Kubby 2008

This being my first blog entry on Presidents Race 2008, I'll open with a disclaimer: I've already chosen my candidate, and am an active member of his campaign team. His name is Steve Kubby, and he's seeking the Libertarian Party's 2008 presidential nomination. Check him out.

And, of course, check out the other Libertarian candidates as well (but I'll let them and their supporters speak for themselves -- there are quite a few).

This entry isn't about Steve Kubby per se, but rather about the general political situation in the US today, why it favors growth and increased vote totals for Libertarian candidates, and why you should take notice, check out the LP and its candidates, and give them due consideration.

Since November, a number of analysts and pundits have looked into the impact of both the libertarian vote (the small "l" reflecting an ideological orientation) and the Libertarian vote (the large "L" reflecting a partisan affiliation). That impact seems to have been larger than is obvious from raw vote totals -- and a good place to start understanding that impact is "Examining the Libertarian Vote," by David Kirby and David Boaz of the Cato Institute.

Bottom line:

The era of libertarian/Republican "fusionism" seems to be over. For decades, a segment of libertarian-leaning voters have supported the Republican Party and its candidates on the premise that they were the best bet for "smaller government." Six years of George W. Bush's big-spending ways, combined with a distinctly non-"conservative" foreign policy, have sundered that coalition.

But as libertarian voters desert the GOP, where are they to go? Brink Lindsey has suggested a libertarian coalition with the Democrats, but that party seems determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Elected Democrats have, for the most part, acted spinelessly on the issue of the war on Iraq. Instead of proposing to rein in big-spending Republicans with fiscal discipline, they just want to continue the spending spree on different items. Instead of standing up for the rights of immigrants, they've jumped on the "build a fence" bandwagon.

Meanwhile, the Libertarian Party has not achieved significant electoral success over its 35 years of existence. A few hundred local officials, a handful of state legislators, but no US Representatives, US Senators, or statewide officials.

That may be about to change. The GOP is bleeding constituencies on the right, the Democrats on the left ... and most of these constituencies find support in the LP's traditional platform for their goals. Anti-war? We're your party. Pro-immigration? That's us. Want lower taxes and a balanced budget? We've got you covered. And, for bonus points, Libertarians seem to finally be re-examining their knee-jerk reaction of equating "free enterprise" with "big business," and taking environmental issues seriously. GOP/libertarian "fusionism" is giving way to fission in the two "major parties," to the LP's benefit.

To put a finer point on it, America's political center is moving toward the Libertarian Party's platform. I'm not bold enough to predict that a Libertarian will be elected to the presidency in 2008 ... but I think it very likely that the LP's vote totals in 2008 will determine the outcome of that election at the presidential level and elsewhere.