Portland's Willamette Weekly on the LP Convention & FSP
The LP Convention and the libertarian movement (especially the Free State Project!) got some good press last weekend in Portland, Oregon. Below are some snippets with links to the full texts:
1. Freedom Flies
The activists came to debate platform planks, elect officers and wrangle over internal disputes—just like their Republican and Democratic counterparts. To an outside observer, though, the best thing about the biennial gathering was how far removed it felt from the grim partisan struggle of the two-party national scene.
The Libertarians' wild-card principles—they oppose most government, taxes and regulations, and champion individual freedom above all else—might seem a little eccentric.
But if nothing else, they are optimists and outside-the-box dreamers. And they attack politics with refreshingly free-spirited, unpolished gusto. (One speaker, for instance, approvingly described a candidate for the party's national committee as "a biker and a smoker." Good luck imagining Oregon Sens. Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith making a similar pitch at their parties' conventions.)
In the trade-show corral outside the Hilton's dimly lit ballroom, I met Varrin Swearingen, president of the Free State Project.
The project aims to persuade 20,000 Libertarians to move to New Hampshire—"probably the most free state in the country," Swearingen said, with an aim to keep it that way.
2. Live Free! (or Die Trying)
Whatever you think of the Libertarians, give them this: These guys don't mess around.
The Republicans babble about small government, even as pork drips from their jowls. Color the Libertarian Party a deep shade of unimpressed:
The Libertarians' platform calls for almost all taxes to be eliminated. Period!
Democrats squeak as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales snips off civil liberties like a mohel in a room of quintuplet boys. Libertarians swagger into the issue like matadors: They support drug legalization, firearms rights, assisted suicide and an end to NSA wiretapping. Freedom is their watchword.
With the Libertarian Party, a 35-year-old outlaw of American politics' Wild West fringe, holding its biennial national convention in Portland this weekend, citizens of this tax-loving, gun-hating People's Republic could be forgiven for thinking between 600 and 700 aliens have invaded. (And they're all reading The Fountainhead!)
Look closer, however, and you find a vibrant, if small (just 200,000 members nationally and about 16,000 in Oregon), movement feeling bullish these days. The Libertarian Party opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, because they philosophically object to almost all aggression. And with Democrats unable to rein in GOP excess, some lefties might look twice at a party that insists civil rights comes first.
READ ABOUT IT.
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