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Entry: Libertarianism's Divergent Roads Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/libertarianisms_divergent_roads#29654 Post contents: Dave Miller in Sacramento wrote: "Well… actually, an unpretentious guy from Arizona has, unfortunately, won the GOP nomination! And, in the last two presidential elections, the winner was… “an unpretentious guy from a small town in Texas”!" That was actually my point. This year the candidate will have to be very un-Bush. The "I don't know anything about your big city ways" routine is starting to wear thin. If McCain has a shot it's because he can claim competence and experience in Washington politics. "One of the big hits against Barack is that he is indeed a “liberal snob,” and, despite the fact that this should be an absolute shoo-in year for the Dems, Barack may lose because of that." I suspect you are right about that. I wasn't so much talking about the little things, like what kind of cheese he puts on his sandwich, how he addresses factory workers or woman reporters, or how he looks riding a bike. There's still a lot of opportunity for a candidate to look foreign and strange and snobbish and condescending and lose the election because of it. I was talking more about the big picture "We little people out West versus you rich snobs back East." I don't know how things are in the rest of the country. Maybe people still eat that sort of thing up, but I know I'm certainly tired of it, probably because we've heard so much of it from the current administration and its supporters. My dig wasn't at Ron Paul, so much as at Justin and the other paleolibs and paleocons. I still don't have any love for liberal snobs, but the notion of the "True South" or coming into its own or populist "prairie fire" from the West cleansing the country has no appeal for me any more. On most issues, I agree more with Southerners and Westerners than with those on the two coasts, but we've seen enough from the President and the last GOP Congress to get disillusioned with self-celebratory depictions of the South or the West. It's not enough to point to some evil, wealthy East Coast "them" to drum up support for a candidate. Prove to me first that a candidate is competent and knows what he's doing. And it's not enough to say, "Murray Rothbard hated who you hate" to make people fall all over him, show us that he really knew what he's was talking about when he ventured into areas outside his expertise. Sent at: 2008 12 02