“Scant Support”
I take every chance I can get to pimp the people on our blogroll. I let the blogroll do most of the speaking, though, so I don’t often link, and even less do I link to those sites in cases where I think they’re being boneheads.
But here’s an interesting article from Michael Medved at Townhall, which is a great site, arguing that Duncan Hunter and Sam Brownback should withdraw from the race given their poor Iowa showings. Medved doesn’t leave it at that though, but decides to get some digs in against Tancredo and Paul.
Two other also-rans in the Iowa Straw Poll, Tom Tancredo and Ron Paul, will no doubt continue their campaigns regardless of their non-existent chances of future success. Both men seek to publicize issues about which they’re passionate: a hard line on immigration for Mr. Tancredo, and an isolationist foreign policy for Mr. Paul. Their continued campaigning can actually provide a public service: demonstrating that their angry, alienated (and alienating) fringe perspectives draw scant support within the Republican Party.
Now, first of all, as Thomas Woods points out, check out the comments.
But second of all, when did isolationism become a single issue fringe perspective in the Republican party? I’ll actually grant that it might be now, at least if you take the talking points from the party establishment (and not Republican voters at large), given the fact that most of them have never met a preemptive engagement they didn’t like. But the neo-isolationist position that Dr. Paul advocates, which I’ve written about here, here, and here) is certainly not new, or fringe. Fully a third of Republicans support withdraw from Iraq in the next six months, for instance (two thirds of Iowa Republicans). Republican candidates have been running, and winning, on isolationism pretty much since the inception of the party, up to 2000 when our current president and his opponent (now the two biggest non-isolationists around) ran against nation-building. It was, indeed, one of the founding principles of our country (”Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations – entangling alliances with none,” said Thomas Jefferson, the proto-founder of our party).
If Medved thinks that isolationism is now an alienating fringe perspective amongst Republicanism, I don’t know who that speaks worse of, Medved or the Republican party, but in any event, I’d expect them both to be surprised by election results in the coming, oh, generations.
Furthermore, Tancredo and Paul got, between them, 22.8% of the vote in the Iowa Straw poll. If you assume that some of the other voters for other candidates (like against-the-surge Brownback or anti-McCain Romney) might have voted on isolationist grounds, again, you get about a third of the party. And nobody denies that all the enthusiasm on the ground at Iowa was for Ron Paul.
I’ll agree that Hunter and Brownback should drop out (Hunter is usurped by Tancredo, and Brownback by Huckabee, and really, I’m not all that impressed with the Brownback/Huckabee showing anyway–they essentially split between them the evangelical vote, which isn’t a big sign of abnormal strength for either of them; had Huckabee WON the evangelical vote outright, that would be different; getting 15% to Brownback’s 13 certainly didn’t prove anything on his part). But I’m not at all clear on why Ron Paul is either a single issue candidate (if anything, Rudy and McCain are), or why his Medved-identified single issue (isolationism; more accurately neo-isolationism) is so fringe to conservatism that it merits blanket dismissal. Or, for that matter, why Tancredo’s single-issue (which I’ll agree is much more a single issue campaign than most other candidates) is fringe either (seems to me John McCain should be the frontrunner were it not for the identified single-issues of Tancredo and Paul combined).
Medved is talking out of his ass here, I think, parroting beltway conventional wisdom not supported by, you know, facts on the ground. It’s weird, though, to see a commentator so buying, hook line and sinker, the establishment talking points without, apparently, a whiff of reflection. At least the comments to his post are helpfully pointing all this out.