Reason Magazine - Topics > Fred Thompson

Operation Live Free or Die

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 07:00:00 EST

NEW HAMPSHIRE—The first New Hampshire ad Ron Paul purchased with his giga-hauls was dubbed "Catching On." Dr. No's donors greeted it like a new strain of some flesh-boiling virus. High up among the ad's problems, they argued, was the oddness of the featured actors—all of them amateurs, almost all of the male actors sporting beards. "If Ron Paul doesn't get the nomination," wrote the sage Jongo2124 on YouTube, "I'm single-handedly blaming that bearded atrocity."

I have seen the Paul campaign in action, and I can confirm that there are beards. Lots of them. Middle-aged electrician beards, gravitas-adding beards on thirtysomethings, thin hipper-than-thou beards on the youngest volunteers. Massachusetts grad student John Notley wears a massive, red Nordic mane that earns him the nickname Thor. It's reminiscent of a semi-famous photo from the 1972 presidential race, of a waddling businessman handing out Nixon literature right next to a skinny hippie handing out McGovern fliers. The difference is that the nameless McGovern flunky was campaigning for acid, amnesty, and abortion, while Paul's crew wants to bring back the paleoconservative sobriety of Sen. Robert Taft.

They're a happy bunch of people, which comes as no surprise. For the first time in their lives, libertarians and men (and women) of the Old Right are bunking together, partying together, and knocking on suburban doors to talk war, abortion, and monetary policy. And people are actually talking back to them.

"We've talked to people that no one else knows to talk to," said a volunteer from Portland, Oregon who goes by the handle Ball. Vanishingly thin, tucking a Murray Rothbard T-shirt into snow pants and adjusting sci-fi eyeglasses, he marvels that no other campaign has tried to steal Paul's thunder. Any Republican campaign (or Democratic campaign, for that matter) could have talked to blue collar voters about why their dollar was collapsing or why we went to war in Iraq, but they didn't, and Ball's finding voters who were waiting to hear about those issues. He reflected on the towns he's canvassed. "Dover is Ron Paul mania," Ball said. "Blue collar people who want to know why the dollar is going down. Derry sucked. All country club Republicans and limousine liberals. Upper crust who don't understand or care about this."

The canvassers have all kinds of theories about what's working and what isn't. They agree that Manchester is tough, that towns with lots of wealthy Republicans are hard going, but the further you drive north, the more Paul support you see. Organizers for Operation Live Free or Die, the grassroots group that's putting hundreds of Paul volunteers in hotels—and 14 houses—across the state, talk about Paul "owning" towns closer to Canada. Aaron Jones, an Indiana musician who pounded the pavement in tiny Franklin, hit one neighborhood with 30 homes and got nine requests for lawn signs.

Rival campaigns don't know how many people are backing Paul. The Paul campaign won't even say how many people they think they can turn out, whether they think they can win, or whether they'd take a bronze medal and call it a win. "We're running hard, everywhere," says Jared Chicoine, the New Hampshire director for the campaign. He kept the campaign's targets close to his vest. "Our voters are conservatives, Republicans, and Independents who want low taxes, who don't like big government intruding in their lives."

In some ways Chicoine sounds like a typical Paulista. "I honestly didn't plan on doing a presidential race this year," Chicoine said. (He's been working on races in the state since 2000.) "My friends were signing up with Thompson, or with McCain, and I was unconcerned. Then Ron Paul got in. I'd been following him for years, since the 1990s, and I never thought he was about to run for president—I had to go and do this."

But in his strategy and his priorities for the campaign, Chicoine illustrates the gap between Ron Paul staff and Ron Paul volunteers. Apart from the debates and select rallies, when Paul has unabashedly talked about the war on drugs, foreign policy blowback, and monetary policy, the candidate and the campaign have focused more on the issues that motivate conventional Republican voters than the ones that speak to libertarian stalwarts. Much of the direct mail that the campaign is blasting across the state could have been designed by pander-happy Mitt Romney or hard-right Duncan Hunter. Simple green fliers, designed for drop-offs at churches, contain the text of Paul's eulogy for Pope John Paul II. One mailer boasts of Paul's donations from military members and features a photo of a massive gunship and the promise that Paul will "Defend America by Defending Our Borders." An optimistic mailer with pro-life overtones fronts an adorable baby smiling above the legend, "Millions like me are counting on you." On a more explicit pro-life flier, the baby is giving a thumb's up.

Some of the volunteers agree with those messages, but just as many wish the campaign would get off them. Anthony Reed, a 20-year old volunteer from Texas, complains that the anti-immigration ad now plastered across the New Hampshire airwaves alienated a friend. Now she supports Obama. There's grumbling in the office about independent voters (the minority of them who pick up their phones or answer their doors) voicing support for Paul but saying they'll vote for Obama or McCain because they want "change." How does a cash-flush insurgent campaign like Paul's win those voters? Try and get the campaigners to agree.

"Maybe I just haven't been on this earth long enough, but I think they should just run videos of Ron himself," Ball told me in the kitchen of an Operation Live Free or Die house. "That first video of him explaining why he got into the race was the best thing he's done." He shook his head. "I don't like these ads with a generic narrator talking about the border invasion, like Paul is just another Mitt Romney."

I mentioned this exchange to some Paul canvassers. "You can't compete with Mitt Romney on the ads," one of them said. "No way. He looks like a car salesman."

"Be fair," said canvasser and Free State Project organizer Jon Maltz. "He looks like a used luxury car salesman."

You hear enough of the bellyaching about the Paul campaign's strategy and you wonder if it's just that: bellyaching. What volunteer is ever going to be 100 percent satisfied with the campaign giving him orders? What the Paul campaign is doing looks like micro-targeting, the tactic campaigns use to find disgruntled, disconnected voters and connect with them on the specific issues they care about. Non-voters who go to Mass might like those pro-life fliers, for example. Maybe they'd crumple up a mailer about the drug war and recycle it with their magazines. But the volunteers' critique sounds more solid when they worry about the campaign's logistics.

"Our call lists are pretty flawed," one Paul canvasser said. "There are these names of people who moved out of state or are absolutely committed to another candidate. There are people who tell you they don't vote, but the list says they voted in 2000 and 2004."

That particular canvasser wasn't brought down by that experience. He folded it into his theory of the race: "If these are the lists everyone is using then maybe the pollsters who are calling them are missing our voters."

Of course, pollsters don't use the same lists campaigns use. In Paul's case, it's a list of Independents and Republicans cobbled from lists the campaign purchased and winnowed down by canvassing. It's the sort of organizational problem that could make Tuesday harder than expected. Operation Live Free or Die has done some of its own canvassing, reminiscent of the third-party groups like America Coming Together that couldn't coordinate with John Kerry's 2004 campaign and underperformed the well-oiled Bush-Cheney campaign. So it is with grassroots campaigning in an era of strict campaign finance reform. ("The only thing I like about campaign finance reform is that it's saved me from giving even more money to Ron Paul," volunteer Ofer Nave told me.)

New Hampshire's primary politics could change dramatically after the Iowa caucuses. Fred Thompson might drop out of the race, Mitt Romney could steal momentum back from John McCain, Obama could fade and free up independent voters who had planned to back him. And that Republican race, moribund for months until John McCain started perking up, is going to be less attended to than the Democratic race. The number of volunteers working for Paul could match the talent, if not the numbers working for the frontrunners. They will probably exceed the numbers working for Giuliani and Thompson, who are doing poorly in pre-primary polls. After the Iowa Caucus results proved that Paul does appeal to independent voters, and that his poll numbers don't fade on election days, we'll see what's going to work in New Hampshire.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

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.

Among the Paul Volunteers

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 22:05:00 EST

GILFORD, NH - I'm at one of Operation Live Free or Die's 14 houses for Ron Paul volunteers - the "bases" that will (they hope) overflow with 400 people, canvassing, phone banking, and turning out votes. Ages range from 20 to 40 (not rounding up or down, those are the youngest and oldest people), and everybody shares food, frozen beers (warmed on a radiator) and parking space, recently reduced by a mountain of snow. No one has an unkind word.

"I've never seen a group this big and diverse get along so well," says Anthony Reed, the 20-year old from Fort Worth.

"It's the smartest group of people I've talked to in a long while," says John Nulty, a Massachusetts grad student. "Not since I was staying in youth hostels, touring Europe."

This house is set far, far away from the populous part of New Hampshire (that's a relative term), close to the Gunstock resort and nestled among dozens of similar spacious rental cabins. You'd guess a Bible study group was bunking here if not for the open bottles of Sam Adams and pale ale or the Rothbard and Ron Paul books splayed open on coffee tables. There's also a stack of mini-Constitutons: Nulty brags that the Operation bought the Cato Institute's entire supply.

Few of the volunteers got here before December, but all of them have canvassed and report that it's a lot more effective than phone-banking. They go to small towns where, according to the locals, no Republican campaign has bothered sending troops. Yesterday Indiana musician Aaron Jones hit 30 houses and gave 9 signs to people who claimed they'd warmed to Paul. They're an optimistic group and they have no love for the rest of the GOP field. When Mitt Romney's face appears for a 10-minute C-Span interview, one of them jokingly punches the screen. When Fred Thompson comes on, they just laugh, and they lose it when C-Span advertises more Thompson videos on their website.

"Forget about Lunesta," Reed says. "Just pop one of those on!"

I'm hearing a lot of excitement and some disappointment that the ersatz campaign isn't better organized. More in a full article later.

Will We See Ron Paul in NH Debates?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 08:07:00 EST

The NY Times and others report on how Fox News and ABC is working to keep Ron Paul--the $20 million man--out of its debates in New Hampshire this Sunday; ABC is holding out possibility of inclusion based on results in Iowa and polls, though that's a small crumb for a guy who is massively successful in terms of fundraising and besting ghost candidate Fred Thompson in various surveys. Even Cap'n Ed Morrissey of Captains Quarter, no RP man that's for sure, finds the preemptive Paulophobia off-putting:

It makes little sense to start excluding candidates just before the first meaningful vote gets taken. Raising $19 million in a quarter shows at least some level of significant support, even if limited to the fringes of the GOP and Libertarian parties. Also, if Fox wants to rely on polling, Paul does at least as well as Thompson in Iowa and perhaps better at the moment in New Hampshire. Why not just wait for the results from Iowa to make that determination for both parties, as ABC plans to do?

More here.

reason on Ron Paul 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 Friday Political Thread: No Hand Shows Edition

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:28:00 EST

We survived two debates this week, an occurance which won't be repeated until... well, until three and a half weeks from now, when the Democrats and Republicans do back-to-back Jan. 5 debates in New Hampshire. Robert Novak's report is especially thorough this week and worth reading.

Unconvincing quote of the week...

"I always knew it would be hard." - Hillary Clinton, Dec. 14. Two weeks earlier she said she never considered the possibility of losing the nomination.

The week in brief...

- The much-loathed Des Moines Register debates hardly moved the needle in either campaign, although Fred Thompson showed signs of life, Hillary Clinton sounded flustered, and John Edwards announced plans to nationalize Hit & Run.

- New Hampshire Clinton backer Bill Shaheen (husband of the Democrats' Senate nominee against John Sununu) speculated—just being helpful!—that Republicans would pillory nominee Obama for his lifetime of hardcore drug use and dope dealing. Shaheen resigned.

- The energy bill, which needed 60 votes to break cloture, got 59.

The GOP rises again! This might be a half-baked theory based on a bunch of random results and fooferah, but consider:

- Last Friday, Kentucky Secretary of State Crit Luallen, a Democrat, decided not to challenge Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, whom polls show has been weakened over the last year.

- On Tuesday, Republicans held on to two open House seats in Virginia and Ohio by 21 points and 14 points respectively. The Virginia result wasn't much of a surprise, but Democrats actually made a play for Ohio, spending DCCC money, sending Gov. Ted Strickland and Sen. Sherrod Brown to campaign for Democrat Robin Weirauch after a nasty primary (the Club for Growth went in against him) apparently weakened Republican Bob Latta. Latta's win was at the high end of Republican hopes.

- On Thursday, former Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore, a popular Democrat, decided not to run for Trent Lott's open Senate seat.

- The first poll pitting Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu against GOP Treasurer John Kennedy (who switched parties to run against her) has the second-term Democrat up only 46 to 42.

It feels very different from the winter of 2005, when Democrats were rushing into less-than-sure-thing races and Republicans were resisting Karl Rove's appeals to run for Senate. (Rove's the guy who flipped Kennedy in Louisiana.) Democrats are still cleaning up in fundraising and winning the general election, but the climate's a little worse than it was last year.

Final point: In the latest CNN poll (PDF), only 54 percent of undeclared voters want to vote in the Democratic primary. That's down from a high of 70 percent, and it's a factoid Democrats have been pushing all year as proof of their continued strength and the GOP meltdown.

Honest Barry. I try to get into the heads of Joe and Jane Iowa Voter, I really do... but it falls apart when the issue is drugs. Plenty of people think drug use is a character flaw, and I don't. So the way that Obama deals with his past drug use, as an awful youthful mistake that no boy should repeat, is probably the way to handle it even though it leaves me cold. Craig Crawford argues that it's not enough.

Throughout the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush managed to dodge detailed questions about his partying past in the same way that Obama's team is now doing – by calling foul against anyone who brings it up.

I don't think that's quite fair. Karl Rove's strategy included denying that Bush had ever used drugs and hoping that reporters would get tired of asking. Rove et al knew that Bush had been arrested for a DUI and simply covered it up for the entire campaign. That's not what Obama is doing. He's wisely been admitting what drugs he did (and what crimes he committed) for years. Still, we're a long way away from the maturity of Australia, where Bob Hawke probably became prime minister because of his legendary boozing abilities.

Debates are stupid. Fred Thompson's going all in and stumping Iowa from next week to Jan.3. His tour is dubbed "The Clear Conservative Choice: Hands Down." That's a reference, of course, to his refusal to put his hand up or down to answer the DMR debate question on global warming. John Edwards put in a manful performance at the Democratic debate, but the second-day story was all about Obama smacking around Clinton when she laughed at a question about how many Bill Clinton advisers worked for him: "Hillary, I'm looking forward to you advising me as well." It's not like we're leaving behind a great era of American politics, but... seriously? Fred's angina counts for more than Romney's precision or Giuliani's daydreaming about endless meetings?

Below the fold...

- Jim Geraghty dreams about President Ron Paul: "I can’t deny that it appeals to some dark corner of my fiscal conservative psyche."

- The Iowa Independent (part of the Center for Independent Media's new web mag network) has an Iowa cattle call that puts Ron Paul in third place.

- Matt Taibbi swoons for Barack Obama. (Fair warning: His last political crush was Kucinich.)

- Mark Hemingway tries to understand the youth-Ron Paul axis.

- Phil Klein talks to Arkansans about Mike Huckabee's pardons.

- Rich Lowry denies him clemency.

In a week that ended with buzz about drugs and dealing, I award the Politics 'n' Prog slot to Can. You can guess why.

Democratic Debate VIII: The One Nobody's Watching

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 14:00:00 EST

The Democrats, following the GOP, are making the abysmal Des Moines Register debate their last dog-and-pony show before the Iowa Caucus. Occasional commentary will appear here, but you're probably flipping around looking for the steroids-in-baseball press conference.

The debate's online here.

2:02: I'm watching the Fox broadcast of this debate, which features a focus group and moving dial. Obama's bland answer on balancing the budget blows the yellow and blue lines off the screen.

2:03: Richardson's specifics - line-item veto, balanced budget amendment - get less fuzzies than Obama's pablum. Breaking news: Obama is more charismatic than Richardson. (Interestingly, liberals like the phrase "no more earmarks" more than moderates.)

2:05: Biden: Slash the hell out of waste in the military budget. Good answer, and I predict he will win the 1988 presidential election.

2:08: Edwards knocks around corporations who've "literally taken over the government. We need a president who's willing to take these powers over." Two things Iowans love: Subsidies and fascism!

2:10: I wasn't around for the mid-1990s balanced budget amendment debate, but if we change the Constitution to demand balanced budgets how do we bypass it "in times of war" like Richardson suggests? By declaring war? Yeah, well, nobody does that.

2:13: Biden calls paradigm "a fancy word my conservative friends use," and rejects the idea that we need to pay for things - but let's cut military spending, you know, for kicks.

2:15: Obama tries some of the Edwards tonic and, to me, sounds more credible and less crazy than Edwards - nail corporations that are cheating on their taxes, don't just attack their foundations with a sledgehammer. The focus group seems less enthused, though.

2:17: Sorry, I don't like the DMR idea of "fairness." Dodd and Biden and Richardson, who'll be back at their old jobs in two months, keep getting questions. Obama and Clinton (less Edwards) are very occasionally thrown a talking point opportunity.

2:20: Senator Clinton, are we spending too much on entitlements? Yes, which is why we need more of them. Boldly, she wants to "convene a bipartisan commission" on Social Security.

2:23: "Universal health care is a human right," says Bill Richardson, as I destroy copies of my column on his libertarian instincts.

2:25: They're in free statement mode. Obama sounds like Obama; Edwards sounds like Ralph Nader.

2:26: Biden's "voted against every trade agreement since CAFTA," giving him a mighty, 2-year record voting against trade agreements. (He's been in the Senate since 1973.)

2:30: China killed John Edwards's daddy!

2:32: Maybe this is my red-hot anti-Edwards bias talking, but I think Obama's doing a good job answering the questions with his pet issues. He talks airily about amending NAFTA and then pulls Gitmo out of nowhere... as something we need to look at to improve our image in the world. The dial (I'm addicted to it) hurtles up.

2:37: Big prediction here: None of them are going to say anything contentious about energy. I'm taking a Doddbreak to get some water.

2:41: As Clinton and Obama and Edwards talk about "enlisting people" in their Five Year Plans for Glorious Energy Independence, it reminds me a little of Ron Paul's rhetoric. Not, obviously, his rhetoric about policy. Paul, who's only recently started thinking about actually being president, realizes that an estimated 434 members of the House disagree with him about policy. (Give or take Paul Broun.) So he envisions the REVOLution continuing, pressuring members, holding rallies, etc. It's similar to the scenario Edwards paints for when he's president and the Senate disagrees with his plan to take away their health care. He'll stuff it in their face, campaigning in their districts, finding opponents to kick their asses, etc. The last time a president really tried that, or something like it, was when Woodrow Wilson worked himself to death in 1918... still, I wonder how the model would work today.

2:46: Or, as Geraghty puts it: "A big theme is that if you just make something a high enough priority, solutions appear and the situation gets better."

2:50: Edwards's education solutions include univeral pre-K, that moderate idea that was rejected by California's hard-hearted right-wing voters, and a "national teaching university" ("like the Naval Academy"), which I'm pretty sure Jonathan Pryce graduated from in Brazil.

2:59: Would Biden endorse Obama (or anyone else) if they just agreed to call their Iraq strategy "the Biden Plan"?

3:02: "There sure are a laaaht of promises for that first year" says Edwards, who has pledged to arm-wrestle every member of Congress with his right arm and strangle the Fortune 500 with his left arm. (Is he ambidextrous? I hope not.)

[An update on yesterday's debate: Turns out Ron Paul got the second-least amount of time to speak, only 13 seconds more than Fred Thompson after he refused to answer a question. Duncan Hunter got a minute more than Paul, and Alan Keyes got about 90 seconds more.]

3:06: It is very important to get Joe Biden on the record about his racial gaffes, because he is the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. If he wasn't, this would be such a waste of time.

3:09: "I have been fighting them my entire life, and I have been winning my entire life," says Vice President John Edwards. Former Vice President Dick Cheney could not be reached for comment.

3:15: Good stuff from Hillary on signing statements - she's said it before, but I wonder if it's sinking in. And how much Democratic voters want the next president to power down and hand back the powers Bush got.

3:16: John Edwards rejects George W. Bush's expansion of executive power. "We don't have a royal presidency," says the guy who wants to lock companies out of legislative discussions and take away congressional health care.

3:18: Godwin alert! Chris Dodd remembers an America "where Nuremberg used to mean something."

3:23: What's everybody love about Iowa? Dodd loves their "independence." As long as they love desperation, boredom, and flop sweat, I think he's got an upset coming.

WINNERS, LOSERS, AND DODD
I felt a twinge of sympathy for Dennis Kucinich at one point, when Washburn asked a black-and-white question about repealing NAFTA. I just pictured him at home, tossing his bowl of Kix at the TV and yanking off his tiny necktie.

Done good
1) Edwards - He spent the year slowly, slowly falling in the Iowa polls as he slashed up the national frontrunners. With some difficulty, he's tamped down that instinct and started just slashing at corporations, job-killers, stuff Iowans hate. He's morphing from Gephardt 2004 (who attacked Dean and imploded) to Gephardt 1988 (who claimed "America is in decline" and won).

2) Obama - Obviously well-prepared for this but elastic enough to get laughs, which he's never been very good at. As good as Edwards at squeezing his arguments into the narrow spaces of the questions. I don't think his policy prescriptions are any less radical than Edwards, but he sounded a little more realistic arguing for them.

Done alright
3) Biden - Calmer and less obviously whiny than he's been before, fairly convincing on his key issues.

4) Clinton - No huge mistakes, but now that everyone's looking for her weakness, she looks pretty weak. The attack on Edwards and Obama wasn't just telegraphed, it was sent by pony express. The laughter when Obama was asked about his backers from the Clinton administration came off as arrogant. There's a balance to be struck between "I've got experience from the 90s" and "I'm going to turn the Wayback Machine to 1993" and she didn't quite strike it.

Ain't done nothing
5) Richardson - Just didn't break through.

6) Dodd - This is the last debate you'll see him in. Wave goodbye!

Ron Paul is Leading in the Polls...

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:02:00 EST

...in the 49th state. According to the newest survey by Anchorage's Channel 2:

Which Republican presidential candidate will you support in Alaska's caucus?

Ron Paul - 29
Mike Huckabee - 22
Rudy Giuliani - 14
Fred Thompson - 12
John McCain - 9
Mitt Romney - 9
Other - 6

Alaska is an odd state—married to federal money, distrustful of Democrats, and very warm to insurgent candidates. Thirty years ago Dick Randolph won a state House seat and became the first elected LP legislator. Twenty years ago, Jesse Jackson won the state's caucuses. And Alaska holds a caucus that's 1)poorly attended (4,330 showed up in 2000) and 2)early in the process (Feb. 5). We're looking at a situation where Ron Paul could win more states than John McCain and Fred Thompson.

Of course, the TV station says what it thinks about the poll in its headline... [UPDATE: When I posted this story the headline read "Alaska May Nominate Fringe Candidate," and that was changed literally minutes later. Should have taken a screenshot.]

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.

The Friday Political Thread: Religion of Secularism Edition

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 23:09:00 EST

There's a lot more to chew over (and I do some of that in an America's Future Foundation podcast with Eli Lake and Amanda Carpenter) but some of the basics...

- Mike Huckabee continued his poll surge, culminating in a Newsweek poll that gave him a 39-17 point lead over Mitt Romney in Iowa. The poll was taken Dec. 5 and Dec. 6. Quick: What happened on Dec. 6?

- The Ron Paul Blimp got set to launch.

Unconvincing quote of the week...

"Americans do not respect believers of convenience. Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world."
- Mitt Romney, Dec. 6

Stop the Bandwagon, I Wanna Get Off! Iowans are notoriously wimpy about negative campaigning, and Hillary Clinton's shockingly abrupt blitz against Obama has inspired one of her state co-chairs to switch to Obama.

"I think the Clinton campaign went negative," [Gary] Thomas said in a telephone interview on Thursday. He attributed his defection to the new tone Clinton took last weekend, describing it as divisive. Obama officials said Thomas committed to them this week... The switch by one man—even someone in elected office, as Thomas, a Burlington city council member is—may mean little in the end. But Baxter's eagerness to speak out—against Clinton and now, on behalf of Obama—comes as the campaigns are trying to assess the impact of a sharper tone by Clinton that began last weekend.

This comes via Ben Smith, who wonders if the Clinton campaign will move its focus from Iowa to other contests and build a "broader case" against him. But the Clinton lead is shrinking in New Hampshire and South Carolina, too, and they're not notorious for their daintiness.

Fred Thompzzzzzz. Here's one measure of the rapid fade underway at Fred Thompson HQ. In July you had to shell out $35 for a Fred future at InTrade. Now it's $5—about the same value as John Edwards. Here's another measure: This video of Fred at a town hall-style rally in Orange City, Iowa. Just try and stay awake, and understand why when Huckabee was told that Thompon had criticized him for not reading the National Intelligence Estimate, Huckabee joked: "I guess it's easy to read it if you're not busy campaigning."

Below the fold...

- Jeremy Lott urges Mitt to make a real Mormon speech.

- Shawn Macomber writes one of the last (and best) Tom Tancredo stories you'll ever read.

- Jacob Heillbrunn recaps the TNR-NR dirty war.

This week's Politics 'n' Prog should be self-explanatory. If Geddy Lee's tight pants don't rattle your faith in the Creator, nothing will.

All I Want for Christmas is a Straw Poll

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 14:50:00 EST

Here's a novel way of preventing Ron Paul supporters from notching up straw poll wins: Cancel the polls when they arrive. Paulblogger BlueEagle gave this account of the San Francisco Republican Alliance poll in the Ron Paul Street team forums.

I arrived at 7:00 for dinner, speeches by representatives of each candidate and then a straw poll.

Unfortunately, at around 9:45pm when the straw poll was about to take place, Gail Neira of the SF Republican Alliance, announced that she was cancelling the straw poll because it was unfair. She was referring to the approximately 40 Ron Paul supporters that were standing in the back of the room with Ron Paul signs. She went on to say that she was overwhelmed by the number of Ron Paul supporters that showed up, but by that time the crowd was in an uproar.

I was outraged and so was everyone else. It was very difficult to hold back the emotions and remain calm. I can only imagine what will happen in the primaries, when too many Ron Paul supporters show up. Will they just cancel the elections?

To be accurate, the dinner was $33 and Gail allowed people who didn't want to eat or couldn't make it in time for dinner to pay $5 to participate in the straw poll later in the evening. This wasn't really the issue, since most of the people that showed up would have paid the $33 and said so, when she used money as an excuse.

Special bonus feature: Neira made the decision while wearing a Santa hat.

More video here.

UPDATE: Lew has more:

The featured speaker was Republican State Senator Sam Aanesta (CA 4th SD). The Senator treated the audience to an hour long election pitch for Fred Thompson that cured the insomnia of all in attendance. After endless delays of meaningless trivia the doors were opened to the late comers to the straw poll each of whom had paid $5 for admission. The flood of Ron Paul supporters entered the room to join an already substantial number of Ron Paul supporters that had attended the 'banquet'."A shocked Gail Neira in consultation with the Fred Thompson Northern CA Coordinator cancelled the straw poll vote offering a series of fraudulent, incomprehensible and incoherent reasons. The result was chaos as more than one hundred Ron Paul supporters objected to the outright deception. Neira’s ratings reached a level of unreality beyond description. Security was called to evict the peaceful if upset Ron Paul followers. When I asked that a picture be taken to attest to security attacking the 79-year-old me, security turned and disappeared.

To paraphrase the fictionialized Thomas More, it profits a man nothing to lose his soul for the whole world... but for a Republican straw poll in San Francisco? And for Floppin' Fred Thompson?

Republican Debate VIII: The Shindy in St. Petersburg

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 18:31:00 EST

The Grand Old Party is scrapping again tonight in Florida at 8pm eastern time on CNN: The questions have been submitted via YouTube and host Anderson Cooper will do some amending and following-up.

Does it seem like ages since the last GOP debate? That's because it was held back on October 21. Back then Ron Paul had only raised $2.4 million for the quarter and Mitt Romney held the one-day fundraising record. Mike Huckabee was polling in the low teens an Iowa for a respectable third or fourth place showing. Children and small animals cowered in fear of the Fred Thompson juggernaut. So, things are different.

I have an unbreakable committment and might turn on the debate a bit late, so consider this an open thread for anyone watching it.

8:11: I show up 11 minutes late, and... nothing happens. At the Ron Paul debate-watching party I'm at in DC, the doctor's arrival onscreen is greeted by "There he is!" (Future comments from the party will be in parentheses.)

8:12: Rudy... claims New York wasn't a sanctuary city?

8:13: Ever-credible Mitt, who presided over three sanctuary cities in Massachusetts, righteously

8:14: Rudy's new attack line: Romney owned "Sanctuary mansion!"

8:15: Romney's "outrage" software is engaged! ("How did it get to be just them?" "Don't worry, if a debate breaks out they'll stop it.") Romney asks, rhetorically, whether he should hound people who show up for work with funny accents. The irony tickles.

8:16: Duncan Hunter asks if he can "jump in here." No. No, you can't. But the crowd is heckling Giuliani for trying and trying to get the last answer.

8:17: Carlos the Jackal (via video) asks if the Republicans will veto amnesty. Ooh, the hard questions.

8:19: Thompson attacks... sort of. One fun thing we've learned in Campaign '08 is that Thompson is unlistenably dull without a script.

8:20: McCain wades in. ("The fire's gone out of him." "Why is he even in this?")

8:21: McCain runs down the government failures that have made him so righteously angry. ("Campaign finance reform!" "All the failures I helped enable!")

8:22: Tancredo is delighted that we're having a Scary Meskins round. ("His nose should be red.") "Everyone's trying to out-Tancredo Tancredo!" ("That's a verb?")

8:24: "I reject the idea that there are jobs Americans won't take!" ("Would you hire Tancredo to clean your gutters?)

8:25: Ah, the Ron Paul party gives Hunter the esteem he deserves. ("Congressman, my question is: Where's your neck?"

8:26: ("Next question... for Ron Paul!") The next question actually goes to Huckabee. It's a good one about whether, as a guy who gave scholarships to illegal immigrants, he'd do the same for the kids of illegal alien military vets. (Everyone heckles Huckabee for addressing the giant YouTube screen as if it's alive.)

8:28: Huckabee explains that he gave scholarships to kids who were smart, didn't do drugs, earned it, dancing elegantly past the issue that they weren't citizens. ("The best students in Arkansas?")

8:30: Romney punches back and Huckabee pours on the saccarine. "If I didn't get an education, I might be picking lettuce!" ("Who'd rather have Mike Huckabee picking lettuce?" Every hand goes up.)

8:32: The room gets ice cold when Paul gets a question on whether he believes in a North American Union. He handles it as well as he possibly could, framing it as "a conspiracy of ideas." He's been prepped on this: He hasn't always been so adroit. ("He can't cut off those guys who believe in it.")

8:34: McCain complains about power changing the GOP. ("I just feel sympathy for him at this point.")

8:36: Giuliani will "strengthen the dollar" by not filling every open federal job. ("Is he serious?") "Twenty-two percent are found not able to evaluated."

8:37: Emily Ekins is apparently an Institute for Human Studies seminar alum: She asks what three programs Thompson and Paul would scrap. "It's a target rich environment." (There's some squabbling about whether he's referencing Top Gun.) He swerves into his well-rehearsed Social Security answer. ("So... we're abandoning the target metaphor.")

8:40: Paul shoots, Paul scores. "That comment about government changing 'us'--I don't think government changed me!" He hits the three I've heard him talk about: Education, Energy, DHS.

8:42: McCain takes the chance to demogogue at Paul on the war, a warm wave of applause gushing over him like a deleted scene from Behind the Green Door. "I spent Christmas with the troops!" ("OK, Ron needs to knock this out of the park.")

8:44: Grover Norquist gets into it! He asks them to sign "the pledge" never to raise taxes. Everyone says yes. Paul: "I have never voted for a tax increase and never will!" Hunter: "I've voted for more tax cuts than anyone on this stage." ("That's because you've been there for like 50 years!")

8:47: Terrible, terrible answers on farm subsidies. Romney and Rudy ("We have to support Archer Daniels Midland EVERY DAY!")

8:48: Rudy gets asked about the Ben Smith story on his under-the-table, end of mayoralty expense reports. "There were... threats against me." ("9/11! 9/11!" "What, did someone threaten his mistress?")

8:50: Duncan Hunter wants us to "buy American" so when "our veterans come back" they'll have good jobs. You lost your legs in Mosul: You've earned the right to assemble LED screens for PS2s.

8:52: I love that Thompson's YouTube ad was just cribbed from other, better videos using Romney's and Huckabee's own words to garrotte them. Cooper's pissed: "What's up with that?" Thompson: "I want to give my buddies here a little extra air time!" A funny joke that he sort of steps on by running out of words and saying "Uhhhhh."

8:53: Some comedy from Romney about how he was wrong about infanticide before but now MA Citizens for Life like him. ("I only gave them $15,000 and put my wife on their board, but...")

8:56: Great ad from the coal industry. ("Who wants coal for Christmas now?" Every hand goes up.)

9:00: Hunter gets a softball about the second amendment from a Californian with a handgun and he... makes fun of him for his handling. Let's cool it with the comments about how he's a brilliant man who deserves to hit the first term.

9:03: A Fred Thompson answer lulls my room into a nice, mellow place. He's poking the right holes in Giuliani's gun answer, though.

9:04: Did... they... skip over Paul to get an answer from Hunter? So he could wink and ramble about the gun he's already talked about? Also, breaking news: John McCain served in Vietnam.

9:06: A question about how they'd stop the crime epidemic and rescue black people goes to Romney, who says government needs to strengthen familes. ("Can we import parents from Mexico?" "Watch out, Romney wants to rear your child!")

9:07: Giuliani can cut crime because he cut it Harlem. ("We got black people out of Harlem! That reduced crime.")

9:09: A good question on what women who abort their fetuses should be charged with goal to Paul... which makes sense since he's a doctor who's seen an abortion performed, but doesn't make sense in that he's obviously going to leave it to the states.

9:12: Hunh. Giuliani grabs a lifeline on abortion by nabbing Ron Paul's answer.

9:15: The death penalty: "What would Jesus do?" Huckabee soars with a lot of friffery about how hard it was to make the decision. ("Shorter Huckabee: I'll kill people but I'll cry about it.")

9:17: Rudy Giuliani: Not William Jennings Bryan. Some of the Bible is figurative, some literal. ("It's a good answer." "It's the only answer.")

9:18: Oh, God, watching Romney pander on this is like watching the Fantasia Hippos dance ballet. "Uh... yes, I believe it's the word of God." But it's not what Anderson Cooper thinks is the word of God. (Because Cooper believes in the whole thing?)

9:19: God likes Mike Huckabee.

9:20: Commercial time. ("My favorite moment was Tancredo restraining himself and not telling the woman to deport her Chinese daughter.")

9:23: Giuliani's YouTube ad is nice and crazy. He saved New York from King Kong! He stopped the snow from falling!

9:26: McCain: "I'm the only one on this stage who said the Rumsfeld strategy was doomed to fail." Didn't he just try to kneecap Ron Paul?

9:27: "When you were suffering from starvation and disease we brought you food and medicine." (My room groans.)

9:29: Romney is shameless on torture. ("Waterboard him and ask the question again!") McCain smacks him across the podium.

9:30: This is the stuff that exposes Romney's inner Dukakis. "I'm not going to say what methods I'll use." Oh, and he'll ask for McCain's counsel.

9:31: "Life is not 24 and Jack Bauer."

9:33: How long will we stay in Iraq? Thompson is... noncomittal.

9:35: "We never lost a battle in Vietnam!" (There's a fight about this in the room.)

9:37: It's moments like this when I'm sorry I'm collapsing from the onset of... something. (Flu? We'll see.) Paul and McCain lock horns over Vietnam and I have some trouble following it. I'm going to sign off for a bit... have at it.

9:59: A great moment from the Ron Paul party. A black YouTuber asks of black support for Republicans: "Why don't we vote for you." ("Well, have you read the Bell Curve?") This was asked in jest, of course.

10:07: I like how they coupled a questioner who says "Ron Paul, you won't win the nomination" with one who says "Fred Thompson, your campaign is going down in flames so hot I could cook a turkey with them." Wait...

The Black Friday Political Thread

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 17:01:00 EST

It's the biggest shopping day of the year, if not one of the bigger blogging days. If you're still thinking about gifts, how about a 3-CD history of America through cover songs, edited by Janet Reno? (Sadly, she passed on AC/DC's "Burnin' Alive.")

Unconvincing quote of the week...

"Hell, yeah, I'm confrontational." - John Edwards to a voter in Iowa, on Tuesday.

The week in brief...

- New Hampshire locked in its primary date: January 8, 2008. Michigan Democrats (now set for January 15) may still throw a tantrum, but New Hampshire is a go, and reason will be covering the primary from the ground at the start of next year.

- The Supreme Court took up the D.C. gun ban.

Too smart to be president? The Politico's Jonathan Martin has a thumbsucker about the state of the Fred Thompson campaign. According to most of his sources, the campaign missed its opening and is now, at best, an insurgent campaign that could get lucky, or at worst, a Hindenburg filled with screaming widows. Martin, however, argues that Thompson is finding his footing by talking policy.

[The National Right to Life endorsement] was followed by two recent policy roll-outs — on Social Security and the military — that have generally won warm reviews. Thompson’s Social Security outline was praised by both the National Review and The Washington Post editorial page. It’s in talking about substance and diving headlong into policy minutia that Thompson is plainly most happy — and Thompson seeming happy while campaigning has not happened much.

This leads me to wonder if I'd underestimated Thompson. For starters, the stupidest rationales for his campaign were not Thompson's own. They came from his backers, salivating over his old pick-up truck and his "commanding voice," or fantasizing about him towering over Hillary Clinton (and her "stubby little legs"). But I don't think I was unfair. Thompson didn't enter this race because it was lacking a federalist. He entered it because conservatives wanted a Reaganesque figure who could inspire them and unite their factions.

One troublesome piece of evidence: Fred's online fan club seems to be shrinking. In the summer, I thought that the excitement and momentum for the Thompson campaign online was strangling the other conservative campaigns—Brownback, Tommy Thompson, et al—in their cribs. He probably did kill those campaigns off a bit sooner, but the momentum's slackened. A grassroots "moneybomb" scheduled for 11/21, the day before Thanksgiving, looks to have been a bust. He received only 82 pledges for $100 apiece, so it's likely he raised less than $100,000.

Ron Paul rising. Earlier this week Mike Huckabee told reporters he was the only presidential candidate who's seen a steady surge of support. Not true: Ron Paul has decisively broken from the 1 percent/margin of error ghetto into, at the very least, spoiler status. RealClearPolitics still doesn't include Paul in all of the averages, but 4.5 percent in Iowa, 6.8 percent in New Hampshire, and 7.3 percent in Nevada. The latest South Carolina poll puts Paul at 8 percent. David Bergland, the (disastrous) 1984 Libertarian Party candidate for president, is overjoyed.

There is no one, true path to liberty. The Ron Paul campaign, the internet, and the millions of people involved in both prove it every day. The old, political establishment is under siege. The power-mad goons are surrounded by heroic lovers of freedom whose numbers will continue to increase exponentially. I’m glad I have lived long enough to see it.

It's a little surprising, how little sting the "nazi" and "9/11 truther" attacks are hurting Paul. Maybe they're an internet phenomenon with no purchase in the real world. You know, like the Paul campaign used to be.

Below the fold...

- Debi Ghate wishes you an Ayn Rand Thanksgiving.

- Bruce Falconer explains the rise of Help Save Manassas, the anti-immigration powerhouse in suburban DC.

- Ezra Klein advocates for a Joe Biden vice presidency. Some people call this the "silly season."

- Yes, Kerry Howley conclusively demolished all that whining about Hillary Clinton "playing the gender card." Still... Clinton's caucus page for women is called "You Go Girl." She can't be playing cards—all that winking gives her hand away.

This week's installment of Politics 'n' Prog is a hit by The Nice that encapsulates the meaning of the holiday.