It may be that we could have refined our objectives further, to make them more clear-cut, and thus easier for people to rally to. Or we may, upon reflection, have found better ways to achieve our objectives. But we must remember that every decision was made in the heat of battle by people who were grossly overworked. There simply wasn't much time for relaxed contemplation of various courses of action.

In other words, we mustn't forget that alternative choices that seem obvious now may not have been so obvious when someone had to come up with an answer to a critical question in five minutes. Also, it's easy to imagine people carrying out some imaginative scheme - when in the real life of a campaign there usually isn't anyone available but yourself to act upon whatever you think should be done.

Even when a plan involves some resources - volunteers or money - that apparently were available, they may not have been available for the plan being suggested now. People may not have been willing to volunteer for the plan being suggested, only for the plan that was implemented. And people may not have contributed to the plan contemplated now, only to the one that seemed compelling to them at the time.⁵

When judging the decisions made, we must never forget that the people who made them were working 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week. There was never enough money, never enough people, never enough time to leisurely consider all the possibilities. In a sense, everyone was working continually in urgent circumstances - rushing to make decisions and implement them with no time to spare. Given the situation, I'm amazed that so many choices proved to be very wise.

Although the urgency became greater as we got closer to election day, we couldn't necessarily make the best choices even in the more leisurely early days of the 2-year campaign. Even then:

• We didn't know in 1995 what we would have to work with in 1996. Would we raise $1 million? $5 million? $10 million? $50 million? It may have been that we should have had a detailed plan for each of these possibilities. But even then we didn't have the time for all that. So we chose the plan based on the expectation that we wouldn't have enough money to do what we'd prefer.

   

• No one had experience with an ambitious campaign, and we all had to learn as we proceeded. Although the number of votes we received might suggest that this campaign was little different from previous campaigns, we expected it to be quite different - and, in terms of the way it was conducted, it was quite different. Thus we were trying to do something brand new - break through the Hurdle of Irrelevancy and, as we saw it at first, perhaps go even further than that.

In summary, I believe the campaign basically made the right overall choices, given the alternatives available.

The message was based on what I believe is necessary to restore American freedoms. To be taken seriously - especially as a third-party candidate, I had to have specific proposals available, not just broad assertions. In Why Government Doesn't Work, I laid out a program to get from where we are now to much smaller government - specifically, to a federal government removed from everything not authorized in the Constitution.⁶

I mentioned often in speeches and radio appearances that we can't expect to reduce the government one program at a time, or reduce it over a period of years. The Republican Congress demonstrated that this doesn't work. There are three reasons such an approach is doomed:

1. No matter what programs are proposed to be cut first, most everyone will assume that the government will continue to get bigger and taxes will still be oppressive. So those directly affected by the first program to go will fight the change, because they will be net losers. And no one else has an incentive to actively support the budget-cutters, because they can't see that the cuts will change their own lives in any significant way.

    

2. Any attempt to cut one program first, and then another, will break down in a free-for-all argument over which program should go first.

    

3. There is little reason to have confidence that Congress will keep its word and continue to reduce the government after the first showy reductions.

For this reason, I coined the Great Offer: "Would you give up your favorite federal programs if it meant you never had to pay income tax again?" This transformed the abstract, long-term benefits of freedom into an immediate reason to reduce government dramatically. It also provided a reassurance that I wasn't offering a pie-in-the-sky free lunch - that there was an apparent cost connected to the benefit.

The 1996 campaign probably contained the most radical - and most specific - proposals of any Presidential campaign. There were three reasons I felt it was necessary to have such a radical message:

• We must have a program that adds up. If we are to be taken seriously by the media and the more influential voters, we have to have specific proposals to reduce government, and the proposals have to add up. Only a radical program does add up. Only if government assets are sold can Social Security be saved. Only if the government is reduced to its Constitutional functions can the income tax be repealed - and only if we offer to repeal the income tax will voters tolerate a reduction in government.⁷

   

• We must not be put on the defensive. Even if we moderate our message, we still will be asked questions that, to be answered truthfully, will reveal controversial beliefs. So we should raise these positions ourselves - so that we frame the way the issues are discussed. The only sensible solution to today's crime wave is to end the Insane War on Drugs - and any more moderate proposal I might suggest would still lead to questions about the government's ability to deal with drugs and crime. Government doesn't work, the War on Drugs has created untold deaths and drug problems, and there's no way to tell the story that doesn't lead to the logical conclusion that drug prohibition must be ended entirely.

   

• We must distinguish ourselves from the opposition. It was inevitable that the Republicans would eventually propose a specific tax cut, as well as promise to reform the IRS. Proposing anything less than the outright repeal of the income tax (the only possible way "to end the IRS as we know it") would leave us differing with the Republicans only in degree, not in kind.⁸

1. Reduce the federal government to the limits provided in the Constitution and use the savings to repeal the federal income tax, so that every dollar you make is yours to spend, to save, to give away as you see fit - not as the politicians think best.

    

2. Take Social Security completely out of the hands of the government, so that your parents and grandparents will have guaranteed contracts with private companies, rather than political promises, and the rest of us will be free forever from the 15% Social Security tax that we know is wasted money.

    

3. Do something positive about crime by ending the insane War on Drugs, shutting down the black market run by criminals - which is the cause of muggers on the streets trying to support a $100-a-day habit, pushers on high school grounds trying to hook kids on drugs, gangs fighting over drug profits and monopoly territories, and children killed in drive-by shootings.

The idea that there's a conflict between principle and politics has never made sense to me. I feel that, if your principles are hard to sell, you need to improve your selling ability - not tinker with your principles.

However, you can't sell someone who isn't listening. So you have to start by meeting him where he is now. There is nothing unprincipled about showing the listener how he will benefit immediately and significantly from application of our principles. And to do so, you have to talk in terms of issues that are important to him - not to you.

I made no attempt to campaign on behalf of rights. A voter may agree that the Branch Davidians or the Weavers were tragically mistreated, but it's doubtful that anyone will change his political philosophy or his vote because of such incidents. The average voter isn't concerned with "rights" until he is affected by the loss of a right - and, even then, his outrage may apply only to his own situation or, at most, to a general concern about that one right and no other.

I tried to confine discussions to federal issues, since I was running for President. If someone asked what I thought about state laws against drugs, I said the federal government shouldn't interfere - but that any state that maintains drug laws will attract the criminal element from states that repeal all such laws. If asked about public schools, I said that this should be decided in each locality, but that repealing the income tax would give parents the resources to free their children from dependence on government schools and do more to improve American education than any other single step.

Many libertarian organizations exist to elevate an individual's understanding of freedom and the libertarian philosophy. A political party exists to capture votes, win elections, and implement its program. In a political campaign, any educational benefits that accrue must be a byproduct of the attempt to win votes. Thus I made no attempt to provide a philosophical education.

However, the very act of justifying any of my positions tended toward education. I continually made such points as:

• Government doesn't work. It doesn't deliver the mail on time. It doesn't keep the cities safe. It doesn't educate our children. It has made a mess of everything it touches. Why should we expect it to work any better in the program you want?

   

• We shouldn't be talking about what government should do or what we wish it could do. We should recognize what government can do. And government has proven that it makes a mess of virtually everything it touches. So whatever it is we may want government to do, we have to look for better ways to achieve it.

   

• Whenever you turn anything over to the government, it is no longer a scientific, medical, commercial, or ethical issue; it is now a political issue - to be decided by Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, Teddy Kennedy, and the rest of the boys. So don't be surprised that there will be a federal building for West Virginia in it, to satisfy Senator Byrd - and a subsidy for Archer Daniels Midland, to satisfy Senator Dole. Is this what you want - to transform a serious issue into a political boondoggle?

   

• Where in the Constitution is the federal government authorized to be involved in . . . ? If you allow the government to ignore the Constitution in this area, you shouldn't be shocked when it ignores the Constitution everywhere else as well. Nor should you be surprised that the government costs $1.6 trillion a year and there's a $5 trillion debt.

I didn't give many speeches to non-partisan groups, and the lack of practice meant that it was late in the campaign before I found the approach I thought best for a general audience. This was a speech built around the Great Offer - and the point that, since we all want smaller government, we should quit letting the politicians get by with promises of slower growth rates and instead start demanding what we want. At that point, the reception changed from respectful to enthusiastic.

Radio hosts, in general, responded very positively throughout the campaign. They considered me a good guest - because I had provocative ideas and could handle any objections. Many radio personalities - including popular hosts Michael Reagan, Art Bell, Oliver North, Mary Matalin, and other non-libertarians - were enthusiastic about my ideas and my attraction as a guest. Many of them talked about me or read our press releases on the air when I wasn't there. What we can't know yet is how much of this will stick after the election. We don't yet whether they will continue to treat us with such respect, given the vote total we received.

Over and over, I heard callers say they were now going to vote Libertarian. I asked if they had ever done so before, and almost all said that they hadn't.

As evidence that there's no conflict between principle and politics, here is a typical letter I received:

"This past summer I heard you on the Mary Matalin show and became excited. I have always been fiscally conservative in a political sense. Here was a candidate speaking directly to most of my views. I was impressed by how you took a stance on issue after issue, and then defended it in the face of incredulous opposition. You weren't evading. You weren't lying. You were running on your convictions and didn't compromise them in order to appeal to some special-interest faction in America."⁹

Although I believe I had a plausible position on every issue raised, there were issues where quicker, more persuasive answers are needed. Among these are:

• Security: We need a way to show, in a few words, that there would be more financial and physical security in a free society than there is now.

   

• National parks: My plan to sell federal assets to liquidate Social Security and pay off the federal debt was usually met with concerns about national parks. I pointed out that the parks are badly cared for now, but I didn't do a good job of stressing the urgency of raising money to pay off the politicians' promises before it is too late. "Which is worse - that the national parks be sold to someone who will care for them or that your parents' Social Security isn't there when they need it?"

   

• Environment: I stated that most pollution problems occur on government property, and that these problems would have been averted if the government had only protected its property as well as private owners do - but that won't happen because all government programs are run on political principles, not environmental principles. More is needed to reassure even the most casual environmentalist.

   

• Civil rights laws: The federal civil rights laws were frequently raised as an example of a government program that works. This is refutable, but it takes time. Late in the campaign, I began saying, "Whatever the merits of those laws, and they're far from an unqualified blessing, you can't use them as justification for maintaining an overbloated government and exorbitant taxation levels."

Return to LP2000 site index

NOTES

----------

⁵A good example is the oft-repeated suggestion that the LP should concentrate all its resources on a single Congressional race somewhere. Like many ideas, this may seem plausible at first glance. But when the time comes to choose the one race, many of those who had supported the idea may have assumed the chosen race would be closer to home and might become less enthusiastic about supporting a race far away. And there may be many potential donors who don't like the strategy at all. So the resources that are assumed to be available (such as the roughly $3 million that went into the 1996 Presidential campaign) won't be available unless the strategy is compelling to the donors. (back)

⁶As I have said often, those who believe we should go further than that are welcome to continue working to reduce the government from there. But I can't imagine that any libertarian wouldn't be happy to trade today's federal government for one only 1/16 as large, no matter how much he may want to continue beyond that. However, those who criticized my message as too moderate never suggested any alternatives, so I don't really know what they wanted. (back)

⁷My early proposal to replace the 15-39% income tax with a 5% sales tax wasn't an attempt at moderation. At that stage, I hadn't worked out the numbers to be confident that the federal debt could be reduced sufficiently to reduce federal interest expense enough that the budget could be balanced without a smaller replacement tax. Once the numbers worked out, however, I abandoned the sales tax. (back)

⁸The Republicans were the only party with which we might be confused because, whatever we might have remotely in common with the Democrats, they will not propose anything similar to what we suggest. Despite their professed belief in civil liberties, liberals don't propose to expand them the way we do - end the Drug War, stop censorship, stop warrentless searches, and so on - much less actually introduce bills in Congress to improve things. (back)