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11/09/2006 Archived Entry: "Post-election thoughts"

COUPLE OF INTERESTING THOUGHTS here:

There's plenty of evidence to suggest that President Bush may have been the deciding factor that killed the GOP's momentum in some key Senate races over the last week. One Republican consultant is convinced that Bush's last-minute visit to Missouri on behalf of ousted GOP Sen. Jim Talent did the incumbent in. According to the network exit polls, Democrat Claire McCaskill crushed Talent among those late-breaking voters who decided in the final three days (a full 11 percent of the electorate). Bush also made a last-minute trip to Montana, where anecdotal evidence indicates the president's rally for Republican Conrad Burns stopped the incumbent's momentum in Billings.

Hm. I'd been wondering about that. It's far from proven, but seems logical

And:

Forget "red" and "blue." The country is basically divided into four voting blocs: the Democratic Northeast, the Republican South, the populist Midwest and the libertarian West. Democrats probably have a decent grip on those populist Midwest voters for a while (at least until the area transforms completely into a new economy). As for the libertarian West (home of the first state -- Arizona -- to reject a gay marriage ban), this is a region that is more up for grabs than it should be. And it's because the Republican Party has grown more religious and more pro-government which turns off these "leave me alone," small-government libertarian Republicans.

I wish the West were as libertarian as pundits lately think it is. Still, I'm glad to be here rather than in, say, Massachusetts. Fashionable talk is right now that the alleged libertarian bloc (around 13 percent of the country, according to the Catoites) is the great swing faction & that politicians are all missing an enormous bet by not catering to us.

Yeah. But how can they cater to real libertarians? All they can do is up their lie quotient. We promise to limit the size of government. We promise to respect the Bill of Rights. We promise to end the drug war. We promise no foreign adventurism. We promise to eliminate useless excresences like the Department of Education. We promise to repeal all laws that hinder peaceable gun ownership. Yeah, right.

Politicians may cynically use us, as "Saint Reagan" (and later the oily and inexcusable Bush 2000) did -- conning hopeful and naive freedom seekers into offering up limited-government votes for their unlimited-government ends. Jacob Hornberger nails it.

There is no political profit and no power in genuinely serving libertarian Americans. Libertarians (and fellow government-slashing sorts) are the last remaining completely unrepresented minority group. And likely to remain so.

Posted by Claire @ 08:11 AM CST
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