we getting out of Iraq?” In between, more ambiguously, he waggled his ass in Paul’s general direction. But he shook hands with the congressman afterward, and according to Paul supporters on the scene he expressed respect to him privately. Paul, watching the broadcast with supporters at a Hollywood Hills fundraiser that evening, shook his head at the aging punk’s antics, noting, well, we do promote tolerance.…

That day encapsulated Paul’s surprising campaign. It featured a powerful show of grassroots support, respect from unexpected places, and an infiltration of radical ideas into American mainstream culture. There was the aging iconoclast Rotten, mixing the anarchy he stood for as a kid and the market capitalism he lived out as an adult (the Pistols had reunited to help promote the video game Guitar Hero III), symbolizing the range of liberties Paul represents to a movement that includes both Christian homeschoolers and heathen punks. And there was the question so many Americans want answered, the question central to Paul’s campaign as the only Republican candidate opposed to the war: When are we getting out of Iraq?

When the Paul campaign began, most of the political cognoscenti considered it a quixotic joke. Now it’s one of the hottest stories of the season. The reason for the turnaround is money. On November 5 alone, Paul took in a gigantic haul of $4.3 million. His third quarter 2007 draw nearly matched that of the far more famous John McCain, and his net cash on hand going into the primaries exceeded that of everyone but front-runner Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson (though millionaire Mitt Romney has his personal reserves to fall back on). As of press time, in the fourth quarter of 2007, Paul had collected $10.7 million, generally in amounts well below the legal $2,300 maximum for individual donations.

By November, Ron Paul was getting respect from surprising and prominent places. Conservative bigthinker George Will called Paul “my man” on ABC. Texas singer-songwriter-novelist Kinky Friedman told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that Paul is “probably telling the truth.” Singer-songwriter John Mayer was caught on video informing a pal that “Ron Paul knows the Constitution, and I’m down with that.” Even Eleanor Clift, conventional wisdom on the hoof, said on The McLaughlin Group that “Ron Paul with his antiwar libertarian message will be the story coming out of New Hampshire for the Republicans.”

Paul is also the wonder of the Internet, with campaign mojo fueled almost entirely by his shockingly large number of fans on Meetup.com, a website that allows people with a shared interest to find one another and meet offline. Paul has more than 67,000 Meetup followers, about 20 times more than his nearest competitor, Barack Obama. That virtual presence has translated into more than just donations. Five thousand Paul supporters showed up at a November rally in Philadelphia, and his poll numbers in New Hampshire reached 8 percent in a mid-November CBS/New York Times survey—exceeding both Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson.

If news is the unexpected, Ron Paul’s rise was the news of the presidential campaign last fall. But Paul himself is not news. He’s been pushing his libertarian values, derived from his love of the U.S. Constitution and the Austrian school of free market economics, through all of his 10 terms in Congress and in between. (He has served in Congress three times: from 1976 to 1977, from 1979 to 1983, and from 1997 to the present. He ran for president as a Libertarian in 1988.) What’s news is the self-styled Ron Paul Revolution—his mass of self-coordinating supporters. The candidate’s critics invented the term “Paulistas” to mock those supporters as wild-eyed radicals. Many of them then claimed the word for themselves, adopting it as a badge of honor.

Four years ago, Howard Dean’s Democratic campaign offered an earlier example of a grassroots mass movement that came pretty much from nowhere, beholden to no power structure, decentralized in how it got information and in how it organized itself to act. But the Ron Paul Revolution adds a twist: This movement is passionately dedicated to a smaller, less activist government.

As this is written, before a single primary vote has been cast, it’s difficult to predict this movement’s future, especially when you remember how Dean’s campaign imploded after the Iowa caucus. But Paul’s backers are confident their man will at the very least be a new Goldwater. He might not win the presidency, they say, but he will reignite excitement about small government in his party and his country, and thus might help reverse the last half century and more of government growth and activism in both domestic and foreign policy.

In the last weekend of October, after months of following Ron Paul action on the Internet and locally in Los Angeles, I tagged along with the Ron Paul road show in Iowa. Over the course of just 24 hours stretched over two days, I saw Paul talk to more than 500 college kids in Ames, more than 700 assorted Des Moines citizens, hundreds of state GOP activists, and a dozen Des Moines area pastors. I saw a skilled politician with a diverse and disproportionately young band of backers—supporters who stretched far beyond a traditional Republican Party base, who loved their man and his message with an enthusiasm undaunted by whatever his electoral prospects turn out to be.

‘Dr. Paul Cured My Apathy’
On the Friday evening before Halloween, Paul is scheduled to speak at Iowa State University in Ames. To get from Des Moines to Ames, I hop on the Constitution Coach, a former school bus owned by Dave Keagle, a Christian homeschooling father of seven. Keagle’s wife, Christa, and their children are on board, along with a dozen or so other Paul supporters. The bus is painted red, white, and blue, with slogans summing up Paul’s message: “Taxpayer’s Best Friend.” “No Amnesty.” “No NAFTA.” “No National ID.” “No Patriot Act.” “Pro-Gun Owner.” “Life.” “Liberty.” “Freedom.” Christa tells me Paul is the first candidate her family has ever been able to get behind 100 percent, with no reservations. She was also impressed with how Paul was able to relate to and remember the names of all her kids on a previous Iowa campaign swing.

I talk to John Carle Jr., a 43-year-old self-employed CPA who dabbles in real estate, and his wife, Meredith, a Korean orphan brought to America as a child. Like most of the Paulistas I meet, he’s fresh to politics, with no history of activism or enthusiasm for any candidate from any party. He’s not a part of any existing Republican base: He’s a disaffected independent who thinks he’s finally found a politician who “oozes integrity” and “is inspiring the best in people.” Paul’s the only candidate he trusts on post-9/11 civil liberties issues. “If they can pick anyone off the streets and send them to a secret camp,” Carle says, “I don’t wanna be part of that country.”

Carle, who has a firm grasp of the candidate’s positions, explains his love for Paul in measured terms. He gets emotional only once, choking up for a beat as he repeats his favorite of the fan-made signs you see at Paul rallies: “Dr. Paul Cured My Apathy.”

The talk at Ames draws an overflow crowd of more than 500 college kids. There are a few longhairs, a few punks, but it’s overwhelmingly a conventional gang of well-groomed Midwestern youth who happen to be wearing hundreds of “Ron Paul Revolution” T-shirts. The event got no free local or campus press. The crowd was gathered almost entirely through Meetup and Facebook, another online social networking site.

“I hear you’ve got a revolution going on,” Paul begins, “and it’s being led by the young people.” Then he recites his first big applause line: He’s not much for passing laws, but he might consider one requiring the next election to be held on the Internet.

Those are the only explicit nods to the crowd’s youth and online activity. From there on, it’s all classic Ron Paul: Get rid of the income tax and replace it with nothing; find the money to support those dependent on Social Security and Medicare by shutting down the worldwide empire, while giving the young a path out of the programs; don’t pass a draft; have a foreign policy of friendship and trade, not wars and subsidies. He attacks the drug war, condemning the idea of arresting people who have never harmed anyone else’s person or property. He stresses the disproportionate and unfair treatment minorities get from drug law enforcement. One of his biggest applause lines, to my astonishment, involves getting rid of the Federal Reserve. Kids have gathered, not just from Iowa but from Wisconsin and Nebraska, in classic hop-in-the-van college road trips, to hear a 72-year-old gynecologist talk about monetary policy.

He wraps up the speech with three things he doesn’t want to do that sum up the Ron Paul message. First: “I don’t want to run your life. We all have different values. I wouldn’t know how to do it, I don’t have the authority under the Constitution, and I don’t have the moral right.” Second: “I don’t want to run the economy. People run the economy in a free society.” And third: “I don’t want to run the world.…We don’t need to be imposing ourselves around the world.”

Paul does not mention abortion or immigration—areas where his views are more conventionally conservative and not of great appeal to this age group. He’s against abortion and thinks the fetus is a human life deserving of state protection, but he also thinks that like all such crimes against persons, abortion is a matter for states to decide without federal interference. He thinks that border defense is a legitimate function of government, and that government has been doing a bad job of it. He wants tougher border enforcement, including a border wall; he wants to eliminate birthright citizenship; and he wants to end the public subsidies that might attract illegal immigrants. Paul’s style of libertarianism includes a populist streak of distrust for foreign forces overwhelming our sovereignty, whether through the United Nations, international trade pacts, immigration, or a feared “North American Union” between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

On the ride back to Des Moines, I meet, among other Paul fans, Bryan Butcher, a 50-year-old high school teacher and part-time drummer for a belly dancing troupe. He’s a pony-tailed former Marine who had thought of himself as a “social liberal” and an Obama fan. “I feel we do need to take care of people,” Butcher says. But Ron Paul has helped him see that “the socialist idea of government taking care of people hasn’t helped, that people need to take care of people, and that’s the smart way to go.”

The Paulistas delight in their independence and fervor. At a press conference after the Ames talk, a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporter asks the candidate about all the Paul signs he sees around Pittsburgh. “You guys must have a big operation there,” he says.

“If we do,” Paul says with a small smile, “we don’t know about it.”

‘You Are Friends for Life’
Iowa and New Hampshire, which hold a caucus and a primary respectively in January, are the early-voting states where the campaign is concentrating most of its unexpected largess and where the unaffiliated revolutionaries are concentrating their energy. But more New Hampshire than Iowa. Iowans are perhaps too staid for the revolution.

I’m on Des Moines’ downtown drinking strip after Paul has spoken at a state GOP dinner, sitting with two Paul staffers and two Paul fans. A tipsy young Romney supporter approaches us. She actually likes Ron Paul, she grants. She could even call him her second choice. But Ron Paul fans? They’re outside agitators, she insists, almost scary in their intensity. Iowans don’t appreciate their shouting, chanting style of campaigning, or their insistence on sticking their huge, silly “Ron Paul Revolution” signs in places they do not belong, often violating both propriety and the law.

I ask Jan Mickelson of WHO-AM, a leading Des Moines talk radio host who describes himself as a Christian libertarian and a Paul admirer, where the classic Iowa Republican “values voter” stands on Paul. He first notes, with a mixture of admiration and disquiet, that Paul partisans are “crawl-over-broken-glass zealots. Fiercely devoted. Passionate. Wherever he appears they appear, wherever he’s on TV they watch, whatever poll they can participate in, they respond. If you get on their right side, you are friends for life. If you nuance even a little bit your support for him, they come at you.”

Iowa Republicans, Mickelson says, have “two impulses” toward Paul. “They find the limited government message very attractive,” he says. “They find his war policies confusing and irritating. They don’t understand how you can be a constitutionalist for limited government and be against the war and not be aiding and abetting both Al Qaeda and Moveon.org.”

So New Hampshire is where the Paulistas are hoping for a surprise victory. It’s happened before for radical outsiders with populist appeal: Pat Buchanan scored the state in 1996. (And see what it got him.)

Vijay Boyapati, an Australian immigrant, was a software engineer for Google who was running a 100-member Google-internal pro-Paul listserv. (Paul filled two rooms to overflowing at a July talk on Google’s campus in Mountain View, California.) Boyapati quit his job in November to devote all his energy to his project Operation: Live Free or Die. His goal: Recruit a thousand Paul supporters to relocate to New Hampshire for a weekend or even for weeks—he plans to rent a house and give up a whole month himself—doing retail canvassing and campaigning to push Paul over the top there.

The official campaign has ponied up more than $1 million for TV commercials in the Granite State. The three ads focus on Paul’s personal integrity, on his opposition to national ID cards and other civil liberties violations, and on his support for a noninterventionist foreign policy. In one spot he notes that “both parties have put their pet schemes ahead of our rights”—a direct blow against his own party.

In the age of Bush Republicanism, Paul barely qualifies as a party man in good standing. But in New Hampshire independents can register and vote in the Republican primary on Election Day. And in the Iowa caucus, any legal voter can show up and vote for Paul. That’s good news for a campaign that must rely on support beyond the Bush-era GOP faithful.

‘We Want to Have a Peaceful Revolution’
The inventor of the phrase “Ron Paul Revolution,” and the designer of the T-shirt logo in which the evol in revolution looks like the word love backward, is 46-year-old Ernest Hancock, a longtime activist in the Arizona Libertarian Party and a radio host. The logo recycles an image he developed for his own (losing) 2006 bid for secretary of state in Arizona. “We want to have a peaceful revolution, so the love is effective in portraying a revolution, but not violence,” says Hancock, known among Libertarian Party activists for always staking out hard-core, no-compromise stances. The logo, which is not an official campaign symbol, is immensely popular among Paul fans, dotting the nation wherever Paulistas can show up in T-shirts or put up stenciled signs or banners.

Hancock says that when he first heard rumors that Paul might be running, back in January 2007, “I called [campaign chairman] Kent Snyder and said, ‘All I need to know is if this is for real.’ When he said yes, I said, ‘Thanks, have a nice day, you’ll never hear from me again.’ ”

Hancock spends most of his time these days crossing the nation, showing locals how to make Ron Paul Revolution signs economically, how to find used banners and billboard pieces for cheap or free and print on the back. He advises activists on how and where to hang them. Hancock’s an anarchist, but he has learned to love the federal highway system for the opportunity to reach a captive audience on the cheap by hanging banners off overpasses.

And if the banners get torn down within hours? “So freaking what?” he says. “Two hundred thousand people saw it.” And, uh, is any of this illegal? “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t care.” Well, Ron Paul is on record as supporting civil disobedience.

Hancock’s crusade is not the only guerrilla effort on Paul’s behalf. Meetup groups are organizing a campaign to send thousands of handwritten pro-Paul letters to Iowa voters. A strange variety of viral videos infects YouTube, many of them featuring unofficial Ron Paul campaign songs. The range of styles in these Ron Paul ballads reflects the eclecticism of the Ron Paul Revolution: from wan old-school folk to ’90s-style jazzy trip-hop, from sprightly garage rock to straight Sinatra steals. Some lyrical samples, from the trip-hop number: “We need Ron Paul/For the long haul/Cause he’ll stop all the wars/Where the bombs fall.” From the garage pop tune: “Ron Paul!/He’s got brains and he’s got balls/Ron Paul!/Who you gonna cast your vote for next fall?/Ron Paul!”

An Eclectic Revolution
As a very successful politician, Ron Paul knows how to sell what’s appropriate at any given moment, within the bounds of his principles. This talent helps forge a movement that appeals across gaps that standard political analysts might think unbridgeable, such as the one between pot-smoking libertine college kids and evangelist pastors.

When Paul speaks to those pastors in Des Moines, he talks about border security, sovereignty, and the North American Union, topics missing from the college talk. He tells of witnessing a casual abortion in medical school, and how much it disturbed him. But even to this audience he stresses that preventing abortion must ultimately be a cultural, spiritual, and family matter, not something solvable through top-down federal action.

Afterward, a couple of pastors tell me they’re “less libertarian” than Paul but plump for him anyway. The “leave us alone” message has wide appeal; as Nate Howe, an L.A.-area computer security worker in the banking industry and an organizer with the local Meetup group, tells me, a recent Hollywood fundraiser found “Ron Paul talking to someone who’s very accomplished in business and then a kid next to him with a Mohawk, and both are saying, ‘I like this guy; he’s saying go live your life, and if you don’t hurt anyone, the government shouldn’t bother you.’ ”

I hear variants of this from many Paulistas. They recognize their scene’s eclecticism but see no reason that, whatever your personal values or lifestyle, you can’t get behind the man who wants to leave you alone.

There’s one strain of the Paul movement, though, that often alienates his other supporters and potential supporters. Ranging from John Birchers to 9/11 Truthers, they’re the type whose distrust of government is enmeshed in elaborate, complicated, and implausible conspiracy theories. To the extent those people have a favorite candidate, it’s apt to be Ron Paul. One big reason: He shares their refusal to believe the government always has good intentions.

My friend Phil Blumel has been active for the last decade in Florida GOP politics and has been following Paul closely for two decades.

He’s a big Paul supporter and has been encouraged at how many rank-and-file Republicans seem open to his message. He understands Paul’s appeal to the conspiratorial types, though he doesn’t share their interests, and doesn’t think Paul really does either. “I’ve heard him speak 40 times, and you can never really tell that he actually believes in any particular conspiracies,” Blumel notes. “But he speaks in a language such that conspiracy nuts believe that he does. Me not being a conspiracy nut, he speaks vaguely enough that I can listen and it doesn’t sound like he really buys it.

“That’s a political skill,” Blumel jokes, “triangulating between the sane and the insane and keeping them both on board.” As an enthusiastic supporter of the campaign who nonetheless disagrees with Paul’s stances on immigration and sovereignty, Blumel has been pleased that as the campaign has gained traction, Paul has emphasized issues with more mainstream appeal: war and the economy.

With that traction has come a wave of “Who Are the Paulistas?” media stories. The ultimately dismissive, if often amused, spirit of many of them is summed up by an anecdote in one of the articles. After noting some Paul fans’ penchant for wearing costumes, including colonial era garb, Time’s Joel Stein describes how, after a New Hampshire rally, a staffer for fellow GOP candidate Tom Tancredo “walked up to a guy in a shark costume and asked him if he was a Ron Paul supporter. ‘No. They’re all nuts,’ replied the shark. ‘I’m just a guy in a shark suit.’ ”

While left-leaning writers such as Glenn Greenwald at Salon and John Nichols at The Nation have been Paul defenders, the right-wing press has frequently featured bitter animus against him. For example, the conservative columnist Mona Charen scoffs that Paul “might make a dandy new leader for the Branch Davidians.” At The Weekly Standard’s website, Dean Barnett writes, “If you’re the kind of person whose neighbors call you a crank, you probably see Ron Paul as a kindred spirit. And chances are he’s with you on the subject for which you’ve achieved your notoriety in crankdom.”

In my interviews with dozens of Paul supporters from across the country, I encountered not a single nut or dedicated conspiracy theorist. In fact, they all evinced a general belief in free markets and the Constitution that should, in theory, make them welcome members in good standing of the American right.

The Revolution’s Future
Most of the current Ron Paul Army has mustered in only with this campaign. Most of them had never heard of him, or thought of themselves as libertarians, before six months ago. The predominance of newbies bothers Jorge Besada, an economics fan in a Hayek shirt who shipped in from Nebraska to hear his man talk in Ames and Des Moines. Without a solid grounding in the verities of Austrian economics, Besada worries, Paul supporters won’t be optimal sellers of the freedom message. Too many of Paul’s positions, whether his hard-money stance or the larger questions of how free markets and free people will function and achieve social goals without constant government management, require a sophisticated economics background to really get, he fears.

There are no survey data about the Paul movement, but certain rough generalizations seem valid. They are not an unwashed rabble of weirdos, as Paul’s right-wing critics like to say; most are either college students or adult professionals, though usually not rich. They generally support Paul all the way. (Those with Libertarian Party backgrounds are likely to differ on immigration and abortion.) The war issue is important to them, but so are the larger matters of civil liberties and fiscal conservatism. They imagine themselves continuing the fight for these ideas in some capacity after the election, but they often aren’t sure how. Many, though, promise that any future candidate for any office pushing the Paul line will have their support. And some promise to be those future candidates.

Some Paul fans with more political experience, both Republican and Libertarian, are working to keep the revolution alive even if their candidate fails to take the nomination. In Florida, Paul partisans are encouraging their comrades to join county GOP executive committees and reshape the party from the bottom up in Paul’s image. In Alabama, a Paul organizer sees single-issue freedom-oriented grassroots groups already arising from the activists Paul has energized, including campaigns dedicated to gun rights and to fighting a national ID card.

There is a lot of clamor among Libertarian Party higher-ups and activists to get Paul (who remains a lifetime member of the party) to seek its nomination if he fails to get the Republican nod. Many insiders agree that it would be his for the taking at the party’s May convention. One downside for the L.P., which most seem willing to overlook, is that laws in a handful of states (including Paul’s home state of Texas) would bar him from the presidential ballot because of his campaign in the GOP primary. Paul continually denies that he’ll make a third-party run, but his denials are always couched in terms of not thinking about it or planning it, as opposed to categorically denying that he would ever under any circumstances do it.

Whatever his future plans, Paul insists this revolution is about his message, not him. But small hints of a cult of personality hover around some of his fans’ devotion to the candidate. Almost all the supporters I talk to stress their trust in him and often assume he’s probably right about most things, even issues they haven’t put a great deal of thought into.

These Paulistas are what hopeful libertarians have fantasized about for decades: a disaffected but engageable mass of Americans, many of them hidden among the 45 percent or so who tend not to vote. They support an argument advanced by David Boaz of the Cato Institute and David Kirby of the America’s Future Foundation, who estimate, based on detailed polling data, that 9 to 14 percent of Americans hew to a roughly libertarian political ideology—and that this group has been shifting away from the GOP during the current Bush administration.

Such Americans represent a deep, natural well of libertarianism waiting to be tapped. And Ron Paul has hit a gusher in a year when every other Republican stands for big government and war, and when YouTube and Meetup are a private, self-selected national TV network and town hall for 24-hour Ron Paul. But when he’s gone?

I ask Paul, as he shakes hands and chats with every one of the 100 or so fans in his hospitality suit after the Iowa GOP dinner, about the future of the Ron Paul Revolution. First he admits to being as shocked as anyone by what’s happening. For years, he resisted calls to run again for president. He thought it was too early in the long-term libertarian educational project for such a campaign to get anywhere.

“Even if I said, ‘OK folks, we didn’t make it, let’s all go home’—I don’t think it would happen,” he says. “I’ve been laboring in these fields for 30 years and wasn’t reaching many people and thought maybe my role is only to lay the foundation with a few speeches, voting the right way, setting a standard. I don’t know what will happen. Something amazing could happen in Iowa and New Hampshire, and that will decide a lot. But many of my supporters indicate they will be running for office. They understand my positions, and it would be pretty neat to see a bunch of new members go to Congress with these views.”

If something like that happens, Paul’s connection with Johnny Rotten and punk rock may be deeper than it first appears. It has often been said that early punk precursors like the Velvet Underground and the Ramones may not have sold many records themselves, but that everyone who bought one formed his own band to carry on the spirit. Even if Ron Paul doesn’t get that many votes, his voters may end up running for office themselves. It would be a fitting legacy for a very do-it-yourself political movement.

Senior Editor Brian Doherty is the author of This is Burning Man (BenBella) and adicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (PublicAffairs). He first wrote about Ron Paul for The American Spectator in 1999.

Could Ron Beat Rudy Twice?

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 11:02:00 EST

Whodda' thunk that after all the hullabaloo following the debate exchange below from seven months ago that Ron Paul would be in a position to beat Rudy Giuliani in both Iowa and New Hampshire?

Today's Des Moines Register poll, which Slate says other pollsters consider "by far the most reliable," has Paul nearly doublng Giuliani in Iowa. Meanwhile, conventional wisdom says Paul's cadre of cell phone-toting college students and new voters will enable him to finish well above where he's polling at the moment in New Hampshire. The latest New Hampshire poll shows Paul just two points behind Giuliani. And that's an ARG poll, which thus far into the campaign has tended to show the least amount of support for Paul.

Looks like third place in Iowa, New Hampshire, or both isn't at all out of the question. Neither is beating Giuliani in one or both. Pretty remarkable, really. The anti-war candidate mocked and chuckled at in the debate below may well knock off the war-supporting 9/11 superhero—in the Republican primaries.

Reason in Wash Post: Meeting Every "Libertarian-as-Bacchus Fantasy You've Entertained"

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 11:46:00 EST

That's Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, agriculture, and the theater, not Jim Backus, a.k.a. Mr. Magoo, James Dean's father in Rebel Without a Cause, and Thurston Howell III.

The Washington Post's Style journeys to the end of the political night with the magazine of Free Minds and Free Markets and files a dispatch, titled "Reason's Libertarians, in Pursuit of Happiness."

Snippets:

Four minutes into Reason magazine's monthly bash at the Big Hunt lounge, and every Libertarian-as-Bacchus fantasy you've entertained plays out before your widening eyes....
"D.C. is a city of young fogies who think the only way to be pious is to wear ill-fitting suits" and obsess over politics, [reason editor Nick] Gillespie, 44, says later. "We're the only people that want to have fun."...
Reason['s] articles rang[e] from the expectedly wonky ("Is Rudy Giuliani a new Barry Goldwater or a new Bobby Kennedy?") to the snarkily cultural ("Say You Love Santa: Pop Culture's War on Secularists"). A recent issue lambasted the District's zero-tolerance drinking and driving policy -- cops can book anyone with a blood alcohol content over .01 -- and postulated that the Onion might be the best newspaper in the country....
Libertarianism is a hard sell for young, majority-Democrat Washington. Its free market philosophy must be carefully tempered with swinging promises: "Yeah, baby, I do oppose the minimum wage, but let's talk about it over an illegal substance or two, hmm? Bring a friend."...
It's not that they don't do politics. Of course they do politics. They are a political magazine. But they want you to know that they do politics far less than the other political magazines do politics. "Too often the conversations here are all about 'Oh, can you believe Al Gore did this?' " says Welch.
Adds Gillespie, "It's such a tedious debate. It's like how many Bill Buckleys can dance on the head of a pin."
To prove they are above all that nonsense, they have parties.
"We want to have interesting conversations about things," says Welch. "We want to drill home that culture matters."...
Several other times each month, Reason brings culture in the form of an afternoon roundtable, or a wine-and-cheese Q&A with Someone Controversial....
Reason's goal in Washington is not to agree with everyone, says Welch, but rather this: "We want to add a new bacteria to the culture."
And are you sure, they ask, that you wouldn't like a drink?

Read the whole thing here. Comment at the Post's site here.

The Reichstag Fire Changed Everything

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:55:00 EST

How do you sell a Rudy Giuliani cover when America's Mayor (and Everyone's!) is tumbling down the polls like a Jenga tower in a hurricane? Like so:

Ah, the days when the Ron Paul right feared the coming Giuliani presidency. The days of... a month or so ago. TAC's package is here, and my story about Giuliani's liberal philosophy is here.

Bonds for Babies

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 12:01:00 EST

You probably missed it, but there already was an “idea primary” in the 2008 election. It lasted two weeks and nobody won.

In September, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) strolled into a Congressional Black Caucus forum, belted “Brooklyn’s in the house!” to rev up some of her backers from New York, and fielded a question about Social Security. Clinton, who typically clings to her script as if it were the last raft off the Poseidon, got a little too comfortable and started to improvise.

“I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account that will grow over time,” she said, “so when that young person turns 18, if they have finished high school, they will be able to access it to go to college.” There were no more details; she mentioned the idea, and then she moved on.

Immediately, the Clinton campaign remembered why their candidate usually sticks to her lines. The Drudge Report mocked the idea in a yelping banner headline: “A BOND IN EVERY BASSINET: HILLARY PROPOSES $5,000 FOR EVERY U.S. BABY.” “Should Clinton become the Democratic nominee,” declared Larry Sabato, the ubiquitous pundit who directs the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, “she may have handed a powerful issue to the Republican candidate.” One Republican candidate, Rudy Giuliani, announced that his rival thought “the American people are stupid.”

Ironically, Clinton had been poaching in a traditionally Republican territory. After all, she was proposing a bond that a child would own, something that would give him or her some sense of responsibility. This was not part of the traditional menu of Democratic ideas. Indeed, it has roots in an idea popular in free market circles.

In 1962 the libertarian economist Milton Friedman proposed a negative income tax, under which welfare bureaucracies would disappear and the government would simply send checks to people under a certain income level. Charles Murray, author of the seminal welfare critique Losing Ground, offered an updated version of Friedman’s proposal in his 2006 book In Our Hands. Both concepts started as thought experiments, and both reached the same conclusion: The recipients of transfer payments can manage that money better than a welfare state can.

Stung by the wide-ranging criticism, Clinton backed down. On October 9 she said baby bonds were “on the back burner,” and the next day her campaign staff assured reporters that the bonds were “off the table.” But another version of the idea was percolating in Congress: A few days later, Clinton’s colleague Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) held a press conference to introduce the ASPIRE Act. This legislation would create “KIDS accounts”: an initial endowment of $500 for each American child, to be funded by taxpayers and administered by the Treasury Department. Schumer had introduced an identical bill three years earlier with three Republican co-sponsors: Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), Rep. Phil English (R-Pa.), and Rep. Tom Petri (R-Wis.).

Schumer’s accounts would be tax-free, and the owners—every kid born in 2006 or later—could start tapping into them at age 18 to pay for their education, to buy a home, or to set up a retirement account. Children below the poverty line would be eligible for an extra $500 for their accounts. Wealthier kids could receive dollar-for-dollar matches for the first $500 they invested each year.
When I asked Hill Republicans about Schumer’s proposal, the reaction was indifference. “I’m not familiar with this,” replied Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), a prominent conservative. “But I’d say, generally, if Chuck Schumer is introducing it than I’m not going to like it.”

Murray doesn’t like the idea either, despite the superficial similarities to his proposal in In Our Hands. The KIDS accounts, like Clinton’s baby bonds, would be a brand new entitlement, he points out, not a replacement for the present welfare state. “Add-ons to the current system will keep all the bad features of the current system,” he explains. “All of the dynamics among families and communities that would make my plan work are destroyed if the present system of transfers is maintained.”

Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, agrees that ASPIRE-style accounts are “the wrong answer.” But he also credits their supporters for asking “the right question.”

Baby bonds, Tanner argues, are a sign that Democrats finally recognize the role personal investment can play in battling inequality. The conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks goes farther: ASPIRE-style accounts, he wrote in 2005, are a worthy idea that anticipates the coming entitlement crunch and adapts to it. Such “asset-based welfare,” he declared, “might pave the way for other asset-based programs designed to give young people a better start in life, not just secure their retirement.” Today, by contrast, “people in the bottom half of the income scale don’t get to join in to take advantage of compound interest. They don’t get a share of the growing national economy. They don’t get the psychological benefits of ownership.”

That, you’ll recall, was the thinking behind Social Security privatization. Privatizers wanted to change the way people thought about Social Security: Instead of pooling their wealth and getting some back when they retired or needed aid, they would build their own assets over the course of their lives.

Even if they don’t replace the current Social Security system, “baby bonds” could have a transformative political effect. The kids who own those bonds won’t just be counting on the government and the Social Security Administration to take care of them. They’ll be investors. They’ll see what happens to their accounts, they’ll look at what’s happening to the transfer payment system, they’ll make the obvious comparison, and they’ll be less likely to vote for the traditional welfare state.

Such ideas have affected Republicans’ political calculations. Grover Norquist, a vocal supporter of private Social Security accounts, argues that “every American who owns his own mutual fund is decreasingly susceptible to the siren call of class warfare” —and transfer payments.

But Democrats are making political calculations of their own. Clinton clearly thought asset building could fit snugly into a plan to lift up poor Americans. She brought it up to get some applause at a meeting of black, mostly urban Democrats. Similarly, Schumer recognizes that ownership is an idea that sells. Slowly, incrementally, the idea is traveling from the right side of the political spectrum to the left.

No one old enough to ride a bike or dress up a Barbie thinks presidential elections are about ideas. But sometimes ideas can shape both a campaign and the agenda of the winner. Ronald Reagan won the election in 1980 after adopting the Kemp-Roth tax cuts and pounding them at campaign stops. Steve Forbes lost the Republican nomination in 1996, but he turned into a credible candidate as he relentlessly pitched his plan for a low universal flat tax. That plan never made it to the floor of Congress, but it has crept into the conventional wisdom of tax reform. Even the Democrats, facing the prospect of power in 2009, have started to consider it when they contemplate tweaking the alternative minimum tax and fixing the code.

When Brooks endorsed ASPIRE-style accounts in 2005, he predicted they “would cut across left-right polarities and prove an irresistible political force.” It hasn’t worked out that way. In their October debates and campaign tours, front-running Republicans Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson started saying that Social Security was en route to a collapse and that Americans needed to look, one more time, at private accounts. Democrats howled. Meanwhile, Democrats called for young Americans to start owning assets instead of depending on handouts, and Republicans shoved the idea off the table. Is everybody missing the big picture?

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

The Grand Old Party Is Up for Grabs

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:18:00 EST

Here's a quick snapshot of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. The closest the party has had to a frontrunner is a big-city mayor from a deep-blue state; he's a pro-choice adulterer who used to shack up with some gay guys. His chief rival is a tax-hiking governor who says our "responsibility to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions" is a "moral issue" and who denounces pro-market conservatives for their "greed." (He also thinks the world was created in less than a week, but in this party that isn't a disadvantage.) Another major candidate is trying to convince the voters that he's under fire for his Mormon beliefs, when the real reason no one trusts him is the pervasive suspicion that he has no beliefs at all. And the best man in the bunch is widely derided as a nut—not because of his frequently radical policy prescriptions, but because he opposes the most unpopular policy identified with the modern Republican Party.

And here's the weirdest thing of all: No one knows who's going to win. A party that prefers to coronate its standard-bearers at least a year before the primaries is about to head into the Iowa caucuses without a clear-cut frontrunner. The race is open, and it's open at a time when the party knows it has been doing something terribly wrong but can't agree on what mistakes it has been making. It isn't just the nomination that's available. The GOP's political vision is up for grabs.

The primary within the primary. The biggest battle in the Republican field right now isn't the fight for Iowa or New Hampshire. It's the contest to be the candidate of the party's social conservative wing. At a time when even the pro-choice Rudy Giuliani has managed to pick up the endorsement of a prominent right-wing evangelist—an aging Pat Robertson, whose declining lucidity is on sad display every day on The 700 Club—it's clear that this faction has no favorite. What it does have, despite Robertson, is a near-unanimous disdain for Giuliani. The two men who began the campaign as Rudy's biggest rivals, Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, have been assiduously courting the Christian right. But they have a history of statements and stances that put social conservatives on edge.

So for the so-cons, who hold enormous power until the end of the primary season, Giuliani is unthinkable, but neither Romney nor McCain is a comfortable alternative. On the other hand, they don't want to line up behind someone like Alan Keyes or Tom Tancredo, even if that means denying us the sublime joy of a Keyes-Obama rematch: To get nominated, you have to be plausibly electable. With that in mind, I predicted last spring that the party would nominate a man who embraces the social conservative agenda while exuding a personal charm that might appeal to swing voters in the general election. There was one tiny problem with my prediction -- just a typo, really. I referred to this candidate as "Fred Thompson," but apparently his name is spelled "Mike Huckabee."

That said, Huckabee's victory in the primary-within-the-primary is far from assured. If he stumbles, so-con support could still go to Thompson, to Romney, or even to a resurgent McCain. Meanwhile, Rudy himself can't take advantage of the divisions in his rivals' ranks, because he made a deliberate decision to focus his attention on the later primaries. And by the time those come around, he might be too weak to win: He has been bruised by scandals and is falling in the polls.

The economic agenda. Huckabee and Romney may be bidding for the social conservatives' support, but the interesting differences between them lie in their economic opinions. Romney is a classic K Street Republican: more pro-business than pro-market, but committed in theory if not always in practice to limiting the government's role in the economy. Huckabee's rhetoric is strikingly different, calling on the state to do more to help the disadvantaged. He favors a few free-market fads like the Fair Tax, a gimmicky proposal to replace the income and payroll taxes with a national levy on consumption, but those are anomalies. Like John Edwards on the Democratic side, he is frequently called a populist; like Edwards, he would be better described as a progressive. His pitches do not call to mind a prophet in bib overalls demanding power for the people. They suggest a speechwriter brainstorming programs that might appeal to the soccer moms.

Romney might not believe in anything, but he pays lip service to the standard Republican values. If this becomes a Giuliani-Huckabee contest, that means the Republicans will jettison either the social views that have been identified with the party for the last three decades or the economic views that have been identified with the party for the last three decades. Meanwhile, the dark horse in the race would jettison the international views that have been identified with the party for most of the last five decades.

War! Ron Paul is a libertarian congressman from Texas with a strong commitment to a non-interventionist foreign policy. He has enough money to stay in the race for as long as he'd like, and he has a devoted band of followers who aren't likely to jump to any other candidate. His opposition to the Iraq war is deeply unpopular with both the Republican establishment and the hawkish Republican base, and that makes it extremely unlikely that he'll win the nomination. But he is also the only candidate who speaks for the 30 percent of the party that wants to bring the troops home (and one of the few candidates whose free-market rhetoric reflects actual pro-market positions). That makes him an important barometer of dissent within the party, and among independent voters as well. The more he succeeds, the more he forces the other candidates to reconsider their assumptions about what the electorate will tolerate.

And people keep underestimating him, which magnifies the impact of his successes. He will probably do well in New Hampshire and in much of the west. And he might do well in less libertarian territories as well: As of Friday, he has been polling in double digits in South Carolina.

Huckabee's economic program marks a shift from the traditional Republican rhetoric, but it's the natural next step after Bush's ballooning budgets and "faith-based" welfare spending. Giuliani's social views are a cleaner break with the old Republican platform, but they aren't far from the tolerant course the country has actually taken in the three decades since Reagan was elected president. Paul's foreign policy, by contrast, would be a radical contrast with the reigning Republican assumptions of the last eight years. He is returning to themes that were briefly resurgent in the '90s but haven't been part of the standard conservative playbook since the days of Robert Taft. If he inspires more Ron Paul Republicans to run for office, he too could push the party in a different direction, if not this year then in the years to come. And if the GOP refuses to listen to what he's saying, it's not clear whether that will be worse news for the non-interventionists or for the faltering Grand Old Party.

Jesse Walker is managing editor of reason.

The Year That Wasn't

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 15:27:00 EST

William Safire is one of the most respected political prognosticators in the business, a fact that never seemed less true than when he was asked on Meet the Press about Hillary Clinton's potential running mate.

What about Rahm Emanuel, the most powerful voice in the House of Representatives that agrees with Hillary Clinton on foreign affairs? He's a hawk. And although he's a rootin' tootin' liberal on domestic affairs, he is a hawk on foreign affairs. I was at a roast for him for Epilepsy Association, and Hillary Clinton was there, and I said, quite frankly, here you have the hawkish side of the Democratic Party. If they get together, the bumper sticker will read "Invade and bomb with Hillary and Rahm."

The stolen Appalachian slang, the name-dropping from an event that transpired two years ago, the boy-in-the-bubble disconnect from political reality: exquisite stuff. But, again, Safire is a writer who's supposed to be good at this. Later this month, when he publishes his 34th annual "Office Pool" in the pages of the New York Times, people will parse his lines and report out his predictions, to see if they could come true. Even the risible Clinton/Emanuel prediction inspired credulous commentary from writers who surmised that, well, Safire wouldn't just say anything. He's got sources. He knows people.

Washington is full of such people, and for them 2007 was a lousy year. It's not that pundits and politicians are usually so prescient. As Philip Tetlock demonstrated in Expert Political Judgment, his 2005 survey of punditry, the pros, on average, are no better at predicting the future than a Denny's night manager or a part-time blogger or Miss Cleo. Rarely, though, do so many prognostications believed by the whole of the Beltway fall apart. Most everyone believed that Hillary Clinton would end the year as the Democratic frontrunner, which is still mostly true.

Not much more of the conventional wisdom of 2007 bore out. There was a moment when Washington was truly ready to accept Fred Thompson as the GOP frontrunner, as the natural candidate who could unite the party with charisma on loan from Cary Grant. All he needed to do was not flop. And then he flopped. (This was one of the few prognostications I didn't buy into. I was shocked at Fred's smug and fumbling campaign persona, a cacophony of "uhhhs" and "we've got some problems," and really thought he'd fail. For this I was raked over the coals at Free Republic. And how has Fred done? He's fallen asleep on the coals.)

There is no one explanation for 2007's odd turns, although there are some explanations for the glut of bad predictions. They are abundance and access. There have never been so many pundits or so many armchair experts with means to make their opinions public. Since they want to distinguish themselves, they rush faster than ever before to be the first with tomorrow's conventional wisdom. There is no historical comparison for the effect of blogs bouncing a meme back and forth, hardening it, investing smart people in the success or failure of an idea like "Barack Obama needs to attack Hillary Clinton head-on" or "Tom Tancredo can win Iowa."

That's one effect of abundance and access. The other is happening outside the opinion market and in the political market, as active campaigners swell in number and find ways to use those numbers to shape campaigns. Twenty years ago a prediction like "There aren't enough libertarians to make Ron Paul a credible candidate" would have been right. Today Ron Paul supporters can organize ad hoc fundraisers and PR stunts and basically run a shadow campaign whose effect dwarfs the efforts of the official campaign. Twenty years ago you could get angry citizens to tie up Senate phone lines, but the power of today's cross-media assaults on Congress—via blogs, phone calls, talk radio, email—probably killed immigration reform after House and Senate majorities were ready to pass it and the White House was ready to sign it.

The following, roughly chronological, list of six botched predictions isn't intended to name and shame the people who got 2007 wrong. It's more interesting to call them back and see why they didn't pan out.

1.) The Iraq Study Group will change our policy. One year ago Time magazine gave its cover to a heavily-reported piece by Michael Duffy, the gist of which was that the White House wanted to get out of Iraq in the quickest, most face-saving manner possible.

Bush aides said last week that there is already agreement on the name for the restart: A New Way Forward, which borrows from the commission's own title, The Way Forward-New Approach. Among people who have known Bush for decades, there is almost as much certainty that he needs to disengage from Iraq as there are doubts about whether he has the wiring and instincts—much less the desire-to pull it off.

Not everything in there is wrong. The White House did whisper the phrase "new way forward" to reporters and Tony Snow pushed it onto Larry King. But by "forward" they really meant "forward"—more troops, a new general, a new PR push for the less-evocatively-named "surge."

To be fair it wasn't only Time editors who got this wrong. From Newsweek to the American Conservative, most beltway observers figured the 2006 election rout meant that George W. Bush was going to run bawling into the arms of his father's advisors and admit that he'd never been cut out for his job. It was a strange misstep; Washington had known for six years that the president was stubborn-running-to-messianic and that Democrats were skittish about actually ending the war. The GOP scored a rare 2005 victory when it forced a vote on whether to leave Iraq immediately, and the Democrats rejected Rep. John Murtha when he ran for majority leader as the hero of the anti-war faction. There was never much political will to start leaving Iraq, so there was no second day story after Baker and Hamilton's big coming out party. The result: a truly historic flop.

2.) The Democrats will overreach and George W. Bush will mount a comeback. At one point pundits believed both of these contradictory things: that the war would grind on and grow ever bloodier, and that George W. Bush would somehow bounce back in the polls. Chuck Todd of NBC News (formerly of The Hotline) got very specific, claiming that a Nancy Pelosi speakership would drive Bush's approval numbers above 50 percent by July 4. The Washington Post's David Broder vagued it up, predicting that Bush was "poised for a political comeback" after winning his early votes on the war.

Three things happened: The public grew less pessimistic about the war, the Democrats grew less and less popular, and...Bush stayed in the doldrums. Too many people assumed that political popularity was a binary, one-or-the-other proposition. It took an unusually long time for it to sink in that this was one of those times—not too rare—when the public had turned bitter and faithless toward all of Washington. The Bush comeback narrative relied on outdated faith in the president's power to persuade. It was one that didn't take into account new abilities to pick and choose the media that you pay attention to.

3.) Al Gore will run for president. In retrospect, hundreds of years later, you can almost understand Tulipmania. But the Al Gore boomlets of 2007 are completely inscrutable. Try to follow the logic of February and March: If Al Gore won the Academy Award for Best Documentary (keeping in mind that Davis Guggenheim, not Gore, would actually accept the prize) he would probably run for president. Why? Just because.

"Honestly, this was the inaugural parade we all envisioned," said Donna Brazile, his former campaign manager. "Gore's political stock is hot right now. I don't know if I would cash in now with so many players still on stage."

It went on like this all year, ramping up when Gore released his mildly deranged book on politics and when he won the Nobel Prize. The book, if anyone cared to read it, compared the media's gullibility to the ease with which chickens can be hypnotized.

4.) Sam Brownback will matter. Long before he declared for president, the political press corps were eyeing Kansas's born-again Catholic fundamentalist like a scout who'd heard some high school senior was the next LeBron James. In January of 2006, Jeff Sharlet reported in Rolling Stone that "the nation's leading evangelicals" had "lined up" behind Brownback and "as the candidate of the Christian right, he may well be in a position to determine who does, and what they include in their platform."

It never happened and for two reasons: Brownback was Brownback and Mike Huckabee was Mike Huckabee. Brownback fit into a comfortable media mold, filled out previously by pols like Rick Santorum: the holy roller who weaves together Christianity and right-wing public policy and chills secularists down to the base of their spines. Huckabee had (and has) no such long-term plans. He's interested in what works and what's good for Mike Huckabee, not necessarily in that order, and he's a lazy fundraiser. But Brownback had no personality, and Huckabee could sell bottled water to Amy Winehouse. Republicans proved more interested in an evangelical candidate they liked than an evangelical candidate with ideas.

And Brownback's anti-momentum has transitive properties. On November 7, Brownback endorsed John McCain: Noam Scheiber of The New Republic called it "a boost" that would give McCain an Iowa organization and speed the flow of white evangelicals who "have been moving toward McCain lately at a surprisingly strong clip." Then came the Huckaboom. Over the last month McCain's Iowa polling strength has dipped from around 8 percent to around 6 percent.

5.) John McCain is the GOP frontrunner and the natural heir to Bush. Fittingly, the story of the McCain campaign can be told in two glossy magazines—Esquire and GQ—that have perfected the art of the journalistic man-crush. In late 2006, Esquire gave McCain a glowing cover story, headlined "One of Us," casting his final run for the GOP run as a hero's quest and all the human impediments like smartass young voters or religious GOP leaders as patches in the Slough of Despond.

That's why John McCain would like to tell you a story—and why he would like for you to listen to it—his story of countrymen and friendship, of reconciliation with David Ifshin and with Vietnam, the country that saw to it that he would never again be able to comb his own hair, and he would like to tell you that all wounds can heal, that all memories can be made good, and that every state can be New Hampshire, in the middle of summer, enjoying an ice-cream social with Senator John McCain. And because of who he is—or perhaps because he is saying exactly what you need to hear—you're inclined to believe him and to believe that he's correct.

The whole article was basically like that.

Everybody's working theory was that McCain would hire as many Bush bagmen and kiss however many religious right rings as he needed to in order to win the nomination, but that this would be OK, because he was the same guns-a-blazin' maverick that the press corps fell in love with seven years ago. Cue: implosion. The story of McCain's fall was finally told by Robert Draper in GQ, and it turned out that McCain's smart hires and organizing had the twin effects of burning through his campaign funds and turning the media against him.

6.) Ron Paul's run will be bad for libertarians. No one, literally no one, has been shocked at the success of Ron Paul's presidential bid like Ron Paul himself. Looking out at rallies of 5,000 people, watching $4.3 million in donations pile up in one day, being told that a blimp bearing his name will be hovering over Washington, Paul often looks as if expecting someone to point out the hidden camera and live studio audience.

In April, Cato's David Boaz looked upon Paul's fundraising numbers and despaired:

Apparently, the most notable contributor to Ron Paul is... Rob Kampia, director of the Marijuana Policy Project. It's going to be a long campaign.

One month later came the Republican debate in South Carolina when Paul was confronted by Rudy Giuliani and heckled by a pro-war crowd. Byron York of National Review pronounced Paul "out—way out." Republicans talked about banning him from future debates.

The candidate who made a big move, who came out of nowhere to win new name recognition was...Ron Paul. But it's probably not the sort of name recognition Republican presidential candidates want. "Wow," said one adviser to a rival campaign after listening to Paul's blame-America lecture. "I haven't heard anything like that this side of Rosie O'Donnell."

And on and on. Libertarians, tempted to root for Paul, worried that Paul's meager campaign and rock-bottom polls would make it seem, again, like the philosophy was unpopular. That joined the worry that Paul's controversial writings (attributed to him, at least) on race would blow up and tar every libertarian by association. None of this has happened. As Paul's vast coalition of political outcasts organized online and filled his war chest, the mainstream media has grown more interested in libertarianism—all of it, not just Paul's brand—and has generally ignored his controversies.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Romney and the Role of Religion

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 10:55:00 EST

Columnist Ron Hart on Romney's recent rap about religion:

A Pew Research Center poll in September found that 25 percent of GOP voters, including 36 percent of white Protestants evangelicals, said that they would be less likely to vote for a Mormon. Rudy Giuliani with his three wives does better than Mitt Romney with his stable solid marriage of 30 years and his great kids. Folks, that is small-minded and wrong.
The Democrats are smarter on this. Their leading candidate Barrack Obama has admitted to drug use and no one cared. Meanwhile, the GOP base slices and dices its candidates; forcing them into in a ludicrous competition over issues of religion and morality that should have no bearing on their ability to govern.

More here.

We Were So Much Younger Then, We're Crueler Than That Now

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 14:49:00 EST

I used to think I was an expert on 1920s Mississippi Supreme Court decisions, but Is That Legal? blogger Shertaugh takes the crown:

In a case called Fisher v. State, 110 So. 361, 362 (Miss. 1926), Mississippi's highest court ordered the retrial of a convicted murderer because his confession was secured by a local sheriff's use of the water cure.
Here's the court:
The state offered . . . testimony of confessions made by the appellant, Fisher. . . [who], after the state had rested, introduced the sheriff, who testified that, he was sent for one night to come and receive a confession of the appellant in the jail; that he went there for that purpose; that when he reached the jail he found a number of parties in the jail; that they had the appellant down upon the floor, tied, and were administering the water cure, a specie of torture well known to the bench and bar of the country.

But Rudy Giuliani disagrees!