Same answer I give to the progressives. You need bottom-up, not top-down. People won’t vote for a president and then have to turn to another party for the 500 other offices they encounter. Build a party starting locally, get people you know in office, have them move up to higher offices so that they can produce results and not lofty empty promises. That’s why third parties can’t work. They can’t produce results unless they are ubiquitous. People care about results.
This sidesteps the issue that libertarians who hate government can’t produce results in government, as the conservatives have already proven. So a Libertarian government is an oxymoron. But you knew that.
Currently, the VP has a staff of about 200, including the staff assigned to his wife. So size alone would tend to give it to the VP. Plus Biden has other duties chairing task force and committees for the President, therefore increasing his executive experience. It is doubtful Nixon had a staff the size of our current VP, but according to Whitehouse.gov, he had major responsibilities in the Eisenhower administration. And he had been big a Representative and a Senator when selected for the job.
So it would be hard to choose who was more experienced based on just what she had done up to her stint as First Lady. Add in everything she has done since? Yeah, she’s probably better qualified now then he was when he won in 1968.
Paul ran a campaign in which only those eligible to vote in Republican primaries could vote for him yet still earned about as many votes, if not more, as Johnson did in the general election.
Republicans who are for gay rights, legalized prostitution, against the death penalty, legalizing drugs with heroin available at local pharmacies, large cut-backs in foreign aid, for free trade to the degree of no tariffs and no restrictions to trade, against the Patriot Act, letting illegal immigrants mostly stay, raising retirement age to at least 70, and cutting all support and aid to Israel?
Honestly not a huge n.
And not to worry he has just as many positions that are anathema to most Democrat-leaners.
Just a bump to say they’ve suddenly taking Facebook by storm.
The only discussion I had seen about Johnson/Weld had been here at the SDMB, but it seems they’ve just put out a video ad and every low information voter has been sharing it on Facebook saying, “Hey, have you heard of this guy? Actually makes a lot of sense!” Of course, none of this Facebook action that I’ve seen has shown any indication that the people showing the video actual took the next step to read up on his actual political views. All the Facebook posts are responses to the video ad only. Also, none of the posts I’ve seen indicate long time support- it’s just people hearing of him for the first time because someone else posted the video and everyone is just feeling warm and fuzzy about the rhetoric.
Who knows, maybe this weekend will come and go as having been his “big moment” but I think there’s a good chance he’ll have picked up as much as a half dozen supporters before the end of the long Holiday weekend.
I’m now seeing tons of pro-Johnson posts in my Facebook feed, since the convention started. They’re coming from the Republican side of my friends list. I guess they’re not happy with what they’re seeing.
Reminder: Gary Johnson wants to abolish the Federal Reserve, at least according to Libertarian Republic. That’s crackpot stuff. But there’s the whiff of pandering about as the full quote says the following: [INDENT][INDENT] He acknowledged that in all likelihood the current Congress would oppose abolishing the Federal Reserve, but he said: “If Congress were to submit legislation to do so … Yeah, I’d sign it.” When questioned about auditing the Federal Reserve, however, Johnson replied: “It could cause a world-wide panic …The issue is just the shock. How many assets are they holding? … What percentage of government bonds are they buying….?” [/INDENT][/INDENT] In actuality, the Fed routinely releases its balance sheets. The pragmatism is appreciated, but a President Gary Johnson would have to appease his loony tunes base.
Elminating the Federal Reserve is a crackpot idea, but WHY is it a crackpot idea?
Because putting the money supply under democratic control is a very bad idea. Yet it’s understandable why many on both the left and right would have a problem with this.
Democrats keep on pushing the importance of letting everyone vote and how sacred this right is. Yet how important do they really feel the vote is if it doesn’t actually give voters control over things like the money supply? It’s natural that people who want more democracy would want the Fed to NOT be an unaccountable agency. It’s independent for a very good reason, of course. No one in Congress knows the first thing about the money supply. But there’s a lot of things they don’t know anything about that maybe should be taken out of their hands. Where does this thinking end?
It’s certainly reasonable to debate such an issue and where we draw the line.
As I understand it, the desire to eliminate the Fed springs from a problem libertarian extremists have with fiat money. They want to go back to the Free Banking days of the 1800s, when the US economy suffered many series of bank panics.
Folding the Fed into the Treasury is something else. The Bank of England actually ran things that way for a while - membership was closely tied to the current government. That situation has been reformed.
I agree that while folding the Fed into the Treasury is a bad idea, it’s not crackpot stuff. Jabbering about fiat money is.
ETA: Given Johnson’s caveats, I still prefer him over Jill Stein, though my politics are a lot closer to her’s. I’m just saying the Johnson will have to deal with crazy supporters in a way that Clinton or even Romney would not. (Both of the latter have crazy supporters, but proportions matter.)
Yeah, true, the fiat money is the main argument, and the least valid part of the argument. But the lack of accountability is what drives the “audit” arguments and partially drives the “End the Fed” arguments as well. It’s another example of the political class doing what’s best but not bothering to ever explain why it’s best to the public in an honest way. We seem to be reaching a tipping point where the publics of many nations aren’t going to accept that sort of thing anymore.
The root problem is that we don’t trust the elites and they don’t trust us. That’s not a sustainable state of affairs.
Watching the Libertarian Town Hall on CNN and I have to say the L’s effed up by not putting Weld at the top of the ticket.
I know authentic/traditional Libertarian Party ideas are pretty out there but Johnson & Weld are staking out an ideology in this, their best television venue yet, that most of us would recognize as old school, moderate Republicanism with an even more expansive view of civil liberties.
If Hillary implodes for some unexpected reason I could deal with these two guys in charge for four years.
Anyone who wants to save the GOP would be well served by paying attention to the positions they support.