When you consider all the factors Obama had going for him in the election, he should have won by 20 points in a walk. You had a very unpopular incumbent President from the other party. You had a failing economy. He had a fawning media. He had an opponent who was well intentioned, but didn’t make anyone’s pulse race (and who, by most accounts, did not run the sharpest campaign).

Yet he won by a modest 5-6 points. Solid victory to be sure, but not the national mandate he would have us believe. And that vote was solely based on the economy. Dems effectively pinned all the economy’s ills on the Bush administration (despite fact Dems had been in control of Congress since Jan 2007), and people decided to boot the incumbent party and give the other guy a chance. Obama managed not to torpedo his chances by playing it relatively safe and making no huge gaffes. Media helped him out by piling on Sarah Palin and largely ignoring Joe Biden’s foot-in-mouth disease.

Any time a party suffers some losses there is a temporary crisis in leadership. When Gore lost to Bush in 2000, the Dems were somewhat in disarray. You had newly elected Hillary, and you had Tom Daschle in the Senate, but Hillary was too green to be the party leader, and Daschle was only good for complaining about the new President (ironically exactly what the Dems accuse the Republican congressional leadership of doing now).

As a wise man once said, “This too shall pass.”

How is that “Libertarian for Obama” working out, anyway?

Moe Lane

*Some of these I don’t personally mind, but then I don’t take my libertarianism straight.

2) when were the young not liberal? Churchill said if you are not liberal at 20 you have no heart, if you are not conservative at 40 you have no brain.

3) What happens if we are hit by terrorists again?

4) what happens if Obamanomics does not work?

I admit we have a problem, but it is our own brand we need to fix. We need to get rid of the big government types. Then we need to take on the NEA and drive bye’s, teach history right again and voila!

You cannot possibly be a libertarian and agree with most of Obama’s social positions (if indeed any of them). “You need to stop living in that big house and stop driving that big car”. “We ARE our brother’s keeper” – these are quotes from BO. For a libertarian, the only possible answer to that is that our brother needs to keep his own dam self, and if he cannot get up the gumption to do so, then he can stay lying in the gutter. Libertarians are not about quotas, mandates, or social engineering. You cannot separate social liberalism from fiscal liberalism; they are opposite sides of the same coin. It’s about the inane social philosophy that requires an insane fiscal policy to support it.

Hard to argue with the points you make, but I’m sure some will.

I will tell you why I use words such as “true conservatism”. I want our Republic to go back to the ideals of the Founders. The Founders were not a party, they created this nation. They did not give a final letter of advice, they gave us a Constitution that was the law of the land, it was and is the raison d’etre of this nation.

I believe those ideas, in fact, laws, of personal liberty, responsibility, and free markets have to come back or we as a nation become not a nation, just a place on the map for people to live. The only way I know of that can ensure a rebirth of freedom and liberty is for the Republican Party to regain control of the government, for the purposes of reducing its power to make it right with the Constitution.

I believe our ONLY chance of gaining a majority any time soon is to go back to “true conservatism” or if you don’t like that; how about “Winning Conservatism”? The ideals and philosophies are drawn from history, back to the Greeks, Romans, Brits, French etc. But our recent American example of this idea was and is the conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan. This is the conservatism of limited government and maximum liberty. This is the conservatism of government IS THE PROBLEM!

All these fights about RINOS, moderates, Social Conservatives, purging, etc are examples of a party that has lost its rudder. This is why I cringe when we talk more about Palin than we do about the fact we need to throw off all our bandages and become anew.

What I am not talking about is litmus tests. For example, some here want to make this party a regional party based on the mores and culture of the South East. The problem with that is we will become just that, a regional party and never get in power to change things. Does this mean I don’t like Social Conservatives or any other group? No, it means what I believe we need is not a long string of litmus tests but to go back to the foundational ideas we ALL can agree on and work from there.

We need to simplify our stand, not make it blurry. We need to be clear in our own hearts and heads what we stand for. We can not get in a tiff just because some Northern Republican is pro choice and call them a RINO and purge them. But what we can do is expect all Republicans to believe in limited government and maximum liberty. From there, we can and will have regional differences along with personal differences. Yet from there we can build a majority, a majority of Americans who believe in the Constitution, hence True Conservatism.

I’ve avoided any labels of what is “true” conservatism or not, that sort of gasoline on a fire is not something that I tend to think is a good idea, especially today.

Back to RP, most of the RP’s I ran into probably fit into the category of being against the spending and against the war in Iraq. The constant “Blame America First” tone of RP really turned me off on him…full stop.

I do agree with one point you made, the Libertarian party is a joke, a collection of odd folks who want to legalize weed, and bunch of other nonsense.

To your question about Paul’s popularity, I don’t know if I am any more qualified than you to explain it but I will give it a shot. I think Paul brought in a lot of people who were sick of Big Government Dems and Big Government Repubs. He also brought in pretty much angry with what was going on in the world, from Iraq to the economy. He ran an insurgent internet campaign and brought in a lot of people who never participated in politics before.

Another thing about Paul is that his support was not deep yet it was wide. A Paul supporter in California probably was anti-war and wanted to smoke pot on the street. A Paul supporter in Virginia was more likely to fear the UN and want to get rid of gun control laws. He was the candidate of the disenfranchised. The shame is that he was a bit crazy, if a more rational libertarian ran, he would have gained even more traction.

This discussion goes back to my point that most libertarians fit better with true conservatism, the pre 1980 version mentioned earlier. While Reagan Lover might be describing libertarians in San Francisco, he is not describing libertarians in Montana. Same with Paul supporters, they were not monolithic at all, but they were all mostly angry.

I was as tough on Paul as anyone here, I said he had some good ideas but was basically crazy. I do give him credit for party loyalty though, we see its importance particularly on a day like this one.

Ron Paul annoys the heck out of me for his “blame America first” crud, but he does represent an elephant in the room.

The sad reality is that RP appealed to a lot of people who would have been nominally Republican, why? I saw it out here in my area of CA which is pretty conservative, but starting to trend D. We have a Republican congresscritter that is well respected, we have a second generation R Assembly member, took the seat of his late father, and R State senator. Yet all summer leading up to the election you saw RP fans out waving banner, at the fair, etc etc. I didn’t get the point frankly, but there was something there for a lot of folks.

I’ve given some thought to the whole RP effect and what it means to the R party, not sure I’m smart enough to figure it out, what’s the appeal?

Generally, libertarians disagree with neo-conservatism greatly, because it takes away all of the positives that they see in the conservative movement (good fiscal policies, less foreign involvement where it doesn’t concern the US, less social engineering), and replaces them with policies that involve the government much more than they would like.

PS: Please don’t take this as a “bash Bush” or “those scary neo-cons” post. I’m simply describing the views of neoconservative doctrine and its most influential recent espouser, Frmr. Pres. Bush. Cheney, IMO, had a different brand of conservatism from Bush’s.

Also, and most importantly, Goldwater-Reagan conservatism fits with the libertarian AKA liberty ideas of large swaths of America. From Texas to North Dakota, from Nevada to Missouri. I am not forgetting the South, I am just saying the South is a bit more complicated, and not quite so libertarian-conservative as it is social-conservative.

In the end, if we as a party and a movement follow Goldwater-Reagan ideas, the ideas of our best and brightest such as Steyn, Levin, and Limbaugh, we will win the vast majority of small L libertarians full stop.

As that is not the only lens I see the world through, it is not hard for me to still think we picked the right person… for the moment.

For instance, I believe we are more powerful with the world on our side then alone. I think Obama will go a long way toward mending relations with our friends, as well as our enemies. I think that makes us more powerful as a nation.

There are other reasons I support him, but this blog is about the changing political landscape and what the means for the Republican Party. A party I, for one, desperately want to see put Obama’s fiscal policy in check.

My original point still stands. There are millions of Americans like me, who agree with Republicans sometimes, and Democrats others. And as long as they are flamed and told to leave your tent, you will continue to have empty seats in it.

On defense, they are, indeed, isolationist: they generally believe in maintaining a strong military for defensive measures, or “peace through strength”, but not in preemptive war. When you consider which of the two dominant movements of conservatism are more in line with this brand of isolationism, conservatism, particularly the paleo-con strain, is much more in line with this view than progressive movements, who support incessant meddling in foreign affairs which don’t concern the US (UN, Somalia, Bosnia, etc). IOW, they believe that America should be the world’s candyman, a view that is doubly rejected by libertarians. Also, I see foreign policy issues as a whole different bag, since historically, there are many countries that have been leftist/statist and supported a vigorous military, including this one.

In social issues, libertarians ask the question: why should government be involved? In this, they invoke the harm principle, or the idea that there shouldn’t be government regulation unless it can be established that an individual is having his right to making his own decisions for himself infringed upon by another. Given this, an argument can be made that abortion falls under that category, and there is a minority position within libertarians that opposes abortion. Regardless, the various infringements of the state on an individual are much more numerous and pronounced in leftist governments (hate crime laws, forced busing, etc.) than in rightist ones, so this makes their views more aligned towards a rightist government than a leftist one.

Something to keep in mind is that some people, particularly college students, self-identify as libertarians, and think that the only issue that matters to them is pot That explains why impressions of libertarian political philosophy end up being so skewed. In any case, an argument that libertarians would be natural conservatives isn’t a good one. However, they do align more with conservatives than liberals, and often make for fantastic allies. Frederich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and many others self-identify as libertarians and have been enormously influential in the American conservative movement, so there is precedent. I suggest you read some articles on Cato.org and make up your own mind.