David Weigel on the campaign trail:
On the way out of the Denver convention, defeated candidate and Massachusetts party chair George Phillies pulled me aside to express how worried he was about the Barr/Root ticket. “This is a train wreck,” he said. “My delegation is majority pagan. Nominating this man is the equivalent of nominating an Imperial Wizard of the KKK to lead a party of African Americans.
Yes, God forbid that people who don’t adhere to the Judeo-Christian tradition should have any political representation. And praise the Lord for Bob Barr’s noble work in Congress in combatting the non-Judeo-Christian scourge!
http://www.religioustolerance.org/burn_aw2.htm
Point well taken. I was not fully aware of that weirdness on Barr’s point. But then, it’s also a bit odd to predict “a train wreck” because the majority of a state’s delegation to a third-party convention is “pagan.” Isn’t that a bit….jarring?
Well, actually I don’t think so. I take Phillies’ point to be this: “we’re libertarians, not the christian religious right. And yet we’ve ended up with a christian religious right candidate, rather than a libertarian.”
Palmer, I think you’ll understand this quite well, irrespective their ideological content, men like Viguerie, Barr and Buchanan behave like Trots. The Libertarian Party has been invaded, and shall soon die.
Actually I have been very suspect of Weigel’s reporting. His reports frequently didn’t match what I saw but then I saw him so little at the convention. And Weigel clearly was a Barr partisan — at least by his consistent sniping at the libertarians which was absent when he discussed conservatives like Barr or Root. Weigel seems to take pleasure in ridculing libertarians even if he has to twist things a bit to do so.
That said I also think that Barr will be a disaster. He is bad on so many issues. He’s not great on foreign policy, he’s weak on the market — especially free trade, and he is not a social liberal but a cultural conservative. In my view the Libertarian Party had a hostile takeover by the Right.
What is worse is that these pro-war, anti-social freedom conservatives are attacking anyone who is libertarian as being extremists. They have equated principled libertarianism with anarchism (which just isn’t necessarily so) and have pledged to drive all the “anarchists” out of the party leaving it with nothing but Republican wannabes. Welcome to the Liberpublican Party. The Party of Principle (for sale to the highest bidder).