Reason Magazine - Staff > David Weigel

Bob Barr Looks Back

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:00:00 EST

WASHINGTON—"Life was a bitch," says Bob Barr.

We are sitting in the coffee nook at the Mayflower Hotel, the aged Washington, D.C. institution where, some 76 years ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote his first inaugural address. We are not yet talking about the campaign for president that Barr finished in fourth place with 512,000-odd votes. Barr is talking about his habit of downing a high-single-digit number of espressos every day, and how hard this was before Starbucks came along.

"Most countries I'd lived in had cultures of much heavier coffee," Barr explains. "In South America you've got café con leche. In the Middle East you need a knife and fork to drink the coffee. It was hard to get strong coffee here—I was delighted when Starbucks made it big."

Barr is in Washington to speak with fellow alumni of Georgetown Law School at a meeting of the Federalist Society, and to build up the client list for Liberty Strategies, his consulting firm. "I absented myself from producing income for about eight months," Barr says. "I'm a working stiff." Hence the coffee, and hence a packed schedule that's meant to introduce Barr to the people who can get him back in the black.

Over the course of a six-month campaign, Barr spent more time than he might have liked dealing with intra-Libertarian squabbling, lower-than-expected fundraising numbers, and what his running mate Wayne Allyn Root called "the ghost of Ron Paul"—persistent media attention on the indecisive Republican candidate who, contrary to some expectations, did not endorse the Libertarian ticket. Over coffee, Barr hashed out how he got the nomination, what went right and wrong, and what he's doing now.

reason: What did you get out of your stint in the Libertarian National Committee?

Bob Barr: From my standpoint, it gave me an opportunity I've not had before to learn the personalities in the Libertarian Party, and to learn the structure of the party. It gave me the opportunity to assure at least some Libertarians that I wasn't a Trojan horse. I wasn't a Republican trying to use the Libertarian Party to further the Republican agenda, or some such nonsense. I think I accomplished that working with the LNC.

reason: There are still LP members who aren't satisfied—less than there were in May, but various voices on the web who make this argument.

Barr: In any political movement you're never going to be able to satisfy everybody. Reagan didn't. I really don't think that anybody with a straight face could make that argument now. I really don't. Which does not mean that everybody in the Libertarian Party loves Bob Barr. I doubt that that's the case. I do think that over the course of the campaign, the people that we worked with, the issues that we presented, I think gave lie to any lingering doubts that I was not a Libertarian.

reason: In December of last year, you proposed, and the LNC passed, a resolution asking Ron Paul to drop his GOP bid and run as the Libertarian candidate. Was that more for attention, or was it a real attempt to get him to run?

Barr: I meant it exactly how it was worded. I saw at that point, and I don't think anyone saw otherwise, that Ron was not going to get the Republican nomination. He had, in fact, built up a significant amount of public attention, a persona as a libertarian with a small l, and my thought was, "Let's make a serious effort here, an honest effort to get him formally back into party and take advantage of what he's done." At the time, had he taken advantage of it, it would have been a significant boost for him and the Libertarian Party.

reason: You had joined the LNC saying you would not run for president. When did you privately decide to make the race?

Barr: I introduced Ron Paul at CPAC. His speech came a few hours after Mitt Romney left the Republican race, which made it much clearer that McCain was going to win the nomination. For whatever reason that's when I started being approached very consistently by a lot of Libertarians about throwing my hat in the ring.

reason: Why did it take two months for you start an exploratory committee and another month to announce? I've heard two explanations. One was the financial consideration of losing your clients, which you've already talked about. The other explanation I heard was that you could not risk running and losing the nomination.

Barr: I was never assured to win the nomination. Some people might have thought that. I didn't. I knew it would be a battle right down to the wire, which it was. I didn't get into it because I was sure I would win. I ran because I thought it was important to do it. Most of the time between February and May, I was working through the personal side of the run—talking to my wife, my son Derek.

reason: Throughout that period, though, and really up to the Republican convention, the big mainstream media story about Libertarians was what Ron Paul would do. Michael Badnarik, the party's 2004 nominee, told me in May that he was still waiting to see if Paul could win the Republican nomination before he supported the LP again. What was the effect of all this?

Barr: It was a not-insignificant frustration, let's say. It was somewhat difficult to convince people of the fact that we had a real timeline here. Certain things had to start being done in order to have the chance for the impact I knew we could have. Every day that went by with people sitting around for something to happen, which common sense told you was not going to happen, was a day lost. It was very frustrating.

reason: You were polling well through the summer, but you took a hit after John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. What was the impact of that on your campaign?

Barr: I don't think that Palin really mattered that much. Initially, perhaps, when her name was first announced and there was all of this unbridled excitement over Sarah Palin, I think there was some concern that it would stanch the flow of Republicans ditching the ticket because of McCain's liberal credentials. But by the time all the dust settled on election day, I think a lot of them realized that she was not the great savoir for the conservative movement that she was put forward as nationally, but I don't think that really mattered all that much. What killed us in the end is that the election came down to a referendum on Barack Obama, period. Nothing else seemed to matter to people.

reason: What did matter? Campaign funds? At the convention, Russ Verney told me that he hoped to raise $30 million, and the campaign eventually raised about $1.2 million.

Barr: If certain things had happened that we expected to happen early on, like gaining access to certain lists very quickly, I think we could have gotten there. But those lists turned out to be not available, unfortunately, and that prevented us early to turn over and over again into significant fundraising. We didn't get that seed money early on that we anticipated. We realistically anticipated it. We didn't sit around say ‘it would be nice to have all that money.'"

reason: Was one of these Ron Paul's fundraising list?

Barr: All I can say is that it appeared very realistic that we would have a list that let us raise a large amount of seed money that we could build on. And that didn't happen.

reason: What effect did your own running mate, Wayne Allyn Root, have on the ticket?

Barr: I enjoyed having Wayne on the ticket very much. I enjoy him personally very much. I mean, he's a very gregarious person. I enjoy his family as well. I think he brought a lot of energy to the campaign, a new dimension to the campaign, and a business perspective that got him booked on Fox Business and CNBC with sufficient regularity to have a little breakthrough there.

reason: Did you expect Root to be more of a fundraising asset?

Barr: Everything in a campaign doesn't always work out like you hoped. What can I say?

reason: You and Root both spoke frequently about bringing conservatives into the Libertarian Party from the GOP. Are you still focused on that?

Barr: First things first. I'm not going to bring anybody into an organization unless that organization is ready for it, has the groundwork laid for it, has a degree of receptivity to make it productive to bring them in. There's a lot of work that has to be done to move the party down the road it started on under [former executive director] Shane Cory into a truly professional viable political entity. There are still those in the Libertarian Party that do not want to go down that road, and there are some in the party that will have to make an important decision about that: whether they want to build themselves into a professional viable political party, or whether they don't.

If so, we've got a tremendous opportunity to increase the size, power, influence of the party. The Republican Party is in absolute disarray. And I think it'll get worse for them. I don't even think they've even reached bottom yet. If the Libertarian Party were at the point I'd like to see it at, we could shine in this atmosphere. We'd be on the news, media would seek us out, to provide the counterbalance that no one else is capable of doing.

reason: After this year, and all of the tension and different timelines and goals of your campaign and the Paul campaign, is the libertarian movement stronger or is it more divided?

Barr: Absolutely, it's stronger. Absolutely. The way I look at it, it isn't as if Ron Paul built this foundation over here and our campaign built this one over here, and they're discreet components. We're building one foundation. What Ron Paul did was a tremendous benefit to the Libertarian movement in making people aware of the movement, of our philosophy, of elements people don't usually hear about in a coherent way. The monetary system, and so forth, which Ron talks about very eloquently.

reason: What mistakes were made this year that the LP has to avoid making again?

Barr: We have to not look backwards. If we are serious about being a real political party we have to set political goals, educate people, have a consistent message, organize at all levels, and look for opportunities. You don't wait for opportunities to be handed to you. Where's the Libertarian Party in these debates about the incoming administration? It needs to be there. But what do I know?

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Obama's Right Hand

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:30:00 EST

...

Happy Birthday, Bob Barr!

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EST

ATLANTA—"I just want to say," says Libertarian U.S. Senate candidate Allen Buckley, "I'm a little disappointed right now. I think I was vastly superior to both of my opponents."

There's a certain freedom that comes with belonging to a third party. Tuesday night in Georgia, Libertarians were the second happiest partisans you could find. Did they win anything new? No. Did they break the all-time Libertarian vote total in the presidential race? Also no. There was disappointment and a little surprise that anger at the Wall Street bailout and pessimism about Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) prospects failed to pry loose more conservatives over to the party of small government.

"When all the dust settles here, in January," said Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr, "people are going to be upset about a government that's offering more bailouts and less freedom."

Tuesday night Libertarians were a sideshow in a historical event on par with the moon landing. In downtown Atlanta, at Ebenezer Baptist Church, a block party broke out across the street from where Martin Luther King, Jr. used to preach. Entrepreneuers rushed to Auburn Ave. with boxes full of quickly screened Obama T-shirts with the label "44th President," and rally flags with Obama's face next to King's. At a ritzy bar up the street, the sound went down as Obama gave his victory speech—then the DJ scratched a record and played James Brown's "Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud." Down the street, jeeps parked, dancers climbed on top, and radios blasted songs such as "I Believe I Can Fly." White stragglers who'd biked down to watch it all exchanged fist-bumps with people they'd never met and might never meet again. It was that kind of a night.

Uptown at Barr's election party, the proceedings were a little more mundane. A bank of bloggers and Libertarian staffers refreshed and refreshed their browsers to see how their favored candidates were faring. "Where's Bill Redpath?" one yelled when CNN pronounced Democrat Mark Warner the winner in Virginia's Senate race, skipping over the strong showing by the chairman of the Libertarian Party.

Throughout the night, party operators like Stewart Flood and Daniel Adams were checking the progress of John Monds, a black businessman who'd run on the ticket for Georgia Public Services Commissioner. If Monds could win more than 25 percent of the vote, that would mean he received more votes than any Libertarian candidate in any U.S. election, ever—surpassing even Ed Clark's 1980 totals for president. At 11 p.m. it was clear he would get there. Monds took the stage just as the networks were calling the presidential race for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

Even Bob Barr had a kind assessment about the history-making Democrat who, along with John McCain, had denied Barr his shot at the presidency. "It just illustrates the tremendous demographic changes, generational changes in this country," Barr said. "This really is a very different country, in some ways much better country, than it was several years ago."

That assessment is going to become a cliché this week, largely because it's true. Barack Obama won the presidency while losing traditional Democratic ground in slow-growing areas of the country. Take the state of Pennsylvania, where McCain had made his last stand, predicated on the hope that the gun-owning whites whom Obama had called "bitter" would march to the polls for the GOP. Sure enough, Obama carried only two counties in southwest Pennsylvania, one of them Allegheny, which contains the city of Pittsburgh. But Pittsburgh is the only part of that region growing in population. In suburbanized eastern Pennsylvania, Obama won by a landslide, carrying every county that borders Philadelphia, sweeping the counties on the Pennsylvania Turnpike up to Lackawanna. It wasn't just Joe Biden's 45-minute bromides about playing stick ball in Scranton that did it. It was a changing electorate lifting up a candidate of change.

For Libertarian and libertarian-minded candidates, this was the wrong kind of electoral shift. The charismatic B.J. Lawson was always going to have a tough time convincing voters in his liberal North Carolina district that he, too, was a change candidate. He couldn't survive the Obama wave. Wake County, which casts most of the votes in his district, swung from a narrow Bush victory in 2004 to a 57-42 Obama landslide. Lawson got buried underneath it. Damien Ober, a media-savvy LP candidate in D.C. who raised real money and campaigned on an anti-bailout, anti-tax platform, couldn't win 3 percent of the vote for a powerless office. Karen Kerin, who won the Libertarian and Republican nominations for attorney general in Vermont, scored only 20 percent.

Libertarians were much luckier, as usual, at winning state ballot initiatives. There were a few prominent losses, such as the San Francisco prostitution legalization measure and an income tax repeal in Massachusetts. Many libertarians will be distraught at the victory of anti-gay marriage laws in California, Arizona, and Florida, as well as a gay adoption ban in Arkansas. But California was a squeaker that took all the power of the Mormon Church and scores of split-ticket black voters, and the margins in Arizona and Florida were smaller than the margins in bluer states four years ago. Medical marijuana and marijuana decriminalization won everywhere that voters had a choice, as those issues often do.

Still, some of the Libertarians at Barr's party were worried about the results. Many still had Republican sympathies. "I would have preferred that McCain win, if Bob couldn't," said Mark du Mas, a Barr neighbor who maxed out donating to his campaign and leased him the campain office. "Ultimately we've got to have a galvanizing issue that gets people so angry that they abandon the two parties," said Andy Kalat, who also preferred McCain as a second choice.

The Barr campaign didn't bother with recriminations. Vice presidential nominee Wayne Allyn Root took the stage before Barr to lambast the "McCain-Obama bailout," calling the two parties "dumb and dumber, big and bigger." He had bet, publicly, that McCain would win the election. "He was winning until he voted for the bailout!" Root said after the speech. "But I didn't lose big money. I bet on Barr/Root!" Back on stage, he promised the crowd that he'd "see you again in 2012, maybe as your president-elect!"

Root didn't act bothered about losing the vice presidency, and he had a laugh at the coming era of Joe Biden gaffes. "I only put my foot in my mouth once in this campaign. And that was with you guys!"

Barr, who rarely campaigned alongside Root, brought him back on stage for his concession speech. "He got to go to all the good places, like California," Barr said. "I got to...well, I shouldn't say anything about the other states." Without a clear victory for the party to point to (it was obvious already that Ralph Nader would beat the party for third place, although Barr would outpoll 2004 LP candidate Michael Badnarik), Barr praised his staff and voters for a campaign run on the issues. "You ain't seen nothing yet!" Barr promised.

After the speech, Barr declined to rule out another run for office, saying he'd pick up his legal and punditry careers where he left them, although he'd lost his Alexandria, Virginia office when his landlords, the American Conservative Union, soured on his potentially McCain-spoiling run for president.

Barr turned 60 the day after the election. There wouldn't be such a ready crowd that night. So after his concession speech, caterers rolled out a cake, and the candidate blew out the candles. The night moved on at a languid pace as he signed autographs, reminisced with staff, and did a "live" media interview that was pushed back more often than the release date for Chinese Democracy. Later Barr and his staff decamped to his office to drink champagne and shoot plastic "Livestrong"-style bracelets at each other like rubber bands. The candidate sat down briefly at a computer to load up the Georgia Secretary of State's page. "I'm looking for something interesting in the state House races," he said. "Nothing yet."

In May, Barr had disputed the idea that 2008 represented a "libertarian moment." "I think," he said then, "that we're in a libertarian era." If that's true, it's an era that won't include any elected members of America's largest third party in Washington. But pundits are no longer talking about a "permanent Republican majority" based on social conservativism and small town votes.

This year is ending with Bob Barr, Ron Paul, and Wayne Allyn Root holding media megaphones they didn't have as recently as January. What will they do with that prominence? What will libertarians do now that the Republican Party has receded back to pre-Reagan levels of influence? That's for no one candidate to decide.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Georgia on Their Minds

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:00:00 EST

The call sheet is short and perfunctory, and everyone who uses it puts a slightly different spin on it. "I'm calling to ask you for your vote for former congressman and presidential candidate Bob Barr," goes one version. "Bob Barr opposed the McCain-Obama bailout and McCain-Feingold. According to the National Taxpayers Union, only Bob Barr will cut taxes and reduce federal spending."

Sometimes the call includes verbiage about the Second Amendment. Often, the person on the other end has something better to do.

"He already voted six weeks ago!" says Austin Petersen, a Libertarian Party worker who's been camped out in Atlanta for the Barr campaign. "Where do they hide all these votes before the election, anyway? Are they in a box somewhere? Where's the box?"

Mikael Sandstrom, an LP intern who's shadowing Peterson, has to do battle with a voter fretting that his vote for Barr could help elect Barack Obama. "No," says Sandstrom, in a more lilting, Southern tone than his usual voice, "it would be a vote for Bob Barr." Earlier today, a voter called the office and begged Barr to endorse John McCain. She was told that Barr was endorsing Barr. She wasn't satisfied.

Welcome to the final 48 hours of the Bob Barr presidential campaign. After winning the Libertarian Party nomination in May, Barr opened this office in the sprawling suburb of Smyrna, Georgia, with a view of Atlanta when you step outside for a smoke—something his staffers do every hour or so.

The office is as wide and rambling as the real estate developments that define metropolitan Georgia. A dozen people are at work, but there are almost twice as many full-stocked cubicles than staff. Typically they service the volunteers who come in on weekends to find more voters, but on the day before the election there is the hardcore staff and no one else. A flat screen TV is tuned to cable political coverage. A computer is tuned to Barr TV, which runs videos of the candidate all day long. Two Mr. Coffees churn in a small break room aside a heaving pile of lawn signs, pieces of mail, fliers, and gel bands that twist cyclist Lance Armstrong's "Livestrong" message into "Live Free."

"This is a real campaign," says Stewart Flood, a South Carolina Libertarian Party executive who has taken a three-week unpaid vacation to help out. "There was no headquarters in 2004. It was Michael Badnarik in a car, driving from event to event. They did raise money, but they weren't raising money. They did contact voters, but it wasn't organized."

In one of the most crowded cubicles, Barr communications director Shane Cory has a map of the country divided into seven sections. The states where Barr failed to make the ballot are blacked out. ("Louisiana screwed us," Cory recalls grimly. "We should have gotten on in Connecticut, and we would have, if the lawsuit was filed earlier.") Seven more states have been assigned numbers that indicate where the campaign is placing resources, which mostly consist of the candidate himself doing media and making speeches. Nevada, Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida—all swing states—are marked out.

As the campaign wound to a close, it was clear that Barr wouldn't get close to the $30 million fundraising goal campaign manager Russ Verney set in May, a disappointment that staffers blame in part on former Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). "Paul set the liberty movement back a decade by encouraging people to stay in the GOP," Cory says. "Not that the Republicans planned it, but if they did they couldn't have planned it any better."

Focus in Barr's Atlanta headquarters has turned heavily toward his native state. "Georgia just came onto the map when the polls closed between McCain and Obama," says Cory. "The rest of the states are being turned out by local people," says Verney. "That work has been decentralized."

The candidate spent the last day of the campaign on a small plane to Savannah for a last round of local media interviews. The other day it was Macon. Months ago the campaign purchased data from Barr's old congressional district in the wealthy Republican suburbs, and the office has been pushing those voters with help from phone-bankers on the west coast. According to state party chair Daniel Adams, the candidate is pulling around 5 percent of Republicans in his old district.

This has the potential to be the main story of Barr's campaign. At a brunch for staff on Sunday, Barr acknowledged that the tightening Georgia polls have boosted his media coverage. The final public poll of the state put Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) at 49 percent, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) at 48 percent, and Barr at 2 percent—down from his pre-Sarah Palin selection peak, but holding steady enough for Obama to potentially win a traditionally Republican state with a plurality of the vote. "If Obama wins this state," says University of Georgia political scientist Charles Bullock, "it will be in part because of Bob Barr."

There are two main challenges here for Barr. The first is that the tightness in the race is keeping some Republicans from casting protest votes. "We'd be above 5 percent if Republicans weren't struggling now," says Adams. The second is that Barr, like Ralph Nader before him, could become a scapegoat for a party that blew a presidential election. The mighty state GOP might go looking to retaliate. "I'm sure Republicans would like to limit [Libertarians'] ballot access right now," Bullock says. "But it's not easy to do when they play by the rules and score enough votes for regular access every year."

This year John Monds, a black Libertarian and NAACP leader, is one of only two candidates for state Public Services Commissioner. The party estimates his absolute minimum level of support at 25 percent, easily enough to maintain the party's ballot access, paving the way for Barr to do what many of his supporters hope—run for U.S. Senate in 2010.

People in Barr's headquarters aren't wasting their time thinking about this stuff on their final days of work. It just comes up when voters resist their entreaties to vote for the Only Candidate Against the Bailout. In the morning, LP media coordinator Andrew Davis posts Barr's final pre-election column for Townhall.com. In the afternoon, he sees the commenters and e-mailers attacking Barr for having the audacity to run. "Who financed your run this time, huh?" says one commenter from Georgia. "Soros or Barack, himself?"

The campaign brushes it off. When some of the phonebankers place an order for sandwiches, Sandstrom writes an IOU for Flood on a yellow post-it note. "Why don't you just give him a Federal Reserve note?" snarks Peterson. Longtime Barr staffer Jennifer Chambrin makes the necessary calls to cater and decorate Barr's election night party. Media Guru Steve Stinton keeps track of Barr's final run of appearances on a calendar that plans them up through Thursday. Vice presidential nominee Wayne Allyn Root's e-mail blasts announcing his latest radio appearances—"Wayne's on Jerry Doyle!"—are read as they come in. All of the big questions—the million-vote target, Barr's impact on the race, the bitterness of the GOP—will be answered soon enough.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

"Can I Get Equal Time Here?"

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:30:00 EST

ATLANTA—"Look," says Allen Buckley. "We know this race is going to a runoff. You can vote your conscience."

Buckley, the Libertarian candidate for the United States Senate in Georgia, was looking straight into the bevy of local TV cameras at the Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) studio, recording this sixth and final candidate debate. On his left was Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss, who led comfortably in polls before the economy crashed and he voted for the $700 billion bailout. On Chambliss' left was Democrat Jim Martin, a former state representative who, to his delight, has surged into a tie thanks to millions of dollars in TV ads paid for by a party hungrily eyeing its 60th Senate seat.

This last-minute tightening has placed Buckley in the unfamiliar position of potentially affecting an election. He has run twice before for statewide office—two years ago he campaigned against Martin for lieutenant governor, and they both lost. But those races were not close enough for most voters to concern themselves much with Buckley's shy presentation and his relentless use of Government Accountability Office numbers to explain how current levels of federal spending are unsustainable.

The bailout cut right to Buckley's message. "I was against it, and I explained what I wanted to do instead," he explained before the debate. "I like tax cuts but only when they're matched with spending cuts, and I've proposed a 25 percent across-the-board cut in spending apart from Social Security. If we did that right now it would balance the budget, allow the Social Security surplus to be funded, and provide for tax cuts."

Neither of Buckley's opponents care to get that specific about slashing government. "I'm running against two Democrats, basically," Buckley grumbled as a GPB attendant pointed him toward the green room. Cobb County Libertarian activist David Chastain put it a little differently: "He's running against two socialists."

One of those "socialists" will win on or after Tuesday. If neither Chambliss nor Martin draw more than 50 percent of the vote, then by Georgia law they will battle in a run-off election to be held four weeks later. National Republican and Democratic money and bodies will swarm in with a force not seen since Sherman's March.

With such potential responsibility on his hands, Buckley spent the final debate bloodying up both candidates.

Chambliss, a tall, smug pol who combines the sneer of Spiro Agnew with the studied folksiness of Boss Hogg, tried to plain-talk his way through his support for the bailout on the first question of the night by maintaining that banks were just "fixin' to fail." Martin criticized that, so Chambliss shot back: "He's been for it, he's been against it, he's been for it, and tonight it's popular for him to be against it."

Buckley entered the conversation. "I called the GAO," he said, "and asked if this trend toward unsustainable deficits would continue under the policies of both major parties. They told me it would. I am the only candidate providing answers." But the Libertarian was left out of a finger-wagging exchange between the two major-party candidates over which banks, exactly, were benefiting unfairly from the bailout. "Can I get equal time here?" Buckley asked. The moderators passed.

Chambliss attributed the nationwide fall in gas prices to his vote to end the ban on offshore oil drilling, though he humbly acknowledged that "we [Republicans] can't take 100 percent of the credit." Buckley snorted audibly. "You can take zero percent of the credit, because that's what you're entitled to!" Chambliss laughed and half-patted the much shorter Buckley on the back. "The GAO probably told him to say that, too."

When Buckley got his chance to ask Chambliss a direct question he rattled off how much non-defense spending had increased in the Republican's Senate career, waved his notes, and asked, "What would you cut?"

"Alan, you should have taken your pill tonight," Chambliss replied.

"You need the whole bottle!" Buckley responded.

The somnolent studio audience cracked up. Chambliss drew back his lips like a crossbow. That was the last cheap shot he'd take at Buckley, who then used his question for Martin to ask "what has Senator Chambliss failed to do" about entitlement spending. Chambliss replied by accusing the Libertarian of wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare.

"Not true," said Buckley. He looked up from his notes and into the camera. "A U.S. senator just lied to you."

Buckley explained that he wanted a referendum on Social Security with the voters deciding whether to raise FICA taxes or not. Was it a dodge? Arguably, but that just laid the tracks for moderators to ask Chambliss about his support for the Fair Tax, the theoretical sales tax that would replace the income tax. "He's using all of you Fair Tax zealots because he's lost you on the real issues," Buckley said. "When the Republicans ran everything, he could have introduced a Fair Tax bill. Why didn't he, if he's such a good leader?"

Buckley closed his remarks with attacks on both candidates. Martin was a "good man" who wouldn't make a great senator, while "Saxby Chambliss is not, and never will be a great senator." He asked for people to support him, which would set up a runoff. And with that, he closed his final debate.

Local news reporters swarmed Buckley, Chambliss, and Martin after the lights dimmed. Before and after the debate, Buckley declined to say who he'd support in a runoff. (Given the chance to imagine actually winning, he called it a theoretical "gunshot heard around the world that would represent real change, not Obama change.")

"Alan was really good tonight," said Jim Martin as he spotted Georgia Libertarian Party Chair Daniel Adams. Buckley returned the favor. "Jim's a pleasant guy." He did not have similarly kind words for Chambliss.

An hour later, Adams joined a number of LP activists at a house they've subletted to the Bob Barr campaign's surplus staff. Fox 5 led its broadcast with Buckley calling Chambliss a "liar." But other than that, the third-party candidate barely made it into the final report. Editors included Chambliss' "pill" insult, but cut the Buckley comeback.

It was telling. If he forces a runoff, Buckley will become one of the pivotal politicians of election 2008. Close races are the surest way of drawing attention to Libertarians. Earlier that day, Bob Barr had noted that his uptick in local media coverage came as polls showed McCain's lead over Obama collapsing. There was a spoiler story to write again! But for one more election, despite the issues, despite the debate, that's the only story the rest of the media will write about Buckley.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Nice Guy, Wrong Year

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EST

"I want to give you a copy of our rulebook. Did you get one of our rulebooks? These are the rules that they need to follow up in Washington. Right now we're seeing what happens when you forget them."

B.J. Lawson, Republican candidate for Congress in North Carolina's 4th district, was standing outside an early voting center in Morrisville on Saturday handing out some of the 50,000 pocket Constitutions he bought from the Cato Institute, along with his one-page campaign flier folded inside. Early voting began at 8 a.m. with four boxes of Constitutions. When it ended at 5 p.m., Lawson had just handed out the last one.

"It's small," he told two young black voters. "You can whip it out"—he whipped it out—"in case of an emergency."

"Yeah, if there's a constitutional crisis," said one voter, nodding and credulous.

Nine months ago, dozens of Republicans claiming to be inspired by the longshot presidential campaign of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) jumped into national politics for themselves. Some lost their primary elections, including New Jersey Senate candidate Murray Sabrin and Virginia House candidate Amit Singh. Others won the right to be token candidates in rock-solid urban Democratic districts. (Among this group is New York congressional candidate John Wallace, who on Sunday released a rambling statement demanding that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) release his birth certificate, which the Democrat has already done.) The one Ron Paul-inspired general election candidate for Senate, South Carolina's Bob Conley (not a Republican, but a populist who calls himself "your grandfather's kind of Democrat") won his primary in a squeaker and proceeded to raise less than $50,000.

Lawson has broken out of this pack and become not just the most credible Ron Paul Republican, but one of the most credible Republican challengers of 2008, period. A 34-year-old doctor who built and then sold a company that made medical records accessible via personal digital assistants, Lawson has raised nearly $600,000 in a district where the last Republican candidate raised less than $50,000—half out of his own pocket. He has received a helpful endorsement from Ron Paul, including pleas for national "money bombs" on his behalf. And while putting away a GOP primary opponent who attacked him for his libertarian views (Lawson won by 41 points), he built a real campaign infrastructure. On Saturday, his Cary, North Carolina headquarters was packed with volunteers calling voters, bundling fliers, and taking turns turning out early votes.

But at the end of the day, Lawson is a Republican candidate in the non-Republican year of 2008. North Carolina, which no Democrat has carried since 1976, is being heavily targeted by Barack Obama's campaign. Lawson's district, which was gerrymandered in 2002 to include more Democratic areas to help re-elect incumbent Rep. David Price, is ground zero for Obama's state effort, and political tipsters rate the district "safe Democrat." In Wake County, where most of the district's population lives, the Obama campaign has registered thousands of new voters. An area that voted 51-49 for Bush over Kerry is showing as much as a 17-point Obama lead.

Lawson is blunt about the problem here. "The party has been so weakened by the tragic mismanagement of our country these past eight years," he explains. "Price has been running on Obama's coattails and saying he wants to be part of a team for change. Well, I'm sorry, but you've been there for 20 years. You had your chance. It doesn't make any sense for the voters to hire the guy who threw the brick through their window to fix the glass."

Lawson's strategy has been to distance himself from the GOP ticket and cast himself as a "change" candidate—a perfect down-ballot match for all of these Obama voters. His campaign literature contrasts Lawson's opposition to the Iraq War and the PATRIOT Act with Price's votes for funding the war and legalizing more government surveillance. "The incumbent has been there for 20 years," Lawson told voters in Morrisville. "He's working for his corporate donors, not for you."

These lines are winning over more voters than a generic Republican message might. Price has had to engage in a race he once took for granted, running ads attacking Lawson, and bringing some D.C. staff down here to help him out. But there are probably too many straight-ticket voters furious at Republicans for Lawson to convert. Jesse Benoit, a 33-year old who grew up in New York, compliments Lawson for what he's doing when the candidate hands him a pocket Constitution. But Benoit is too frustrated with the GOP to consider splitting his ticket like he's done in the past. "He's trying to change his party, which he has to, because it's not his party anymore," Benoit said. "He's a democratic conservative, is what I'd call him. But the national party has moved so far away from that."

Some voters were less interested in straight-ticket voting and, as such, more gettable for Lawson. "I want to know about Social Security disability," said Vicky Smith, a middle-aged voter sporting sunglasses and a gem-encrusted pumpkin sweater.

"The government's been lying to us in a lot of ways for a while now," Lawson says. "One of the ways it lies is in how it calculates inflation, so when Social Security benefits increase, they're getting increased much less."

"Exactly!" says Smith. "I mean, with the property taxes and all that we have to pay—it's ridiculous. We're on the low end of the totem poll. We can't take it."

"Exactly," says Lawson, nodding, hands on hips. "We've got to stop taxing Social Security benefits and start being honest about how much it costs to live, so we can eventually transition out of Social Security and into something more fair."

"We're on the low end of the totem poll," Smith says. "What do you call it, lower-class?"

"And it's getting worse and worse," Lawson says. "We're spending $700 billion to bail out the banks—"

"Exactly!" she interrupted. "Exactly!"

Anger at the bailout has helped Lawson frame his message down the stretch. "It's finally blown away the illusion that our government is responsible to the people," he explains. "Nobody wants to bail out Wall Street when the average American is losing his job. The bailout didn't change the campaign, but it put an exclamation point on what I had been saying."

State Republicans have warmed to Lawson since the primary. "We're the grassroots of the party here," says volunteer John Lahtinen, a Paul supporter who helped Lawson work the early voters on Saturday. Lawson's distasteful connections to Ron Paul are outweighed, in Republican minds, by the strength of the race he's running. "Every dollar Price spends is a dollar he can't give to someone to use somewhere else," Lawson says.

Even if Price wins, Lawson is still cheered by an organization that "came out of the woodwork" and survived past the flash of Ron Paul's presidential campaign.

"Maybe," says Lawson, "I'll become a community organizer."

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Empire Bloat

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 21:07:00 EDT

The Defense Department's 2008 Base Structure Report reveals just how far the military has spread across the globe. As of last summer, the Pentagon rents or owns 316,238 buildings around the world with a total value of more than $455 billion. These holdings are spread across 4,668 sites in the United States and its territories and 761 in foreign countries. That latter number doesn't include bases and sites in war zones or in those trouble spots where the U.S. doesn't release detailed information and expenditures.

This isn't a record for the Defense Department. The official number of military sites peaked in 1967, at the height of the Cold War and the conflict in Vietnam, with 1,014 locations in foreign countries. And the number is down from 823 in 2007.

According to the anti-war journalist Chalmers Johnson, one factor keeping the figure from rising further is the anti-American sentiment that spikes when the U.S. military moves in, allowing locals to blame Americans for any conflict in the region. Kyrgyzstani President Kurmanbek Bakiyev has threatened to close down the Manas air base in his country, demanding more payment for rent. And in Ecuador, President Rafael Correa has threatened to end America's lease on the Eloy Alfaro Air Base when it expires in 2009. He suggests he might lease it to China instead.

Yellow Peril

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 15:48:00 EDT

When the United States went to war against Japan in 1941, Congress passed a law commanding Japanese Americans to stay inside after dusk. Two years later, in Hirabayashi v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the curfew. Unlike Korematsu v. United States, the decision that justified race-based internment, Hirabayashi has never been struck down. It could still be used as precedent.

That’s cause for concern. In a new paper Eric Muller, a legal scholar at the University of North Carolina, makes the case that both decisions were based on lies probably driven by racial animus—and that legislators knew the truth while writing the law.

Muller’s paper, published in August by the Social Science Research Network, relies on publicly available memos to argue that American generals knew that Japanese forces were not about to attack the West
Coast and that there was no Japanese-American insurgency that could have backed them up. In 1942 Gen. George C. Marshall argued for moving resources from the Pacific to Europe because the Japanese threat was containable. “In view of the great distances over which these operations would have to be undertaken,” Marshall said, “it is probably not necessary to provide a strong scale of defen[s]e.”

Despite that, Justice Department lawyers told the Supreme Court extreme measures were necessary to stop the Japanese threat. The Court bought it, endorsing curfews in part because “the principal danger to be apprehended was a Japanese invasion.” Muller writes that the precedent provides a “warning about the blinding power of racial schemas in the wake of attacks by foreign enemies.” But it’s not a cold case. While most Americans have repudiated Korematsu, Miller says Hirabayashi’s reasoning is still “potent in today’s world.” Even if it’s based on a lie.

Atlas Blinked

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EST

Every Wednesday in Washington, conservatives gather in the conference room of Grover Norquist's pressure group, Americans for Tax Reform, to hash out arguments and promote their projects. The off-the-record meetings are notorious among liberals: proof of the shudder-inducing organizational powers of the right.

In late September, a White House economist arrived at Norquist's salon to sell a proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street firms whose investments in worthless mortgage-backed securities had sparked an international financial crisis. In a tense meeting, the president's emissary was turned into a piñata. Pro-market activists and economists with decades of experience battered him with questions, asking whether the administration was putting an end to capitalism as we knew it. The White House's economist responded coolly. Did these people really want to do nothing in the face of the great 2008 meltdown?

In the end, what fiscal conservatives wanted didn't turn out to matter much. As the Wall Street vapors scrambled every aspect of the 2008 presidential campaign and of George W. Bush's final days in office, no one was as angry as D.C.'s dwindling number of libertarians. They pointed out that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's plan involved a massive takeover of private firms and (in its original draft) unchecked executive power. They invoked previous examples of government meddling worsening crises, in the 1930s and the '70s. But as Washington faced the greatest economic panic in a generation, adherents of free markets were spectators in a debate between moderate interventionists and radical re-regulators.

Libertarians proposed alternatives, such as privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and letting the market find a bottom. They were shouting into the dark. Instead the feds imposed a two-week ban on short-selling stock and engineered the largest economic intervention since Nixon's wage and price controls. "The market is not functioning properly," warned President Bush. "The government's top economic experts warn that, without immediate action by Congress, America could slip into a financial panic and a distressing scenario would unfold."

People who should have been primed for such a crisis had little voice in the matter. Take the Republican Study Committee (RSC), the fiscally conservative caucus within the House of Representatives. The RSC regularly responds to pork-filled budgets with thriftier alternatives. As Wall Street shattered, the RSC was confronted with a spending package equal to a million earmarks.

On September 18, the committee sent a public letter to the White House opposing any Wall Street bailout because "the risk to taxpayers and to the long-term future health of our economy remain just too great to justify." The next day, RSC Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) put out a tentative, grasping statement on the proposed bailout that decried the idea without ruling it out completely: "My mind remains open."

The next day the draft of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's plan was released, with a giant price tag and a two-year ban on oversight of Treasury's activity. Former RSC Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.), who attracts TV cameras like lightbulbs attract moths, rejected "the largest corporate bailout in American history."

And then all went practically silent. Fiscal conservatives dared not come out swinging against a proposal whose effects they could not predict, offered by a White House they had trusted more often than not.

On September 22 at 5 p.m., the RSC met to strategize further. Who was opposed to the bailout, full stop? Who had alternatives to propose? According to staff who attended the meeting, the mood was somber and the opposition was not uniform. The next morning, when the full Republican conference met, there was even less unity. According to Arizona Rep. Jeff Flake, only about half the party's members opposed a bailout.

On September 23, a dozen members of the RSC called a press conference in the House to sell their suggestions. These fit on one piece of paper, and included a two-year suspension of the capital gains tax, full privatization of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae "over a reasonable time period," and a suspension of the "mark-to-market" regulations that forced banks to value assets at zero if they couldn't be sold at that precise moment.

At the press conference, Republicans proposed fixes with little chance of making it into a bailout bill. Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.) suggested that business tax cuts could attract investors to our shores, bringing in more revenue from "profits left stranded overseas." Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), a dogged supporter of more oil drilling, claimed that the policies he favored would, conveniently, pull us out of the crisis. Mike Pence was the only legislator at the events who ruled out any vote for the bailout. He tried, in vain, to challenge the premise. "There are those in the public debate," he said, "who have said that we must act now. The last time I heard that, I was on a used-car lot."

"I would amend that statement," added Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.). "The last time I saw the phrase ‘act now,' it was advertising one of those time-share condo deals that lock you in after a free trial period."

"Did you try it?" asked a reporter.

"No!" Shadegg laughed. That summed up the fiscal conservatives' effort: outraged gallows humor with no expectation of success.

Members of the RSC got a louder megaphone for their ideas when GOP presidential candidate John McCain flew to Washington to tacitly support them. The stunt drew some attention to the House Republicans' proposals, and a coalition of Republicans and liberal Democrats defeated the bailout in an initial vote. But the suggestions themselves didn't challenge the central proposition of the bailout: that the government, in a crisis, needed to nationalize whole chunks of the finance industry. The minority of Republicans who spoke up were accused of being Chicken Littles stoking false fears about the "end of capitalism."

Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.), an Ayn Rand devotee who made his name voting against earmarks, said he would reluctantly support Paulson's bailout. "People are struggling with it around here like you can't believe," he explained. "This proposal is anathema to everything I believe. I've voted against million-dollar bills, and here's a $700 billion one. But to do nothing—that really threatens a massive expansion of government."

Campbell says he was willing to make the sacrifice, just this once, because he believed the crisis was comparable to 1929. "If John Q. Lunchbucket doesn't understand this stuff, and waits in line for a block to get into his bank, and then is told ‘we don't have your money,' he will respond to any proposal to prevent that in the future. Any populist who says ‘I'll make sure these guys never get your money again' will have his ear."

But who's to say that this scenario hasn't already taken place? If libertarians had won the argument on the economy—if they were as influential as social democratic writers such as Naomi Klein and Thomas Frank claim they are—they would have dominated the argument about the causes of the crisis and the damage intervention would wreak. That didn't happen. A bill that failed on September 29 was re-written in the Senate, then passed the House on October 3. Among the congressmen who changed their votes was Shadegg, the man who had compared the bailout to a time-share ripoff.

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), with a media profile burnished by his presidential campaign, appeared on CNN many times over the weeks of the crisis to explain why the Federal Reserve was to blame. But Paul was lonelier than ever. No other Republican was willing to suggest that avoiding a bailout and risking "a bad year," as he put it, would forestall several more years of economic central planning. They accepted the crisis narrative and attempted to legislate around the margins.

"This does ensure that President Bush will have a legacy," laughed Competitive Enterprise Institute president Fred Smith after that Americans for Tax Reform meeting. "It's a legacy that will set back the concept of economic liberty by a century. The free market, for all intents and purposes, is dead in America."

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

The Third Man

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Some third party candidates brush aside the pundits and the polls. They cling to a few examples of third party success—Jesse Ventura!—to auger for their victories. North Carolina's Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Michael Munger doesn't do that.

"At this point, I expect between to receive between 3 and 4 percent of the vote," Munger explains as he drives up I-40 to a speech in Raleigh. "What usually happens to our candidates is that we head on a sharp downward trajectory as the election approaches. I'm doing a little better than that. But that's what almost always happens."

Munger has to think like this. Since 2000, he has been the chair of Duke University's department of political science. He's written or co-authored four books on policy, and was a fixture on local news before he got into this race. "I got to know the producers," he says, "before I needed them to book me."

Munger is one of the LP's most prominent candidates in what, as the campaign grinds into its final week, is looking like an above-average year for the party. It's a comedown from the expectations of May and June, when former Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) secured the party's presidential nomination and talked about raising $30 million and making a Perot-like breakthrough. But there were reasons why that didn't happen: some predictable, some not.

Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) shotgun political marriage to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin ended some of the wavering of libertarian-leaning Republicans. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) never gave the Barr campaign his stamp of approval, and eventually endorsed the Constitution Party's candidate after he felt that Barr slighted him. And no third party is blowing the doors off this year: The race between the first black presidential candidate and a war hero who chose the second female running mate in history has sucked out the energy from the non-aligned movement.

At the state level, the LP is having an easier time of it. Membership is up slightly. The intra-party sniping of the presidential race (one defeated candidate was leaking internal LP documents as recently as last week) hasn't trickled down. There are candidates who don't associate with Barr and candidates, like Munger, who have seen him pump up the profile of the LP.

"Having a complete ticket is a huge help," Munger says. "Bob Barr's somebody people have heard of. Half of the polls here include him. That gives people the sense that libertarians are a real party, and that it's not just me out here."

Munger ruminates on that for a moment. "I have had people come up to me and say, ‘I'm a Bob Barr libertarian, not a Munger libertarian.' But that tells you they're looking into it!"

Privately, Libertarians suggest that Munger is running one of the ten best Libertarian campaigns in the country. His competition comes from state House candidates in New Hampshire such as Morey Straus and Brendan Kelly, Vermont attorney general candidate Karen Kerin (who secured the support of the LP and the Republicans), and a pack of candidates in Indiana, Nevada, and the "new south." Georgia Senate candidate Alan Buckley, suddenly a factor in a tight race, was called a "viable third option" with "a message of responsibility that both parties would do well to heed." Indiana House candidate Eric Schansberg got a quasi-endorsement from the Indianapolis Star: "[A] prime example of how far the Libertarian Party has advanced in Indiana."

Munger is an example of how the LP can grow in a state not historically susceptible to third parties—unless they were led by George Wallace. He makes good copy, but not in the colloidal silver-chugging way. The closest he comes to eccentricity is his habit of growing his hair out for two years, cutting it, donating the results to Locks of Love, and starting the cycle all over again. That's as weird as it gets. The Munger campaign is a focused, four-issue affair that the candidate can elucidate in seven words: "bringing in business, controlling annexation, infrastructure, and education."

Conveniently enough, that's what Democrat Bev Perdue and Republican Pat McCrory are talking about. Munger has eschewed the strategy of debating libertarian philosophy with his rivals, or trying to insert discussions of pet issues into the race. In debates, he tries to pull McCrory to his side on charter schools, "the first thing I'd do in education." He tries to keep Perdue, a typically cautious North Carolina Democrat, on his side on social issues. That's hampered his progress.

"One reason I haven't been allowed in all the debates," Munger explains, "is that I'm taking votes from the Democrats. Sixty percent of my supporters are voting for Obama. I'll talk about gay marriage, and Perdue isn't, or doesn't want to."

But another reason why Munger has been marginalized is more fair. When asked how many offices Munger's campaign has opened, North Carolina LP Chairwoman Barbara Howe says, "my kitchen table, his kitchen table, and his home office." Munger has repackaged the libertarian message, sold it in a manner that appeals to state opinion makers. He has not built a political machine or a popular movement.

Instead, Munger is relying on a media charm offensive and a pack of volunteers. He's tapped the remnants of the Ron Paul movement in the state. "A lot of Ron Paul meet-ups were of Republicans who only became Republicans to vote for him." (Paul pulled 7.2 percent of the vote in the May primary.) He's also coordinated with B.J. Lawson, a Ron Paul Republican running for Congress in the gerrymandered district that includes Durham. They agree on one of the basic questions of libertarian politics, post-Paul. "Are we proud of our irrelevance," Munger says, "or do we try to become relevant?"

The quest for relevance this year involves getting that 3 or 4 percent of the vote, securing ballot access for next time, and becoming a real political party that the Democrats and Republicans both have to adapt to. It's the goal of the Barr campaign, only localized, slower, and a little more realistic in the final week.

"As I make appearances I'm organizing counties, I'm coordinating volunteers, and I'm building a database," Munger says. "The day after the election, we start organizing the next campaign."

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Spoofed!

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:30:00 EDT

“The whole idea of spoof, to me, is just so done and gone,” said David Zucker to The Onion AV Club. “I'm very proud of all three of the Naked Guns, but I think we've declared victory.”

That was ten years ago. In 2001, terrorists attacked and destroyed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—or have you forgotten? In 2004, a newly-minted Republican David Zucker donated to the Bush re-election campaign and made a commercial for the Club for Growth that portrayed a line-up of schmucks being as indecisive as John Kerry. “If you never commit to what you believe in,” said Zucker’s narrator, “who will commit to you?”

Zucker stayed committed, producing more political ads in 2006 and directing An American Carol, a feature-length—what’s the word?—spoof of the modern left, of terrorism, of Hollywood, of slavery, and of the never-promising genre of Charles Dickens pastiches. This is an idea even the Muppets had trouble with, and they didn’t have Zucker’s political obligations.

We open on an idyllic Fourth of July picnic, where embalmed-looking, paycheck-needing Leslie Nielsen gathers up some kids to tell them a tale occasionally broken up by erotic, slow-motion daydreams. It’s the story of Michael Malone (Kevin Farley, brother of Chris), a Michael Moore lookalike who is following up his success with films like Die, You American Pigs with a campaign to ban Independence Day.

”I love America,” Malone says in one of the many, many scenes where he’s eating and looking confused. “That’s why it’s got to be destroyed.”

Malone is approached by hard-luck Taliban terrorists who, buffeted by American military success, are having trouble recruiting fresh bodies. Led by Robert Davi, who reads his lines as if he’s smothering them with a hospital pillow, they corner Malone at an award show. ”We heard you were a big fat liar!” giggles Mohammed (Geoffrey Arend), before giving Malone tentative funding for a drama that will finally, finally win him the respect of the Hollywood elite.

All of this happens before any of the Dickensian ghosts show up to shake some sense into Malone. We’ve forgotten what’s being parodied by the time the ghost of John F. Kennedy jumps out of Malone’s TV set to remind him that his high-toned rhetoric disguised an anti-commie ass-kicker. The ghost of George S. Patton (Kelsey Grammer) guides Malone through most of his journey, showing him a world where American soldiers never freed the slaves or beat the Nazis, where ACLU lawyers groan and swarm like zombies. He summons the ghost of George Washington (Jon Voight), in a scene of transcendent weirdness, where Malone is shown the ashes of 9/11 victims to shame him out of making documentaries. Malone’s lessons end under the arm of “the freakin’ angel of death,” (country singer Trace Adkins), who shows him a future where morgue doctors play with his remains and Muslim conquerors build him a statue in occupied Hollywood.

Spoiler alert: Malone learns the error of his ways. By the end of the film he’s patched up relations with his Navy man brother, celebrated the Fourth of July, and started production on a patriotic biopic of JFK. He exposes the terrorists’ plot from the stage of a Trace Adkins concert, where the man sings an ode to America that goes, in part, “army, navy, air force and marines/the greatest fighting force the world has ever seen.”

And that’s how David Zucker returns to the spoof genre. (He has directed, but not written, two of the Scary Movie films.) The goals here are as partisan, zealous, and transparent as Warren Beatty’s when he made Reds, or John Travolta’s when he made Battlefield Earth. Zucker has promoted the film across conservative media, at the Republican convention (where screening attendees like Rick Santorum got liberal paper dolls for their kids), and on Fox News. “Laugh like your country depends on it!” bellows the movie’s ad copy. This is not a joke. If a Scary Movie bombs, some people lose money. If An American Carol bombs, Zucker’s quest to make Hollywood safe for conservatives is dealt a Dunkirk.

How successful can he be, though? Like Redacted (2007) and other Iraq films attacked by conservatives as propagandic money pits, the targets of AAC have shrunk since the screenwriters first aimed at them. Just because Michael Moore took four years to put out a documentary on his “slacker uprising” tour doesn’t mean people still take him seriously on electoral politics. Indeed, Moore released the movie for free online. He went through a brief moment as a symbol for everything conservatives hated about the left, roughly from the release of Bowling for Columbine to Bush’s re-election. Spoof targets work best when the subjects are brand new or ripped out of clichés. Farley’s Malone never overcomes the “oh yeah, that guy” factor.

Zucker doesn’t try too hard to understand the left beyond Moore/Malone. Late in the film, we learn that Malone was only ever unpatriotic because, as a portly teen, he had a crush on a girl who hated America, too. When she ran off with a soldier, he doubled down as a political activist. Malone’s motivation is the only one that Zucker explains: The rest of the liberals and left-wingers in the movie are psychopaths who willfully make things up, chant slogans mindlessly, and beat up people who upset them. This is the first Hannity and Colmes comedy, birthed in an echo chamber, with references that only make sense to people who are already die-hard conservatives.

Is it funny? It depends. Zucker funs around with Hitler by recycling a gag from his worst political ad, in which a James Baker III lookalike did the bidding of a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lookalike. There is a truly disturbing scene involving Leslie Nielsen and human dismemberment that might have gotten a chuckle at Ed Gein’s house. There are a few jokes that connect, though, and that puts An American Carol miles ahead of Fox’s short-lived “The Half Hour News Hour.”

It doesn’t put it in league with the great liberal comedy. There’s a reason for that, as TV critics point out every time a conservative comedy or skit fails. Political comedy mocks authority. Conservative comedy in the Age of Bush venerates authority. The “heavies” that corrupt Malone and (temporarily) ruin the lives of his conservative extended family are powerless, silly activists. Malone simply gets slapped around a bit and decides the establishment was right. If you transported Zucker back to 1978 and pitched him Animal House, he’d direct Niedermeyer: Man of Iron.

Hopefully this is a curable problem, a result of eight fat years of Republican rule, the bulk of which were spent apologizing for the Bush administration and agonizing over land wars in Asia. Conservative comedy thrived in the Clinton era; perhaps it can bloom again in the Brumiere of Barack Obama.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason. This article originally appeared at Culture11.

Abandon All Hope

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Theresa Finch was pissed off. Somebody had to be. It couldn’t have been quieter in the bleachers of Tuesday's Obama-McCain town hall debate if the events drinks were laced with Quaaludes. Audience member Finch was quiet, too, until she got up to deliver her question.

“How,” Finch said, “can we trust either of you with our money when both parties got—got us into this global economic crisis?”

Anyone could have predicted the candidates’ answers: It was the other party’s fault! (As McCain might say, it was “that one’s” fault.) “When George Bush came into office,” Obama said, “we had surpluses. And now we have half-a-trillion-dollar deficit annually.”

“Do you know,” said McCain, “that he voted for every increase in spending that I saw come across the floor of the United States Senate while we were working to eliminate these pork barrel earmarks?”

Tone-deaf debate answers are nothing new. The blowsy responses of McCain and Obama, though, revealed the traps that voters and the candidates have both fallen into. Voters are furious about having their money shoveled onto Wall Street. That was supposed to restore faith in the mortgage industry? Huh? What?

(Story continues below video.)

Click above to watch a 63-second condensation of Tuesday's 90-minute presidential debate between John McCain and Barack Obama.

On his post-bailout vote show, Lou Dobbs, the jowly arbiter of middle-American anger, called it “stunning setback for voters who believed the House would stand up for the American people and refuse to be bought out by the Bush administration, political elites, and Wall Street.” True, he always talks like that. But this time he was actually expressing what voters thought. A Tuesday CNN poll pegged the proportion of Americans who thought the bailout was “for Wall Street” at 53 percent. Only 40 percent thought it was passed to “help ordinary taxpayers.”

Obama and McCain are stuck in another trap. They voted for the bailout. They can’t run against it. They went all in, literally, and now they’re stuck selling its merits while frowning and promising that it was the only choice they had.

When you dip a little lower, under the presidential stratosphere, anyone who can be against the bailout is against it. In both parties. In Oregon, where Democrat Jeff Merkley is running stronger than people expected against Republican incumbent Sen. Gordon Smith, the bailout is the villain of a heavy-rotation TV ad. “In this economy, who's really on your side? Gordon Smith and Washington—a decade of no accountability. A trillion dollar check for Wall Street.”

You couldn’t find a politician more at odds with Jeff Merkley than Wisconsin’s John Gard, a Republican trying to take a GOP-leaning swing seat from Democrat Rep. Steve Kagen. Yet his message on the bailout is basically identical. “Now they want to give a huge bailout to Wall Street billionaires,” Gard says to the camera in a new ad. “You play by the rules and fall further behind while they break the rules, and Congress hands them your money.”

There’s no wiggle room here: None of the congressfolk who supported the bailout—and most did—are benefiting from it. Their tone is set by Georgia Rep. Jim Marshall, a perpetually endangered Democrat who is deflecting Republican attacks with an apology that is Jimmy Swaggartian in scope. ”I don’t like this rescue plan any better than you do,” he tells voters, sour-faced, in a new ad. “And I’m not interested in bailing out the irresponsible people who dragged us into this credit mess.” Subtext: “But I did it anyway. Let me keep my job!”

You'd expect some sort of libertarian backlash to be brewing—if you define libertarianism down to mean "not wanting to nationalize mortgages." There's not much evidence of it, although some bailout enemies are trying. In Massachusetts, libertarians are working to pass Question 1, a rerun of the 2002 ballot measure that would have repealed the income tax. Six years ago groups such as the Committee for Small Government and Citizens for Limited Taxation powered it to 45 percent of the vote. This year, according to the CSG's Carla Howell, the support on the ground is a little more noticeable, and the opposition of Massachusetts' political establishment is a lot more pronounced.

This weekend one of the protestors at a pro-Q1 rally showed reporters a sign he was proud of: "Bail Out Massachusetts Taxpayers!" Just like those Democratic and Republican challengers, here was an anti-tax activist channeling the anger of the hoi polloi against the government.

"The congressmen voting for the bailout," says Carla Howell, "have one financial qualification: They're on a first-name basis with the institutions that stuff their coffers. Beyond that they're unqualified to meddle with markets. People see the reaction to Katrina, the foul-out of the Big Dig, and this bailout, and that shakes their faith in government doing anything right."

Well, not quite. Faith in government was low before the bailout. Faith in Congress was lower. A Rasmussen poll taken right after the bailout showed voters ready to replace the entire Congress by a 4-1 margin. Faith in government has been low at least since Watergate. None of that matters, because both parties passed the bailout, and both candidates are defending it. On Tuesday night, John McCain even suggested expanding the role of the Treasury beyond the provisions of the bailout legislation, to purchase mortgages directly from homeowners.

Was the onus on John McCain to articulate a stance against the bailout? Should he have cracked open his Henry Hazlitt and explained why some industry failures are necessary for economic growth? Maybe he could have, but really, so could have anyone on the right. So could have Obama. But neither of them did, and a sort of gentleman's agreement developed: Anyone could complain about the bailout from a kneejerk populist stance, but no one could derail it. All you need to know about the craven political thinking at work came from the desk of Newt Gingrich, would-be idea man of the right, who first opposed any bailout, then publicly supported a bailout "reluctantly and sadly" about an hour before the House initially rejected the plan, and then pronounced McCain dead in the water for supporting the bailout at all.

The voter's place in all of this? McCain located it in a Wednesday campaign trail gaffe.

"Across this country," McCain said, "this is the agenda I have set before my fellow prisoners."

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Card Sharks

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 18:34:00 EDT

When Michigan state Rep. Fred Miller (D-Mount Clemens) got married in 2003, he received more gift cards than he knew what to do with. “I didn’t want to carry them in my wallet all the time,” he remembers. “Of course, some of them expired before I could use them.” The issue stuck with him, and when a constituent told Miller how annoyed she was about expiring gift cards, he pondered a possible solution: What if gift cards lasted longer?

Miller’s proposal became an amendment to the Michigan Consumer Protection Act, signed into law by Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm on July 12. Under the new law—which takes effect on November 1, just in time for the Christmas rush—gift cards sold in the state must last at least five years. That blue-and-gold Best Buy card slipped into your stocking this year can be redeemed in 2013 for the iPhone 13G: now with holographic conferencing!

The law passed with almost no objections, but the lobbyists who helped Miller are having second thoughts. “This started as a way to crack down on shady operators,” says Mary Dechow, director of government and regulatory affairs for the 89-location in-state supermarket chain Spartan Stores. “There were businesses taking advantage of people by selling one-month cards without broadcasting the fact that they lasted one month. It was important to crack down on that. But whenever you get a legislature involved, you go after the good actors as well as the bad.”

Dechow’s objections to the law include the rapid compliance schedule and the excessiveness of the five-year expiration window. “If you haven’t used a card after a year,” she says, “you’re not using it.” Miller isn’t worried about that. “People need to be confident,” he says, “that when they buy a gift card, it’s as good as cash.” His next priority: tax breaks for companies that hire Michigan workers wherever possible.

Divided in Nevada

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 11:51:00 EDT

It’s getting harder to find remnants of Ron Paul’s remarkable presidential campaign at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch. But they’re still there. On the wall, next to clips from Playboy and Smoke, you’ll find a framed local news story about a late 2007 press conference with brothel owner Dennis Hof and the libertarian Texas congressman. An eight-by-10-inch head shot of Paul hangs in the computer room. In the dining room, you can still see a picture of Hof and some of his girls clutching signs that spell out “Pimpin’ for Paul.”

But Hof ’s support is not transferable. In late August, as the Bob Barr campaign was scrambling for a national foothold, Hof was sitting in the Reno-Tahoe airport waiting for a flight to a Los Angeles charity auction. He told me he’s a one-man candidate and has no interest in backing the Libertarian Party nominee.

“Anybody who’s considering Bob Barr needs to understand that he’s a hypocrite, and that he lied about paying for an abortion for his first wife,” Hof said. He paused to answer a call from the plus-sized porn star Ron Jeremy. “I’d much rather these people just be honest. I’ve got my faults. I know what they are. I eat too much and I sleep with too many extremely hot 18- to-25-year-old girls. But I’m not a hypocrite.

Paul never seemed wholly comfortable with his Bunny Ranch support. Hof ’s enthusiasm was a symbol of just how far the rEVOLution reached. But the rancher’s disinterest in what the Libertarian Party is up to now is a symbol of something else: the rending of the Paul movement. Walk through a brothel or a casino, look up the low tax rates, and you’d figure Nevada was ripe for libertarian politics. It is, but not in a way that’s affecting the Obama-McCain slugfest.

The year began with a flurry of libertarian politicking. In January’s caucuses, Ron Paul placed second, behind Mitt Romney and ahead of John McCain. Paul’s army outnumbered and outsmarted the rank-and-file GOP, badly depleted by the national party’s problems and state party infighting. “There wouldn’t even have been a caucus in our area without Paul people,” says Juanita Cox, the head (until this summer) of the Storey County GOP.

Paul groups swelled. A Vegas Meetup attended by webbie Arden Osborne grew from fewer than 10 people to more than 200. “It just kept going up until those numbers came in from the caucuses, and it was clear that we weren’t going to jump all the hurdles the party had set up for us,” Osborne says. On the other side of the state, college libertarian leader Alyssa Cowan of the University of Nevada at Reno went through the same thing. “The most optimistic I ever was about this movement,” she says, “was about, oh, 11 p.m. the night before the caucus.”

After the caucus several hundred Paul supporters organized for the Republican state convention in Reno and won delegates, but the state party refused to send them to the national convention in Minneapolis. Instead a pro-McCain slate was appointed by conference call. The Paul backers sued. National media outlets started writing about the fissures in Nevada.

The dispute triggered a geographic split among Paul backers. In northern Nevada and in the state’s barren rural counties, Paulistas focused on shaming the Republican Party and fomenting a revolution at the Twin Cities convention. In Las Vegas, Osborne and others stayed in the GOP and focused on quietly taking it over for the long term. Paul supporters in both areas ran for office, but their most successful candidate was the Vegas-based state assembly candidate Andrew Brownson, whose door-knocking political organization earned him 23 percent of the vote, tying for second in a four-way primary. “If he’d started earlier,” says state Sen. Bob Beers, a Paul-sympathetic Republican who has grown exasperated with the convention coup faction of the movement, “he would have won that race.”

For the revolutionaries, Beers is part of the problem. He chaired the convention where the fracas began. Beers calls their story a “misdirection created by a minority of Paul supporters,” destructive to their influence in the party. “Losing is terrible,” Beers says, arms folded and shaking his head. “I hate to lose. But if you’re angry about what’s happening with the gavel, you get your own gavel. You
don’t subvert the Republican Party process.”

Lost in the middle of all this: the Bob Barr campaign. Nevada should be one of Barr’s best states. At a dinner of 12 Ron Paul Republicans at a Reno Claim Jumper restaurant, I ask how many of them will support Barr. Only one—Cowan—raises her hand. “He’s the only choice we’ve got,” she says. Two others are considering Chuck Baldwin of the paleoconservative Constitution Party. Cox questions whether electronic voting machines cut down Paul’s totals, rendering the whole question of who to vote for meaningless. The general attitude is summed up by video producer Cynthia Kennedy: “The big choice is whether to give up on the political process altogether.”

The small group of Libertarian Party activists in the Vegas area don’t have much of an organization of their own. “Someone needs to devote his time to rebuilding the party,” says Nate Santucci, the party’s secretary and a candidate for the state Assembly. “I can’t. I work all day. I’m on the road part of the year.”

Santucci’s day job is special effects coordinator for Penn & Teller’s five-nights-a-week magic show. It’s a “hotbed of libertarians,” says Penn Jillette—but not the kind of libertarians who are going to pound the pavement for Barr. Jillette is voting for Barr, but he’s not going to become some kind of celebrity advocate.

“I believe in individual rights so much that I don’t like any sort of ‘what’s good for the cause’-type questions,” Jillette says. “We have to leave open the possibility that the other side is right, even as we call them assholes.”

The party’s vice presidential nominee has no time for that kind of reluctance. From his sprawling home in a Henderson, Nevada, country club, overlooking the skyline of the Strip, Wayne Allyn Root hammers out press releases, books radio interviews (“No one has anything bad to say to me!”), and schedules appearances before conservative conferences and Meetup groups. He is concentrating on media instead of personal campaigning because there’s no infrastructure to build a personal campaign.

“We have to concentrate on this election,” says Root, a professional oddsmaker. “After the election, I want to build up the Libertarian Party of Nevada. When you go to a Republican fundraiser, you’re walking into a dining room at the Venetian and eating steak. The Libertarians are holding meetings at the back of a smoky bar.”

Root, who still has a photo of himself with George W. Bush on one of his walls, believes that wavering suburban Republicans, not Paul backers, are the winnable base for the state and national Libertarian parties. He rattles off interest groups he wants to bring into the party and talks about running for mayor of Las Vegas in 2011. He’s writing a book, The Conscience of a Libertarian, and transferring his interests from sports betting to investment banking and punditry. The theory is that if he sells the message, the party building will follow. “I suspect 40 years from now nobody will remember I was ever involved in gambling,” Root says. It’s kind of like Winston Churchill. Nobody knows anything about him except that he saved the world from Nazi Germany.”

But how much more selling does the libertarian message need in Nevada? Forget the legal gambling and prostitution: This is a state where Bob Beers was able to defeat an incumbent state senator because the latter pushed through a tax hike. Republicans shouldn’t be able to alienate libertarians and win elections here. “I’ve told the McCain people not to piss off the libertarians,” says political blogger Chuck Muth, a former Republican, now independent, who’s trying to find a friend in a safe Democratic state to vote Barr so he can vote McCain.

At the Bunny Ranch, there’s no talk of Barr among the staff. There’s a little discussion of Obama and McCain. Neither of them can touch this business, but they will not support the enterprise’s political values like Paul did either. “I don’t like either of them,” says Air Force Amy, the most famous of the Bunny Ranch girls. “I may move to Sweden.”

David Weigel (dweigel@reason.com) is an associate editor of reason.