Topic: Presidential Campaign 2008
Maybe the Libertarian Party is Lucky Elitism, Racism and Scandal. Maybe the LP is lucky it's being ignored by the media.by rtbohan
(libertarian)
Monday, September 8, 2008
It is a quadrennial complaint of the Libertarian Party that the Party, its platform and its candidates are excluded from the debates and ignored by the media. And the compliaints are justified. The media always concentrates on the activities and the speeches of the two major parties and ignores the other choices available in the election. It is how to say the voters are making a reasoned choice of party and policy if they never get a chance to hear all of the choices available to them.
But looking at the internet, maybe the LP is lucky no one is looking. Blogger brmillerlib yesterday posted an account ot the Party's National Committee meeting at which an elected member, Angela Keaton, was ejected from the meeting, after which the remaining members, without allowing her to speak, voted to remove her from the Committee([link edited for length]). Although the article does not give any indication of the grounds for removing an elected member from the office to which she was elected, commenter Kate O'Brien indicates that it was the result of a personal confict between Keaton and a party official.
Just look at how the media reacts to any change in the campaign staff of the Democratic or Republican candidates for President. Think what would happen if the National Committee of either of the major parties had engaged in a similar proceeding. Fortunately for the LP, only those who make a practice of following the antics of the LP will be aware of this one. The action may inspire outrage, laughter or ennui among the devotees of Libertarian politiics, but, fortunately for those involved, most of the country will never know.
As if this were not bad enough, Reason Magazine On -Line published an interview with LP vice presidential candidate Wayne Allyn Root ("WAR". as he likes to be called) by Matt Welsh ([link edited for length]). In the interview, WAR offers a bet that he had a better G.P.A. at Columbia than did his classmate, Barack Obama.
There are a lot of interesting things in the interview. One is the frequency that Mr. Root, in interviews and in speeches, almost always makes a reference to being a classmate of of Mr. Obama. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has yet to mention Mr. Root. It brings to mind the story of the nineteenth century Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who rejected a challenge to a duel by another congressman. Senator Benton was told that his antagonist planned to write a short book in which Senator Benton's behavior would play a large part. Senator Benton sent back word that he planned to write a large book in which the Congressman would not be mentioned.
Now the idea of looking at transcripts in choosing a Presiden first arose in the election of 2000, when the debates between the pedantic Al Gore and the mumbling, bumbling George W. Bush were characterized by a relative of mine as a contest between "Mr. Know-It-All" and "Mr. Know-Nothing". One enterprising reporter finally got the college records of the two candidates and discovered that Bush had better grades than Gore at Columbia. Nobody else cared.
There would be nothing wrong with Root making this wager, which seems to be made without knowledge of Obama's academic record. Since Obama will probably ignore him, as he has consistently, there is little chance that Root will actually have to pay, and none at all that Obama will. It might not have been a bad gimmick to get some minimal attention if Root had not couched it in the terms of an elitist and racist attitude.
His first contention is that he was better known than Obama among their classmates. Or at least that is what he appears to be saying. What he said was "Nobody I knew knew Obama, and they all knew me." I expect that Obama would be able to make the same sort of statement about Root. What the statement would seem to imply is that Root, as the campus bookie, had more contacts among the social and economic elited of the Columbia students. No surprise there.
He then assumes that he will have a better G.P.A. because Obama is black, and Affirmative Action programs allow minority students to obtain admissin with lower higher school grades and lower test scores. But the assumption that because a student is black he is automatically less qualified is the kind of racism which a candidate of the Libertarian Party, which puts emphasis on the individual, would do well to avoid.
On the whole, given the performance of the LP and its candidates, the Party may be lucky that the media are not paying attention.
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The removal of Angela Keaton is dispicable. This is an attempt by certain party leaders to dispose of the people they disagree with regardless of the will of the people. It reminds me of antics pulled by a former party executive to smear our brightest and best, Mary Ruwart.
I'm not going to go looking for sources, but from what I read in passing: Keaton was live-blogging LNC meetings, and was asked to stop after a minor error -- she had the Barr campaign deciding to focus on him rather than the LP, when it was actually reported that the media had decided to do that -- was promoted as the latest LP "scandal" by Last Free Voice. She refused to stop, so the LNC voted to remove her.
Posted By: Thomas L. Knapp
Date: 2008-09-09 03:40:10
Actually, Keaton was not removed from the LNC, although apparently there's a motion in play asking her to apologize or resign. And the issue was not a minor error in her liveblogging (actually, she used Twitter and others liveblogged the output), but the fact that she was shining unwanted light on the LNC's operations.
That bears emphasis: The problem the LNC has is not that its actions might be falsely portrayed. It doesn't want the membership to know what it's doing at all, outside of minutes which, per LNC policy established a few years ago, are required to be bare-bones rather than comprehensive.
How important to the LNC is protecting its culture of secrecy? Well, this was the last LNC meeting in a presidential election cycle. About one third of it was spent trying to silence or eject Keaton, and another chunk of time was spent debating on whether or not the LNC's meetings should be taped and, if so, whether the tapes should be destroyed afterward. Apparently the LNC's choice of the Watergate for its headquarters was not entirely coincidental.
Because the people running LNC are rreligious nationalist socialist plants. (i.e. extreme religious populists) and opportunists, at least some working with their opposite numbers in the government. The motives arevarious, but as one said to me, "anything but Libertarianism."
It's the same stuff that paralyzed the Canadian LP years ago.
They even have a large yahoo group somewhere, which says explicitly they're seeking to silence Libertarians as a threat to their 'values.'
If the details of Democratic National Committee meeting were being released to the media by Sarah Palin, I'd expect some DNC members to start worrying about meeting confidentiality. Same for any other two parties, I'd imagine.
Actually, Mr. Knapp was filling in for Sarah Palin in the analogy. The hypothetical wasn't that Palin was a DNC member, but that she had friends on the DNC filling her in on the proceedings.
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