Why Mark Sanford, Ron Paul, etc. Will Have to Change If They Want Things To Remain the Same

Daniel Larison had a post arguing that the greatest liability for Sanford in 2012 will be his opposition to the War in Iraq. I think that any campaign mounted by Sanford in 2012 would be rife with liabilities, but I doubt that opposition to Iraq would be one of those liabilities.

Larison notes that, should the War in Iraq go south, the hawkish Republicans will be able to claim that it was Barack Obama's mishandling of the war which led to our failure at nation-building. I don't quite buy into this. It seems to me that, should a reasonably stable autocracy be established in Iraq after the center no longer holds, the Republicans would be glad to forget about the war altogether. If nothing else, they probably won't want to admit defeat (which would be necessary for them to claim that Obama egregiously mishandled the war.)

It is much more likely that Sanford will fail based solely on his inability to square governance with idealism on the national level. Sanford is now being posed as the sane version of Ron Paul (R-Texas) by those extreme libertarians and paleoconservatives who made Paul's 2008 campaign into an event worth paying attention to. But Ron Paul's campaign was. even self-consciously, a reductio ad absurdum. Ron Paul knew from the beginning that he would not be the next president of the United States.

With Sanford, on the other hand, should he run, he will be running to actually be elected, not just to publicize libertarian/traditional conservative ideas. The American people will understand his opposition to the Iraq War. Even now, most of them admit that it was a mistake.

But the libertarian notion that when everyone is trading everyone is happy is a myth. Money may be the primary engine of human activity when it is scare, but, when it is plentiful, people find other issues over which they can fight. And Sanford will have to take a position on issues like this if he intends to become president.

Osama bin Laden, for instance, brought down the World Trade Centers because of the presence of American soldiers in the Middle East; but there were American soldiers in the Middle East in the first place becauze (fundamentally, if not on a case by case basis) we needed to protect our oil interests in the region. Without oil, half of the nation would starve to death. How does libertarian sensibility grasp that?