David Boaz

Today’s Wall Street Journal gives a warm review to the new book Twilight at Monticello by Alan Pell Crawford:

Alan Pell Crawford treats his subject with grace and sympathetic understanding, and with keen penetration as well, showing the great man’s contradictions (and hypocrisies) for what they were…. Drawing on new archival sources, Mr. Crawford reconstructs daily life at Monticello and depicts a colorful supporting cast of eminent personages, family members and retainers.

Alan Crawford will discuss Twilight at Monticello at the Cato Institute on Tuesday, February 19. He promises to discuss Jefferson’s growing concerns about slavery and how he became a radical decentralist and admirer of the New England townships, where, he believed, the real fire of liberty burned bright. The event will begin at 6:30 p.m., so our hard-working friends can work a full day and still join us for a glass of wine and a new look at the man George Will called “the man of the millennium.”

Sen. John McCain boasts about the breadth of his support: “We’re depending on Republicans, Democrats, independents, Libertarians, vegetarians, Trotskyites,” he said in Michigan.

Alas, the 71-year-old senator is not up on the latest lingo. The Trotskyites prefer to be called neoconservatives now.

Robert S. McIntyre, the tireless crusader for higher taxes, had a letter in Saturday’s Washington Post under the title “Fuzzy Math.” Usually McIntyre is directing his ire at the “fuzzy math” of supply-siders and other fiscal conservatives, such as this pdf about Senate Republicans. This time, however, he wrote in to point out an error in the Post’s political data. But was it an error? Here’s McIntyre’s letter:

Fuzzy Math

On Jan. 4, reporting the results of the Iowa caucuses, you said, “Sixty percent of Republican caucusgoers described themselves as evangelicals, according to entrance polls. Those voters went for Huckabee over Romney by more than 2 to 1.” [That article here.] Meanwhile, you also reported that Mike Huckabee received 34 percent of the total GOP vote. This seems impossible.

Even if Huckabee didn’t get a single non-evangelical vote, his two-thirds-plus share of 60 percent of the voters would give him more than 40 percent of the total vote.

Can you explain this?

– Robert S. McIntyre

McIntyre seems to be befuddled by a simple conceptual error. He’s assuming that Huckabee and Romney were the only two candidates, in which case two-thirds of 60 percent of the voters would indeed be 40 percent of the total vote. But in fact, Huckabee and Romney together got only 60 percent of the total vote. So let’s sort through the numbers. The entrance poll surveyed 1600 Republican voters. Of those, we’re told that 60 percent, or 960, were evangelicals. As this Los Angeles Times graphic of the entrance polls shows, Huckabee beat Romney 46-19 among those voters, which suggests he got about 442 evangelical votes among those polled. (And about 35 percent of evangelical voters voted for someone other than Huckabee or Romney.) That’s about 28 percent of the 1600 total voters. Huckabee got only 14 percent of the non-evangelical Republicans polled, or about 90 people. Add the 90 to the 442, and you get 532, or 33.25 percent of the voters surveyed. Which is pretty close to the 34.4 percent that Huckabee got in the actual caucuses.

McIntyre’s error should have been obvious to the Post’s editors. I don’t know why newspapers should publish letters to the editor that contain obvious errors. Would they publish a letter that said “You misspelled Reagan; it should be Raegan”? I doubt it.

Of course, what’s more interesting is that this simple conceptual error about elementary arithmetic comes from a leading “liberal” expert on tax policy, quoted regularly in major newspapers about the interpretation of complex income tax data. Let’s hope he understands those intricate and abstruse data better than he does simple political polls.

For the past few months most libertarians have been pleased to see Ron Paul achieving unexpected success with his presidential campaign’s message of ending the Iraq war, abolishing the federal income tax, establishing sound money, and restoring the Constitution. Sure, some of us didn’t like his talk about closing the borders and his conspiratorial view of a North-South highway. But the main themes of his campaign, the ones that generated the multi-million-dollar online fundraising spectaculars and the youthful “Ron Paul Revolution,” were classic libertarian issues. It was particularly gratifying to see a presidential candidate tie the antiwar position to a belief in a strictly limited federal government.

And so it’s understandable that over the past few months a lot of people have been asking why writers at the Cato Institute seemed to display a lack of interest in or enthusiasm for the Paul campaign. Well, now you know. We had never seen the newsletters that have recently come to light, and I for one was surprised at just how vile they turned out to be. But we knew the company Ron Paul had been keeping, and we feared that they would have tied him to some reprehensible ideas far from the principles we hold.

Ron Paul says he didn’t write these newsletters, and I take him at his word. They don’t sound like him. In my infrequent personal encounters and in his public appearances, I’ve never heard him say anything racist or homophobic (halting and uncomfortable on gay issues, like a lot of 72-year-old conservatives, but not hateful). But he selected the people who did write those things, and he put his name on the otherwise unsigned newsletters, and he raised campaign funds from the mailing list that those newsletters created. And he would have us believe that things that “do not represent what I believe or have ever believed” appeared in his newsletter for years and years without his knowledge. Assuming Ron Paul in fact did not write those letters, people close to him did. His associates conceived, wrote, edited, and mailed those words. His closest associates over many years know who created those publications. If they truly admire Ron Paul, if they think he is being unfairly tarnished with words he did not write, they should come forward, take responsibility for their words, and explain how they kept Ron Paul in the dark for years about the words that appeared every month in newsletters with “Ron Paul” in the title.

Paul says he didn’t write the letters, that he denounces the words that appeared in them, that he was unaware for decades of what 100,000 people were receiving every month from him. That’s an odd claim on which to run for president: I didn’t know what my closest associates were doing over my signature, so give me responsibility for the federal government.

But of course Ron Paul isn’t running for president. He’s not going to be president, he’s not going to be the Republican nominee for president, and he never hoped to be. He got into the race to advance ideas—the ideas of peace, constitutional government, and freedom. Succeeding beyond his wildest dreams, he became the most visible so-called “libertarian” in America. And now he and his associates have slimed the noble cause of liberty and limited government. (more…)

In today’s San Francisco Chronicle, I take a look at Mike Huckabee, the winner of the Iowa caucuses:

After a year of wringing their hands over their choices in the presidential race - a pro-choice mayor with an authoritarian streak, a serial flip-flopper, and a senator who is a dedicated opponent of free speech - the Republicans finally have a new front-runner….

So . . . Republicans looking for a presidential candidate to inspire them are now faced with a tax-and-spend religious rightist who would have the federal government regulate everything from restaurant menus to local schools.

As Dorothy Parker would say, “What fresh hell is this?”

Sen. Barack Obama has excited the national media, Andrew Sullivan, young voters, and 38 percent of Iowa Democrats with his message of “change” and “hope” and “becoming one people, the United States of America.” It makes for a great speech. But I’m reminded of what the Democratic establishment candidate, Walter Mondale, said to insurgent Gary Hart after Hart did well in the 1984 Iowa caucuses with a campaign of “new ideas”: Where’s the beef?

It’s not that Obama hasn’t addressed questions of public policy. His campaign website has as many policy ideas as a Bill Clinton State of the Union Address. It’s just that they’re pretty much the same ideas: more taxes, more spending, more government help to scratch every itch a voter might have. He’s got more subsidies for workers who lose their jobs because of international competition, more subsidies for research and jobs and energy technology and broadband access and rural schools, more federal support for labor unions, and much much more.

To help borrowers and employees, he proposes more regulations on lenders, credit card issuers, and employers. These would, of course, make lending and hiring more expensive, so fewer people would be hired, and their wages would be lower, and borrowing on credit cards and mortages would be more costly.

But my main point here is, these are the same policies that Sen. Hillary Clinton proposes. So what’s so new? In what way does Obama offer “change” or “hope” or something different from ”the same kind of partisan battling we had in the ’90s”? Where’s the beef?