Liberty Maven

Last year, I admitted to my Ron Paul-aholism. It could be more accurately described as an eternal need to quench my thirst for liberty. Ron Paul was my elixir of choice, but he is no longer running for President. I reject writing his name on the ballot. You might as well drink water. Sure it is pure, but doesn’t accomplish much.

Once it became obvious Ron Paul would not get the GOP nomination I began scanning the back of the bar for new drinks to satiate me. The problem became obvious from the start. That delicious Ron Paul concoction was nowhere to be found. Ron Paul ruined all of the other potential candidates. Drinking up the other candidates from Ron Paul’s gold shot glass left me unsatisfied.

To remedy this I came up with a scoring system to help determine which of the current candidates most closely represents Ron Paul’s sweet liberty message. I started with only 10 criteria. Those 10 quickly became 20. Each of the criteria is assigned a score between 0 and 5. A perfect score of 100 means the candidate is a Ron Paul twin which to me is not possible, so I disallowed a perfect score making the total possible score a 99.

The methodology is certainly not perfect. I’m not sure perfection is possible due to the subjectivity of the criteria, but it is a fairly comprehensive method. We began ranking the candidates using the methodology with John McCain and Barack Obama. We then focused on the third party and independent candidates, Bob Barr, Chuck Baldwin, Ralph Nader, and Cynthia McKinney.

We also set up a web based polling application to get input from Liberty Maven readers.  (Feel free to submit your own rankings here). As of this writing we have received 262 scores from 200 readers. The results from readers were in line with our own rankings with a couple exceptions. Below is a table showing our scores vs. reader-averaged scores (ranked in order according to our own scores).

The two candidates with a large difference between our own scores and the reader scores were Nader and McKinney. We fail to understand how anyone rating Nader or McKinney could give either a score even close to 40. There is a lack of honesty, an abundance of ignorance, or some combination of the two when both of these candidates score more than 40 on the Paul-O-Meter. Both Nader and McKinney believe in an expanded role for the federal government in solving the problems we face. This is the opposite of Ron Paul.

We received a response from the Chuck Baldwin campaign following the publication of our article ranking him in order to clarify his positions and express disagreement with some of his scores. This resulted in changing his overall score from 86 to 88. What annoyed us was that several of our readers gave him more than a 3 for “liberty voting record”. We specified that candidates without voting records should automatically earn a score of 3 signifying a middle of the road voting record. We deemed this fair because history proves that once candidates get elected they suddenly get selective amnesia about campaign promises. It is important to point out that we did not modify any reader’s score to reflect our own guidelines. We decided to let those who followed the guidelines normalize the score, a “free market” approach if you will.

Obama scored the lowest both in the Liberty Maven score and the readers’ scores. This is further evidence that anyone now voting for Obama after supporting Ron Paul in the primaries needs a liberty intervention. Barack Obama is as far away from Ron Paul as you can get. McCain, Nader, and McKinney are not much closer.

There are only two candidates who can claim they are close to Ron Paul. Neither are perfect. Bob Barr has a poor voting record, but he has since fallen off the neo-conservative wagon and found himself in a 12-step program toward libertarian policy. Chuck Baldwin is a cleric running as the nominee for the Constitution Party. This raises fears of religious intolerance, the morality police, and potential theocracy. He is doing his best to dispel these fears, but is it enough?

Perhaps, as one reader pointed out, the most important feature for a third party candidate is his/her ability to get media attention. Without media attention you are merely serving liberty drinks to liberty drunks. If you remove all mainstream media appearances but one from Bob Barr’s history he still has one more than Chuck Baldwin. To bring new friends to the bar then hire Barr as your bartender.

As Ron Paul supporters, it is difficult for us to argue against voting for Baldwin or Barr. It becomes much easier to argue against supporting Obama, McCain, Nader, or McKinney. So step right up and order a Barr, or maybe a Baldwin if he is more to your liking. Neither may leave you punch drunk on liberty as well as Ron Paul, but both will come pretty darn close.