It’s Not a Campaign, It’s a Mission
By ALEX WILLIAMS

Attendance at Ron Paul campaign stops has nearly returned to pre-Super Tuesday levels. A group of supporters recently announced plans to start Paulville, a gated community in West Texas, where believers can pursue the candidate’s libertarian ideals as a cooperative lifestyle. Ron Paul’s book, “The Revolution: A Manifesto,” rocketed to No. 1 on a New York Times best-seller list on May 18 (it has since dropped). Supporters are starting to discuss creating yippie-ish disruptions at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul in September to gain visibility for the movement.

Many supporters say that such gestures are not the final gasp of a failed political campaign, but a spark for a “revolution.” And Mr. Paul encourages such talk. When he speaks or writes of revolution, the congressman means it in the 1776 sense, except that the oppressors now live in Washington, not London. The candidate wants to turn back what he sees as 200 years of creeping expansion of federal power, dissolve the Federal Reserve and the Internal Revenue Service, return to the gold standard, bring the troops home, not just from Iraq, but from everywhere — and yes, legalize pot, at least for medical purposes.

This message has hit home — not only with some traditional libertarians, but also among a small but passionate group of young voters who came of age after Sept. 11, during the debates about the Iraq war, the Patriot Act and Abu Ghraib. For them, the Ron Paul message has the feel not of 1776, but of 1968, when an unpopular war raged abroad, and a subculture of disenfranchised young people embraced an unorthodox philosophy built around a utopian ideal of freedom.

Of course, Ron Paul is a lot closer to Barry Goldwater than to Eugene McCarthy. But his young supporters, many of whom call themselves former liberals, said the peacenik left shares much with the libertarian right.

“It’s about taking the country back,” Mr. Lim said, waving off the policy differences between his old “political saint,” Mr. Nader, and his new one, who is anti-Roe (Mr. Paul opposes abortion personally, but thinks states should decide the issue) and supports gun rights. “Whether you believe in abortion or not, in guns or not, that’s not the point,” Mr. Lim said. “It’s about the way the country is going: to hell in a handbasket.”

Could this be the beginning of a collision course?

Is Bob Barr the Ralph Nader of 2008?
By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet.

For many Libertarian delegates, the best joke of the weekend wasn’t overheard in the lunch line; it was the result of the convention itself, which party veterans describe as the most bruising and ideologically acrimonious in a quarter-century. After six ballots, a deeply divided party chose the dour former Republican Congressman Bob Barr as its presidential candidate and a brash Vegas oddsmaker named Wayne Allyn Root as his number two. Both are recent GOP defectors, and both are viewed with suspicion if not hostility by much of the party’s radical or “purist” old guard, which rallied around the candidacy of veteran Libertarian activist Mary Ruwart.

It turns out the Democrats aren’t the only ones with a unity problem. In the run-up to the balloting, a determined anti-Barr front advertised itself with buttons and fliers declaring fealty to “the Libertarian wing of the Libertarian Party.” When Barr finally secured the nomination with 54 percent of the vote, Ruwart not only pointedly failed to endorse him in her concession speech, but sounded like she was going underground with her troops to fight another day. “Our work continues,” she said. “Writing, speaking, recruiting.” But not campaigning.

It’s not yet clear whether any of this should concern those outside the tiny world of Libertarian politics. But inside the convention hall on Sunday, it was possible to mistake the victory of Barr/Root ‘08 as a ground-shaking world-historical event. One despondent member of the Libertarian Radical Caucus wearing a button depicting Barr as the Wicked Witch of the West expressed fears that the choice spelled the end of the Libertarian Party, and thus the end of America’s, and hence the world’s, last best hope. “This is a disaster. (Barr) hasn’t been around long enough to be one of us,” he said. “He still has so much to learn about Liberty — and much to atone for.”

Living in New York affords me the opportunity to vote for someone besides a Democrat, someone closer to my principles. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to vote for Barack Obama, but it doesn’t matter if I do, because, once again, I live in New York. It’s a given. I might just as well vote for Cynthia McKinney. If only I lived in Colorado, or Virginia, New Mexico or Florida…then it would be imperative for me to show up at the polls and pull the lever for “D.” We need Third Parties, on the Left and the Right, now, more than ever…I just hope their voices aren’t drowned out by political refuges & Johnny-come-latelys.