Trent, it will take more than what Barr has done so far to have me not vote Libertarian in this fall's presidential election. Of the 2008 contenders, I think Phillies makes the best impression on the smartest people in an audience, and so I voted for him on every first ballot -- in the California primary, at the LPCA convention, and in Denver. After the first ballot in Denver I switched to Root, because Phillies had no chance and Root was best at pitching the Libertarian brand (as neither Left nor Right) to a general audience. After Root dropped out, I had to choose between Barr and what would have been the first (except perhaps for Bergland) openly anarchist LP nominee -- which would have been fine except she was campaigning on being "fully attuned to the Libertarian philosophy" and said she will "take the party in the direction we want to go" and "really explain to the American people what we truly are all about". We all know what that explanation turned out to be.
I voted for Root in spite of his simplistic and wavering views on foreign policy, not because of those views, as Steve Meier wants so desperately to believe. To find an LP leader whose foreign policy views resonate with mine, you have to bypass all the presidential contenders, all the members of LNC and PlatCom, and reach all the way down to Starchild, vice-chair of the San Francisco LP. Unfortunately, the LP is not institutionally capable of even confronting such nuanced views, let alone adopting them. Thus I never let foreign policy determine my vote in LP-internal elections, and didn't argue it at all on PlatCom. Not worth it. But it's stilly funny to occasionally get called names like "pro-war" by people whose thinking on foreign policy consists mostly of spinal reflexes.
