Rep. Ron Paul kicks off his post-presidential bid Campaign for Liberty, telling crowd of thousands to defend personal freedoms as well as economic liberty.
(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET News)MINNEAPOLIS--Ron Paul is no longer a candidate this year to be president of the United States.
But on Tuesday, the Republican congressman from Texas nevertheless attracted up to 10,000 supporters here for a 10-hour event called Rally for the Republic, held at the sports center home of the Minnesota Timberwolves basketball team.
It was only about 10 miles from the official Republican convention that's taking place in St. Paul, but a galaxy away in message and spirit. Instead of access being carefully limited to delegates, insiders, and well-heeled party donors, this rally was open to the general public. And instead of featuring President George W. Bush and a defense of his "war on terror," the counterrally featured a lineup of speakers who echoed Paul's message of limited government, civil liberties, lower taxes, and peace.
"There's something exciting in the air," Paul told a cheering audience. "A revolutionary spirit has erupted, and it will not be suppressed. We are involved in a historic event."
During his speech on Tuesday evening, Paul extolled the virtues of individual liberty against an overreaching government (which are also explored in his recent book "The Revolution: A Manifesto"). He formally kicked off his Campaign for Liberty with the motto: "The Revolution Continues." He pointedly did not endorse Sen. John McCain, who is expected to receive the Republican nomination at the Xcel Energy Center on Thursday.
One thing Paul didn't say, but could have added, is that neither his candidacy nor this week's rally would have been possible if the Internet had not existed. His support among Republicans only infrequently ventured into the double digits, but the courtly obstetrician developed a towering presence--and, just as important, an impressive fund-raising base--online.
Paul warned that, barring a significant political upheaval, the nation was venturing down a dangerous path. "The future of the Republic is bleak," he said. "As conditions deteriorate, those in charge use the problems they created to solidify their power with more spending, taxes, rules, inflation, and militarism. This must be reversed."
Other speakers included Jesse Ventura, the colorful former governor of Minnesota, (who hinted at plans for a 2012 presidential bid); low-tax activist Grover Norquist; Mises.org director Lew Rockwell; and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, an outspoken opponent of the so-called drug war.
Singers Aimee Allen and Sara Evans provided musical interludes. Allen lives in Los Angeles and previously recorded "The Ron Paul Revolution Theme Song." Evans is one of country music's most popular singers, with at least one platinum album.
For more than a decade, Paul has had a rocky relationship with the Republican Party--and this year, his decision not to endorse anyone for president didn't help. The GOP returned the favor this week by not giving Paul full access to the official convention. The former presidential candidate told reporters on Tuesday morning that he would be allowed only on the convention floor with a chaperone and with limited or no staff.
What McCain is likely worried about is the threat of Paul supporters defecting to the Libertarian Party candidate, Bob Barr, who has generally similar views. Barr is already positioning himself as the pro-privacy choice, and arguing that both major parties are far too indistinguishable on far too many issues.
Whether Barr can manage to be as successful as Ross Perot was in 1992 or Ralph Nader in 2000 remains an open question, not least because his voting record has for many years been more conservative than libertarian. Another one is whether Paul will be successful in turning a presidential campaign into a genuine movement: unsuccessful 1992 Democratic candidate Jerry Brown tried with his now-defunct "We the People" movement (the phrase is now being used by an income tax protester).
Among Paul supporters, a deep distrust of McCain
There were many disaffected Republicans at the Paul rally on Tuesday--including Republican delegates--who felt that John McCain represents big government while his vice presidential pick, Sarah Palin, remains a relatively unknown quantity.
Catherine Bleish, a Republican delegate from Missouri, said she voted for Ron Paul in the Republican primary and is dissatisfied with McCain as the party's candidate.
"I don't think he represents conservative values," Bleish said. "He's kind of a big-government kind of guy. I'm a states' rights kind of girl, so there's a disconnect with him. But I'm not happy with Obama, either, so it's kind of a lose-lose situation for me."
Bleish said she considered herself a liberal until she learned more about Ron Paul's libertarian-inspired platform. She then fully supported the candidate, even organizing marches in Washington, D.C., for his campaign. She said the issues that have drawn her to Paul's campaign are his opposition to the Real ID Act, the Patriot Act, and the Iraq war.
"I feel like (the war is) bankrupting our economy, and that really concerns me," she said.
While still showing her support for Paul, Bleish said she is now a staunch Republican, "through and through."
Bleish--along with the other members of her delegation--is attempting to muster up enthusiasm for the Republican candidate.
"There hasn't been a great amount of support for McCain, but people are trying to rally around the party," Bleish said. "There (are) a lot of Huckabee and Romney supporters that are disappointed, but the Missouri delegation's really been trying to show support for the party itself."
Bleish called McCain's vice presidential pick of Sarah Palin "phenomenal."
"I think she's a real American, a real person--she's a hunter, a gun owner, a mother," she said. "I know there's controversy with one of her daughters right now, but I really respect that she's a real person and doesn't try and cover up her faults. I don't know enough about all of her stances, but I really think she's going to bring a lot of positive support to the Republican Party and to the McCain campaign."
Rene and David Knight, who traveled 12 hours from Michigan for this week's Paul event, were less willing to pass judgment on Palin.
"The policies that need to be talked about are eliminated from the media coverage, and all they're talking about is tabloid junk," Rene said.
When issues are addressed by the media and the campaigns, they're the wrong ones, David said.
"A lot of these issues advocated don't even belong in national politics," he said. "These (politicians) are fascists--not Constitutionalists. They hold up their hand, and they take the vow and swear to uphold the very thing they turn their backs on."
"We support the idea of freedom," David said. "I was involved with the Republican Party back in 1986, and I got a good taste of how things were run."
"And how they're not run properly," Rene added.
Although their candidate is out of the running, the Knights refuse to support McCain, Barack Obama--or even Libertarian candidate Bob Barr. They say they strongly support Paul's movement.
"I think a lot of people are dissatisfied and confused," David said. "I think that, in and of itself, will bring people around to the Ron Paul revolution."
CNET News' Stephanie Condon contributed to this report.
Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr talks up privacy last week at a political conference in Las Vegas, saying there's little difference between Barack Obama and John McCain on the topic.
(Credit: Declan McCullagh/News.com)LAS VEGAS--Bob Barr hopes his enthusiasm for electronic privacy will boost his Libertarian Party campaign for the White House. Call it a long-shot bid for the geek vote.
Absent Barack Obama and John McCain found in flagrante delicto with, say, Osama bin Laden and a 12-year old, Barr will not be the next president of the United States. But he is polling surprisingly well, with a Zogby poll last week putting him at 6 percent nationally, meaning he could siphon away enough limited-government votes from McCain to affect the November election.
Barr was a GOP member of Congress best known for leading the floor battle to impeach President Clinton. After losing his Georgia congressional seat in 2002, he became an ACLU consultant and privacy activist, and won the Libertarian presidential nod after a pitched floor battle in which some delegates angrily accused him of being more right-wing than right-thinking.
Speaking here at a political conference on Friday, Barr focused almost exclusively on privacy and eavesdropping--and argued that both major parties are far too surveillance-happy. "Both of them will continue down the same track," Barr said, noting that both McCain and Obama supported last week's bill to immunize telecommunications companies that illegally opened their networks to government snoops.
Congress' legislative rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is "not about surveilling al-Qaida," Barr said. "It's about surveilling U.S. citizens in America." He added, for good measure: "This administration is the most anti-privacy, the most anti-individual freedom, in our nation's history, certainly in my lifetime."
This is hardly a Bush-McCain species of Republican speaking. It underlines Barr's appeal: If you're a traditional conservative who disagrees with the big-government policies, the surveillance, the inflation, the deficit spending, and the wars of the Bush administration, vote for me. I was one of you, once.
It might work. More precisely, it might work well enough--think a Republican equivalent of Ralph Nader--to make a difference in states that would have tilted toward McCain otherwise. It's certainly a more attractive message than that of the Libertarians' 2004 candidate, a telemarketer-turned-programmer.
Rep. Ron Paul, a Texas Republican with a libertarian bent who made an unsuccessful bid for the 2008 presidency, represents one argument for the theory of a third candidate potentially hurting McCain. More than 10 percent of the Republican electorate, and far more in some states--like Idaho, where he won 24 percent of the primary vote--share his libertarian view. Plus there's the remarkable post-primary success of Paul's book (No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list and at or near the top of the lists on Amazon.com).
Barr would surely do anything, except perhaps shave his prominent mustache, if he could lure those tech-savvy, Internet-donating Paul-istas. But his arch-conservative voting record could be a hindrance.
Barr, a former CIA employee and federal prosecutor, voted for the Patriot Act; he voted for the Iraq War resolution; he voted for a 2002 warrantless surveillance bill called the Cyber Security Enhancement Act; he tried to restrict the practice of Wicca in the military; he wanted to ban a subset of computer-generated porn. On each of those votes, Paul went in the opposite direction.
For his part, Barr says he has become an honest-to-goodness convert to the cause of electronic privacy and limited government. He said a long time ago that he regrets voting for the Patriot Act; he wants an Iraq withdrawal "without undue delay"; the head of the Marijuana Policy Project formally nominated Barr at the Libertarian convention; Barr even endorsed a Libertarian presidential candidate in 2004. He founded a group called the American Freedom Agenda that opposes the White House's policies in the so-called war on terror, and his supporters note he embraced a wealth of privacy measures while in Congress (see our coverage from 2002).
"Electronic privacy has been his forte for a long time," said Brad Jansen, an ex-Paul staffer turned Barr enthusiast who runs a group advocating greater financial privacy. "It was his signature issue with the ACLU, and is topical now with the FISA ruling last week. He certainly differentiates himself from both McCain and now Obama on the issue."
It's true that under the we-absolutely-must-recapture-the-White-House theory, many Democrats will vote for Obama, no matter that he flip-flopped on retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies. (He voted for an unsuccessful amendment stripping it out, but then for the entire bill with it included.) But some progressive bloggers are finding that decision impossible to forgive.
McCain's position on wiretapping and retroactive immunity has been mostly, but not entirely, consistent--see our tech voters' guide from January. That makes the Arizona senator a more stationary target for Barr. "Sen. McCain has made very, very clear that he basically embraces the notion of unfettered executive power," Barr said.
Barr also likes to swipe at the Real ID Act, a law creating a federalized identity card that's effectively on hold until December 31. "It was passed by the Congress not as a national ID, which it is in every way except a name," he said. "It is a national ID for the first time in our nation's history...If certain people were elected president, it would not go into effect."
During the Libertarian Party's presidential debate in Denver, the candidates were asked what they'd do about Real ID and the Patriot Act. Barr's reply was captured on video by C-SPAN: "Fear has become the driving force behind all public policy in our country...(For the Patriot Act), I'd drive a stake through its heart, shoot it, burn it, cut off its head, burn it again, and scatter its ashes to the four corners of the world."
The Zogby poll released last week puts Obama at 44 percent, McCain at 38 percent, and Barr at 6 percent--a combination that hands Obama a handsome electoral college majority.
"Bob Barr could really hurt McCain's chances," pollster John Zogby said. "McCain can't afford the level of slippage to Barr we found among conservatives in this polling...Bob Barr has some juice among conservatives and is hurting him in several states."
On one hand, Barr's breadth of support doesn't seem to be an aberration: a Rasmussen poll released May 18 also gives him 6 percent of the nationwide vote, including 7 percent of Republicans and 5 percent of Democrats. On the other hand, support for third parties tends to wane as the November election nears, as pollster Mark Blumenthal points out on NationalJournal.com.
For now, Barr seems enthusiastic about positioning himself as the candidate who most supports digital privacy.
"The best way to control the populace is to take away their privacy," he said. "The digital age, and what will come after that, makes it much, much easier for the government to abuse those powers and erode the Fourth Amendment."
Banks, credit card companies, and some Democratic members of Congress are predicting that forthcoming restrictions on Internet gambling will ensnare innocent customers and threaten the viability of e-commerce.
The criticism came at a congressional hearing on Wednesday devoted to the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, enacted in 2006 by a Republican Congress after pressure from social conservatives. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department published draft regulations last fall--which financial institutions say will disrupt perfectly legal transactions unless dramatic changes are made before the rules take effect.
Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian-minded Republican presidential candidate, criticizes Net-gambling restrictions on Wednesday, saying 'people should make their own decisions.'
(Credit: U.S. House of Representatives)"Consumers will be placed at risk of having lawful transactions blocked," said Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., chairman of the House monetary policy and technology subcommittee. "It is easy to see how these regulations, if implemented in their current form, could wreak havoc on electronic commerce in the U.S."
The 2006 law forces banks and other financial intermediaries to police money flows that could be related to Internet gambling. It never received a formal up or down vote in the entire Congress; instead, Republican congressional leaders simply glued it on to an unrelated port security bill that was approved nearly unanimously.
No consensus
The difficulty with the law's approach is that, while banks cooperate internationally to identify terrorist-related funds and drug-related money laundering, there's zero consensus on Internet gambling transactions.
Online betting is perfectly legal and government-regulated in many areas of the world: PokerStars is licensed by the U.K.'s Island of Man; Bodog Entertainment is a betting company headquartered in Antigua; so is the World Sports Exchange. Other European Union nations also license Net-gambling firms.
Given that financial institutions process nearly 100 billion payments a year, according to Federal Reserve data, and given that other governments won't necessarily be cooperating, identifying which payments are gambling-related is no trivial task.
The U.S. government's "decision not to fully define unlawful Internet gambling places our members in a very difficult position," said Leigh Williams on behalf of the Financial Services Roundtable, which counts Visa, Mastercard, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and other banks as members. "They cannot know if a transaction is restricted unless they have in hand specifics of the transaction that in almost all instances they will not have."
At the very least, Williams said, the U.S. government should provide a list of names of Internet gambling businesses that can be identified and blocked--something that regulators are unwilling to do. (One model that's been suggested is the Treasury Department's list of "specially designated" people and organizations subject to economic sanctions.)
Federal regulators have said it would be too expensive for them to create a list themselves, arguing that "the government must engage in an extensive legal analysis to determine whether the gambling Web site is used, at least in part, to place, receive or otherwise knowingly transmit unlawful bets or wagers" and that due process safeguards "would result in considerable added costs."
Adding to the complexity is that horse racing was explicitly exempted from monitoring in the 2006 bill, although it's unclear whether betting itself is legal. The Justice Department thinks it can be prosecuted under the the Wire Communications Act, but the Fifth Circuit has indicated that the statute doesn't apply to a game of chance.
Another unusual aspect is that the draft regulations from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department require "monitoring of Web sites" related to gambling--based on the premise that credit card companies and banks can identify if their payment systems are being used.
Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian-minded Republican candidate for president, said that could lead to more Internet regulation: "Though I do not endorse gambling per se, people should make their own decisions. It's a personal choice. I've always been concerned about this type of regulation and legislation--it's likely to open the door (to control and regulation) of the Internet itself."
"There is a risk that financial institutions would misclassify a payment as illegal and thus be exposed to liability," said Williams, from the Financial Services Roundtable. "We also believe that 'monitoring of websites'...is inappropriate to include in a financial institution's monitoring activity."
Rep. Barney Frank, the Democratic chairman of the full House Financial Services Committee, used the chance to talk up his bill that would effectively legalize--but closely regulate, including with criminal background checks and financial disclosure--the online gambling industry. (Here's our audio interview with him last year.")
In the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve's 52-page draft regulations, the word "identify" appears 61 times and "monitor" appears 18 times. "Privacy" appears not once.
Frank was one of the few people to raise that point on Wednesday, telling the financial representatives on the panel that there was "a conflict between the obligation imposed on you by the act...and the privacy expectations of your customers."
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