Saturday, August 11, 2007

Help Me Uncle Sam!   [Jonah Goldberg]

I’m on quasi vacation in the upper left-hand corner of the country (or at least the upper left hand corner of the lower 48, a distinction I offer in deference to my Alaskan relatives who surround me in abundance). I haven’t followed the Iowa straw poll closely, so I hit the wires to see the results (the Corner was so far into the details and I needed the basics first). Anyway, I found this report from the International Herald Tribune:

The voting machine delay may have added fuel to the fire of some Ron Paul supporters who had sought to block voting at the event because of the machines. They filed a federal lawsuit on the constitutionality of the voting process this week and argued that the vote-counting machines had fundamental weaknesses.

A federal judge refused to grant an injunction Friday, and a U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the ruling Saturday.

Now, I may be missing something (or a whole lot of things), but isn’t this a bit of a contradiction? Last I checked, the Iowa straw poll was nothing like a governmental exercise. This is a private affair of a private institution – the Iowa Republican Party. So isn’t it just a teeny bit ironic that representatives of the principled libertarian candidate went running to the federal government to complain about the unfairness of how said private institution was handling things? I have no idea if there’s merit it to Paul’s complaint about the problems with the voting process (the straw poll is famous for winking at multiple voting). But even if the whole thing was grotesquely rigged, what business is it of the federal government? I suppose it would be a different matter if this was the actual caucus, and certainly it would be different if this was an actual election. But, this is the internal business of a private entity. The Iowa GOP could have decided to declare the winner by slicing open a goat and going by the color or smell of the animal’s entrails. Would the Paul campaign ask the leviathan state to rule on the unfairness of the goat's diet?

Update: From a typically charming Ron Paul supporter (the email came in within 2 minutes of the original post, by the way):

Subject: Uh - yeah. Maybe the thing you're "missing"...

...is that the Paul campaign had nothing to do with
the lawsuit and requested that it be withdrawn.

It's not hard to check these things before posting
something to embarrass yourself, you know.

Me: Okay, fair enough. But, a few things: One, sorry if the posting on limited information dynamic of blogging offends you. Two I said "representatives" of the Paul campaign. I assumed that Paul had some kind of plausible deniability. Usually, candidates can tell their supporters to stop this sort of action, so I wouldn't surprised if Paul winked at the effort. Three, the irony that supporters of Ron Paul don't see the contradiction is funny in itself. And, last, to the extent Paul's finger prints aren't on the effort, I think this is a sign that Paul's appeal reaches into a category of activists who are not exactly doctrinaire libertarians.

Update II: A more reasonable email:

It's not the Ron Paul campaign doing it.  The campaign even sent an open email to supporters asking people to please stop with the phone calls, faxes, and other complaints about the IA straw poll vote count.  It's an outside group affiliated with the wackjob [I'm putting it mildly] Jim Condit, who also tried to raise money from Ron Paul supporters to conduct his own "exit poll" of the straw poll.

08/11 10:52 PMShare