While the "big three" Republican presidential candidates—Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney—have monopolized the media coverage of the GOP presidential race, perhaps the biggest story of the race is the apparent dissatisfaction of Republican voters with the current slate of candidates. In a field full of big-government, hawkish politicians, there is little of substance to distinguish one candidate from another.
The exception is Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who previously ran for president in 1988 as the Libertarian Party candidate. Paul advocates a return to the constitutional limits of government and a foreign policy of peace and trade instead of intervention and nation-building. Those who feel the government has eroded their liberties and gotten too big and too powerful for its own good would do well to give him serious consideration.
Although Paul has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, he did grab headlines following the second Republican presidential debate in South Carolina. He pointed out that extreme acts such as the terrorism of 9/11 do not happen in a vacuum and that U.S. interventions overseas can have unintended consequences, or "blowback," as the CIA has called it. This is a sensible position, seeing as our former alliances with Osama bin Laden during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war did not prove to be so good for our national interests in the long run.
One-note wonder candidate Giuliani jumped at the chance to mischaracterize Paul’s position as blaming America for the attacks, adding, "I don’t think I have ever heard that before and I have heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11." The only problem was that the 9/11 Commission Report itself provided support for Paul’s position, based on the testimony of experts on terrorism and the Middle East.
Commentators on Fox News, which sponsored the debate, predicted the rapid demise of the Paul candidacy after his appearance. But then a funny thing happened. Paul posted a strong second in Fox News’s own post-debate poll, and his campaign has enjoyed a robust, energized grassroots movement since. He has strong Internet support as well, generating far more interest than all other candidates on social networking sites such as MySpace and YouTube. Paul’s performance has even caused Sportsbook.com to dramatically decrease his odds of becoming the next president from 200:1 to 15:1, and it expects to slash those odds even further in the coming weeks.
It is interesting that so many Republicans have sold their souls to support candidates like Giuliani, with whom they fundamentally disagree on a number of key issues but back anyway merely because they think he can win the general election. According to recent polling by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 44 percent of social conservatives think Giuliani has the "best chance" of winning the presidency, and 30 percent have thrown their support behind the socially liberal candidate.
Fiscal conservatives abandoned principle in favor of power shortly after the "Republican Revolution" of the mid-1990s. Now, it seems social conservatives have made the same Faustian bargain.
Once upon a time, I was active in Republican Party politics. I was on the board of the college Republicans at UCLA and headed a Young Republicans group in Ventura County. I considered myself to be a fiscal conservative and was excited by the promises to reduce the size and scope of government made by members of the Republican Revolution that swept the GOP into power in Congress in 1994.
There were promises to eliminate entire federal departments, such as the Department of Education, prevent government interference in the economy and elsewhere, and maintain fiscal responsibility. Yet, within only a couple of years, it was Republicans who drastically increased federal education funding, increased the minimum wage, and, once they had taken control of the White House as well, went on a spending binge greater than any administration since Lyndon Johnson’s.
It soon became apparent that the purported party of small government had abandoned its principles, and I found my new political home in the Libertarian Party. Republicans would do well to remember this lesson in the 2008 election. Voters are tired of picking the lesser of two evils, especially as the two major parties become increasingly indistinguishable. The GOP risks alienating a large group of voters—including fiscal conservatives on the right, civil libertarians on the left, libertarians in general, and anti-war voters of all parties—if it tries to ignore or marginalize Ron Paul’s candidacy.
