Weigel

If you're in D.C., you can catch me speaking at the Cato Institute about Tea Party politics. If you can't make it, here's the gist of what I'll say.

Let’s start with excerpts from two articles from TheWashington Post . Both are about Rand Paul,the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate in Kentucky. This one is from May 13.

Paul's campaign stops are feisty affairs at whichsupporters hoot and cheer as he weaves his personal biography and a list ofgrievances with Washington into a populist call to arms. The founder of theantitax organization Kentucky Taxpayers United, Paul rails against what hedescribes as Washington's unsustainable spending, crippling debt, careerpoliticians with no term limits, a "socialist" health-care law and afailure to close the nation's borders to illegal immigrants.

This one is from May 21.

Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul of Kentucky thrusthimself, his party and the movement into an uncomfortable conversation aboutthe federal government's role in prohibiting racial discrimination and about aperiod of history that most politicians consider beyond debate.

That’s a pretty serious tone change. What happened in theweek between those two articles? You know the answer: Paul won. He defeated theGOP’s hapless establishment candidate in a landslide, and then he took avictory lap with a bunch of media interviews. Paul thought he knew what he’d begetting, because in the year he’d spent campaigning for the nomination, he’dbecome a symbol of the Tea Party movement, asked to explain what he dislikedabout the Republican Party, why Americans were pouring into the streets withGadsden flags – you know, easy stuff. But the moment he won, he was asked byNPR to apply his libertarian philosophy to enforcement of the Civil Rights Act,and asked to explain a 2002 letter he wrote arguing that businesses had theright to discriminate.

I talked to Paul’s campaign team a lot that week, and gotthe sense that they were genuinely surprised by their treatment from the press.Coming off of a victory bigger than anyone expected, they didn’t expect to dealwith theoretical and accusatory questions like this? I don’t think they werenaive; I think they were the first people to feel what it’s like when theoptimism and confidence of the tea party runs up against the iron wall ofpolitical coverage.

We’re starting to get used to this kind of coverage, and Ishould say that it’s been influenced by the Democratic Party’s strategy ofportraying Republicans as undisciplined and taken over by weird morlocks fromthe heartland. When one party pushes a line, reporters spend a lot of timeasking the other party if it’s true. But if the media’s used to hearing thatfrom Democrats, it’s not actually used to libertarian ideas coming fromRepublican candidates. Republicans are supposed to like tax cuts and defensespending and, usually, enormous walls along the border. They’re not supposed tomake existential challenges to every aspect of the modern welfare state. Andit’s not just journalists who think this. We’re finding that voters aren’t surehow to deal with it, either.

This isn’t to soft-sell the advances that libertarian ideashave made since January 2009, when Barack Obama took office. The period fromFebruary 2009, when CNBC’s Rick Santelli made his rant about HAMP, and May2010, when Rand Paul won his primary, saw a mainstreaming of libertarian ideasunlike anything we’ve seen before. Just look at what happened with Rand’sfather, Ron Paul. The political press wasn’t very interested in hispresidential campaign, except as a joke. It was especially uninterested in hislong lectures about the evils of the Federal Reserve. But today, Paul has beenincredibly successfully in getting Fed-monitoring legislation through aDemocratic Congress, and the Fed is probably as unpopular as it’s ever been.

And this wasn’t the only issue on which libertarians made upground. Starting in February 2009, they made a hard bet against the Keynesianspending plans in the stimulus package, and it was the arguments ofinstitutions like this one that girded Republicans to vote almost unanimouslyagainst it. They opposed the Democrats’ agenda at a time when the press tookthat agenda very seriously, taking for granted that voters had given Obama amandate for a New Deal-style program that everyone knew was the only way out ofthe recession. In March 2009, the GallupPoll asked Americans who they trusted more to solve our economic problems,the government or businesses. Government won out, by a 53-42 margin. Nearlyone-third of Republicans said they trusted the government over business. Andyet while they failed to stop some of Obama’s biggest agenda items,libertarians have gotten the country back to trusting business over government.It was the rules of the Senate, really, that slowed down the progress ofObama’s agenda, but ask any Republicans who worked to slow it down and they’lltell you that the pressure from outside – literally, by March 2010 there wereraucous rallies outside of Congress as it debated health care reform.

So libertarians have had incredible success at convincingtheir fellow Americans that Barack Obama’s neo-New Deal can’t work. With theTea Party movement – which is not explicitly libertarian, but which takes itseconomic cues from libertarian economists and thinkers – they’ve organized asan effective political force that can win Republican primaries.

But have libertarians convinced Americans to replace Obama’s ideas with theirs? The jury’s out, but Rand Paul’s experience wasn’tvery promising. Before he won his nomination, the press covered him as a phenomenonand focused on his criticism of both parties. There wasn’t much examination ofwhat, as a senator, he’d do. That started the minute he won his primary and ithasn’t stopped, and the result has been a much closer race in Kentucky thananyone could have expected in such a bad year for Democrats. The latest poll inthe field has Paul tied with his Democratic opponent, Jack Conway.

Should this surprise any of us? Not unless we have extremelyshort memories. One thing we learned in 2008 and are relearning now is thatvoters care more about economic conditions then they care about ideology. Theyvoted for Barack Obama because they were panicked about the economy, andDemocrats took the opportunity to enact as much progressive policy as possible.In 2010, voters are going to reject a lot of Democrats because they blame themfor the bad economy. Libertarians and Tea Partiers have laid plenty ofgroundwork for those voters to attribute the doldrums to deficit spending andregulation, but that’s not the same thing as having those voters embracelibertarianism.

You’re seeing how this works in some other big races. InNevada, Sharron Angle won her primary partly because her opponents imploded,partly because she had the strongest libertarian credentials – years offighting for entitlement reform, for example, and explaining that SocialSecurity was unsustainable. She started slipping behind in polls, so she putout a new ad that portrayed her talking to senior citizens about how she wantedto make sure Social Security money was stashed in a lockbox and they’d geteverything they paid for. That’s pretty libertarian, I guess, if your ideasabout free markets come from Al Gore.

Hopefully, I’m the most pessimistic person you’re going tohear from today. And I’m not even that pessimistic. I don’t think libertariancandidates are going to go down in flames. But I don’t think you can say thatAmericans are embracing their ideas as much as they’re turning away frompolicies and incumbents that they consider failures. When libertariancandidates are completely up-front, they get tripped up; they run into voterswho are afraid that they’re going to lose benefits they’ve paid for. This is abetter problem than libertarians used to have, when they were scrambling for 5percent in New Hampshire primaries. What we need to see, though, is whetherlibertarians can get past the apprehensions, win, and govern.