Word: republicanized
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Such tactical shifts to the center are a general-election ritual for Democratic presidential candidates, a pre-emptive defense against the Republican attack machine. But Obama isn't like other candidates. In his 2006 best seller, The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote of himself, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." So as his pragmatic side fills that screen, those loyal foot soldiers who got used to seeing their own reflections are beginning to cry betrayal. The people in Obama's movement feel they have an open line directly...
...dissatisfied with a lot of what government does. He hates our gun laws. Hates the war in Iraq. He doesn't use drugs, but he sees the fight against them as another government power grab. Growing up as a Mormon in Salt Lake City, Parshall was a Barry Goldwater Republican. Now he's the kind of voter who should scare the GOP most--and he's not alone...
Maybe you haven't heard, but this is the year of freedom. First there was the Ron Paul revolution, in which an avuncular 10-term Representative from Brazoria County, Texas, raised more than $34 million as a pseudo-Republican candidate, garnered more than a million primary votes and outperformed Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson, all on the back of a get-government-off-my-back platform. Now there's the Libertarian Party, which sold a little bit of its hard-line liberty-loving soul in exchange for the most respectable candidate it has ever had: recently converted former Republican Congressman...
Since 2000, Libertarian candidates have peeled off enough votes from Republican congressional candidates to cost the party races in Washington, Nevada, Montana and, most recently, Louisiana. But if anything, the GOP platform has grown more committed to foreign military intervention and domestic moralizing. The selection of John McCain was a final insult--most libertarians view him, fairly or not, as pro-war, anti-gun, pro-environmentalism and anti--free speech (thanks to his advocacy for campaign-finance reform). In Nevada, where the liberty lobby is strong, McCain got trounced in the primary voting, coming in third behind Mitt Romney...
...candidacy, though, is not without risks. The Libertarian Party is looking to introduce itself as an alternative to the major parties, but it has done so by poaching politicians who, like Barr, were very recently Republicans. And Barr wasn't just any Republican. He was a premier culture warrior in Congress, leading the impeachment of Bill Clinton and fighting medical marijuana, gay marriage, even the right of soldiers to practice Wicca--all of which are anathema to the out-of-our-bedrooms libertarian ideal. In fact, one of the biggest political victories of the modern Libertarian Party was to unseat...