Burnt Orange Report

Libertarian Spoiler in 2004?

By Andrew Dobbs

So Jim put up a funny little post about Michael Badnarik, a Buda, TX resident and frontrunner for the Libertarian Party nomination for President. This post was rather timely in that I've been doing a little research into Libertarianism, seeing if I can find something there to convince myself of because the CATO Institute pays interns $700 a month. What I found is a party that's dominated by a handful of intellectuals, a handful of small businessmen and a whole holy mess of whackjobs. Interestingly enough, most people who actually do believe in Libertarianism have found the same thing and vote for the GOP. But Pat Buchanan's magazine, The American Conservative has a really interesting article this week about the cracks forming between the GOP and Libertarians.

(A) growing number of libertarians no longer think they are getting much out of the fusionist bargain. Liberty magazine editor R.W. Bradford called upon his fellow libertarians to cease thinking of themselves as operationally part of the Right. Writing in the September/October issue of that magazine, he argued that the mainstream conservative movement has abandoned “its claimed love of liberty and opposition to ever more powerful government” and instead have become “the greatest advocates of an imperial foreign policy, of massive defense spending and of invading people’s homes in the names of the Wars on Crime, Drugs and Terrorism.”...

FoxNews.com’s Balko normally votes Republican and cast his ballot for George W. Bush in 2000 but now says he’s “90 percent certain” he “won’t be voting for President Bush in 2004.” He further argues that the “right now poses a greater threat to freedom than the left.” Jim Henley, a noted libertarian blogger, put it even more bluntly: “Having abandoned the substance of limited government since early in the Gingrich ‘revolution,’ conservatives increasingly eschew even the rhetoric of limited government. Animosity aside, they’re just no use to libertarians any more.”

It seems as though an administration that has spend a couple hundred billion dollars fighting an elective war, that has increased government spending, ballooned the deficit, infringed on a woman's right to choose, expanded the war on drugs, suggested federal interferences in marriage laws, treated the First Amendment like so much toilet paper and has created billions of dollars in unfunded mandates for the states just doesn't appeal to those laissez faire types. Now we are seeing more and more Libertarian GOPers say that they won't vote for the GOP, but might *gasp* vote for a Democrat.

Libertarians have not limited their support to third-party efforts. Some have begun contemplating support for a Democratic presidential candidate to oust the Bush-Ashcroft Republicans. The antiwar Howard Dean appears to be the favorite. Already a Libertarians for Dean blog site debating the merits of libertarian support for his candidacy has been set up on the Web. While a Libertarians for Clark Web site appeared and quickly dissipated following Wesley Clark’s declaration of candidacy, the Dean site is still going strong with those posting on it inclined to support him. The liberal American Prospect ran a piece by Noah Shachtman on its Web site citing several prominent libertarians, including Reason assistant editor Julian Sanchez and Cato Institute senior editor Gene Healy, at least willing to contemplate a vote for Dean over Bush.

I got wind of this article in an email from a regular reader, my 9th grade World History teacher Mr. Marvin Keene. Mr. Keene is a Libertarian who usually votes Republican and he's the best teacher I ever had. He sent an email with the subject "I'm Looking at Dean" which is a bit like Bill O'Reilly politely admitting he misspoke- it is so out of the ordinary and unexpected it takes you aback. If Marvin Keene would vote for Howard Dean over George Bush or Michael Badnarik or whoever then there's gotta be a lot of other people saying the same thing.

The best thing is that unlike the Green Party, which tries its damndest to pretend that it doesn't cost Democrats elections, the Libertarian Party actually relishes screwing with Republicans and makes it a focal point of their campaigns:

Although third party candidates rarely win statewide or Congressional office, in many cases they can control which of the major parties does win by purposefully siphoning off votes from one of the major-party candidates. The media has tagged this ability of third-party candidates to control elections the "spoiler effect," although a better name for it might be "incumbent killer," as the person being defeated is typically an incumbent evildoer.

Don Gorman has called the "spoiler effect" the "biggest stick the LP has," and Libertarian Party candidates have been credited with controlling the outcome of numerous Congressional and statewide elections.

In the past, the LP's use of the spoiler effect has been essentially random, and often unintentional. This year, for the first time, we made an effort to use the spoiler effect intentionally, in an orchestrated effort to defeat some of the worst drug warriors in Congress...

In a State Assembly race in California, Democratic organizations spent $147,000 to promote Libertarian candidate David Eaton. In New Hampshire, the Democrats mailed three full-color brochures highlighting Libertarian candidate Dan Belforti's positions on gun control and taxes in an effort to lure voters away from the Republican.

Democrats can use this group as a sort of reverse Green Party in 2004. Why not put up fliers in West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee and Arkansas that say something to the effect of "Bush has not overturned any gun control laws- Vote Libertarian" or in Nevada, New Hampshire and New Mexico- "George W. Bush has kept fighting a War on Drugs that costs billions and robs Americans of their freedom- Vote Libertarian" or in New Hampshire and Arizona: "George W. Bush has increased the size of the federal government and created the biggest deficits in US History- Vote Libertarian." Now is Howard Dean or whoever going to repeal some gun laws, end the drug war or decrease the size of the federal government? Unfortunately no. But we aren't saying Vote Dem, we are saying Vote Libertarian. By stripping the GOP of these votes for a candidate that can't win we can take a few states- New Hampshire, Nevada, Arizona, West Virginia, etc. Any one of those would win the election for us most likely.

In 2000 a crackpot no chance candidate kept Al Gore out of the White House. It's time to turn the tables in 2004.