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Last week, Campaign for Liberty press guy and Ron Paul grandson-in-law Jesse Benton was driving to a constituent event with his boss and the subject of 2012 came up.
"He hasn’t closed out the idea of another run," said Benton today. "We have some time to decide whether he runs again, or whether he gets behind somebody else. But we don’t have tons of time. By the middle of 2009, the decision needs to be made."
Benton isn't pushing Paul one way or the other. "I could get behind either decision, but it needs to be made in the next six months or so," he said. "One thing we learned is that those voters in New Hampshire and Iowa expect, to see their candidates early and often." Paul entered the 2008 primaries in January 2007, about 11 months and two weeks before the Iowa caucuses.
I asked about the rumor that former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson might jump into the race (unclear in which party yet). "If he were to decide that he wanted to do that, he’d be a great guy to take the reins. But I don’t think that what Dr. Paul captured was 100 percent transferable to anyone else. I think the Bob Barr campaign assumed that and it didn't pan out."
Would Paul run as a Republican again or as a Libertarian? "We try not to ever deal in absolutes in politics," Benton said carefully. "But he would be very likely to be running as a Republican again." It's not just that "working within the system" gets more exposure for a candidate. It's that several Republican primary states include the caveat that candidates cannot run in their primaries and go third party if they lose. "To be frank, I got tired of the 'third party' question getting asked time after time, and I know that Ron did too."
Paul is almost exactly a year older than John McCain, and turned 73 in August.
Via Instapundit, it seems that T. Boone Pickens is slowing down his plans to save America by getting us to buy wind power from him.
Over the past two days, Boone spoke at events where he said that the wind project is having trouble getting financing because of the credit crunch.
He was also quoted saying that falling prices of natural gas, used in power plants, are making his wind project less economical.
Another possible factor (albeit smaller) is the defeat of California's Proposition 10, a plan to provide rebates that was heavily funded by Pickens because of the potential windfall to his business. reason was critical of that set-up early this year, and Pickens spent a lot of his time dealing with criticism in a conference call I participated in last month. But the biggest problem I had with Pickens' year-long campaign was his populist angle that our purchase of oil from other countries was "the largest wealth transfer in the history of mankind." Steven Milloy put it best.
Contrary to Pickens' demagoguery, "wealth transfer" is a term generally used in the context of estate planning, where money is simply "gifted" to heirs.
Our purchases of foreign oil, in contrast, are more reasonably known as "trade" — and trade is good.
Americans are not simply petro-junkies who mainline crude oil for the masochistic high of watching gas pump numbers spin faster. We produce goods and services with imported oil more than any other people on this planet.
The Pickens TV and PR campaign was one of the most sophisticated I've ever seen: not only did he get Al Gore and the presidential candidates to give him cover, I remember an Ohio voter who said she didn't like McCain or Obama so she'd write in Pickens. (Pickens' gravelly Texas accent was a big help, I think: as Ross Perot could tell you, there's something more politically attractive about a plains tycoon than, say, a Silicon Valley billionaire.) But I'm not weeping that his $57 million campaign isn't getting him what he wanted this year.
If you're in the D.C. area tonight, I'm appearing on an America's Future Foundation panel on the subject "Now What? An Election Postmortem."
With president-elect Barack Obama stepping into the White House, with expanded Democratic majorities in Congress, with public sentiment moving against free markets in the midst of the economic crisis, and with Virgina voters supporting a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1964--now what? What does this mean for freedom and the free market principles that conservatives and libertarians fight for? Will this be the opportunity for the Republican Party to rebuild and come back to their roots of a smaller government? What lessons can be learned from this election and how do conservatives and libertarians move forward?
I'm stepping in for Evans-Novak reporter Tim Carney, so my remarks will be mostly exit poll and other data-driven with some suggestions of what libertarians in the GOP should do. The answer, obviously, is to ban gay marriage everywhere and ask Democrats hard questions then upload the responses to YouTube. Also, to run Sarah Palin for president every four years.
In the L.A. Times, I go at it again with the Center for American Progress senior fellow on whether Hillary Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger should get jobs in the Obama cabinet.
This National Journal map doesn’t strike me as a particularly useful guide for the GOP's chances of taking back the House. It obsesses over which Democrats represent districts that voted for President Bush in 2004. But 2004 was, you know, four years ago. This year Barack Obama clobbered McCain in every Kerry state and all of the non-deep South, non-Great Plains, non-Arizona Bush states. As a result, outside the deep South, basically every Democrat is from a “safer” district now.
Look at Virginia. The first number is how much of the vote John McCain scored in this district. The second number is what George W. Bush scored four years ago, when he easily defeated John Kerry statewide. I’ve bolded the districts where the representative is now from the party whose presidential candidate lost the district. (VA-02, VA-05, and VA-11 all replaced Republicans with Democrats this year.)
VA-01: Rob Wittman (R) - 51% (60%)
VA-02: Glenn Nye (D) - 49% (58%)
VA-03: Bobby Scott (D) - 24% (33%)
VA-04: Randy Forbes (R) - 49% (57%)
VA-05: Tom Perriello (D) - 51% (56%)
VA-06: Bob Goodlatte (R) - 57% (63%)
VA-07: Eric Cantor (R) - 53% (61%)
VA-08: Jim Moran (D) - 30% (35%)
VA-09: Rick Boucher (D) - 59% (59%)
VA-10: Frank Wolf (R) - 46% (55%)
VA-11: Gerry Connelly (D) - 42% (50%)
See what happened? Only two of the state’s six Democrats are in McCain-voting districts, one of them in a squeaker (Perriello) and one whose southwest district is so safe for him that the GOP didn’t even field a challenger (Boucher.) Two of the state’s five Republicans are now in Obama-voting districts, even though their districts voted for Bush last time. And two of the three Democrats elected this year, Connelly and Nye, are in districts that swung from Bush to Obama.
Keep in mind, all of this happened in a state whose Republican governor and legislature started the decade by gerrymandering the districts for maximum GOP strength. Bush carried nine of Virginia’s 11 districts twice. McCain carried only five of them. Once we learn the full results from states like Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana, Iowa and Wisconsin, places where Obama dramatically outperformed in the suburbs, I think we’ll learn that most congressional districts went blue at the presidential level. In 2004, 255 congressional districts had gone red.