Over at Rasmussen Reports, there’s a poll asking about a matchup in 2012 between President Obama and libertarian-oriented Ron Paul. The results aren’t surprising – there’s a considerable support for a libertarian-leaning candidate, even if people don’t always refer to support for free markets, individual liberty, and limited government by using the term libertarian.
In Rasmussen’s matchup, the pollsters finds that if one were to “Pit maverick Republican Congressman Ron Paul against President Obama in a hypothetical 2012 election match-up, and the race [would be] — virtually dead even. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of likely voters finds Obama with 42% support and Paul with 41% of the vote. Eleven percent (11%) prefer some other candidate, and six percent (6%) are undecided.”
These results are all the more impressive when one considers that Paul has some views idiosyncratic for most libertarians, and that he’s had nowhere near the favorable press attention that President Obama has had. I don’t doubt that Representative Paul would lose a real race against President Obama, but I think he’d come much closer to winning on election day than the incumbent’s supporters, or status quo Republicans, would find comfortable. (Of the group that Rasmussen defines as the “political class,” 95% would favor Obama; of those that Rasmussen defines as “mainstream,” 58% would favor Paul. Definitions of these terms, and the questions and toplines from the survey, are available at Election 2012: Barack Obama 42%, Ron Paul 41%.
More interesting to me is how the results show the decline not of the left, so much as so-called big-government conservatism. There’s been much of that these last several years, and it’s brought the Republican party only voter discontent and defeat. Simultaneously, it left the Republicans unable to challenge credibly the more far-reaching political program of America’s progressives. Those Americans who favor government intervention and regulation aren’t likely to find the lukewarm efforts of big-government Republicans appealing. I don’t support government intervention in this, that, and the other thing, but if I did, I’d rather have the genuine article over a pale copy. Why would one buy a Republican rabbit for the same price as a Democratic mink?
In Whitewater, one can see the Pyrrhic victory that big-government, there-oughta-be-a-law conservatives have had. The price of entry into local politics is a “we-have-to-regulate-something, we-have-to-prohibit-something” admission ticket. Small-government conservative are plentiful in the city, but not so much in office. On a topic like binge drinking, for example, one will find an alliance between incumbent progressives who want to legislative to prevent harm, and incumbent conservatives who want to extend enforcement authority. It’s a bad bargain for the left: the problem of over-drinking won’t go away, and big-government conservatives will just move on to another area of administrative over-reach, using their last effort as a precedent.
These victories come at a price. One can see the wide gap between how officials portray regulatory efforts, and how people freely describe them, whenever comments are published freely. Outside of a small, sycophantic press, initiatives touted as major or extraordinary are often viewed skeptically, or ridiculed. It’s not radicals – we don’t have ‘radicals’ in town – who have come to doubt the florid justifications for government intervention. Look carefully at those voicing objections, and one will see that many are center-right in viewpoint, but increasingly doubtful of one grand claim after another. If enforcement actions meet with increasing skepticism — and they do — it’s because formerly supportive moderates and conservatives have grown tired of grand talk.
New ordinances should be subject to half-year and full-year review, where officials would be required to present concrete, verifiable evidence of a new ordinance’s influence. That’s the last thing many advocates of new regulatory authority would want, but it’s among the first things that the city should require, and expect.