'Outside the debate'

I went to a terrific debate last night at America's Future Foundation rating Bush's presidency thus far. Basically, it was two libertarians, a conservative and a Republican party guy. They were Gene Healy, James P. Pinkerton, Ramesh Ponnuru and Jim Dyke, respectively.

If the purpose of a debate is to leave with your thinking somewhat changed, then the conclusion I came to last night is that I don't need any liberals in a debate. They just have nothing to add these days. I haven't come away from any conversations with liberals, in particular about Iraq, feeling like I've had my position challenged or that I had been given food for thought. 'Bush is an idiot', 'Bush is evil', 'it's all about oil' or 'he's just doing this to please his daddy' aren't arguments. Neither is 'we should spent that money here'. How much money would we have been willing to spend to prevent 9/11? Their hatred of Bush, and of Republicans in general, makes them so unserious to me.

Libertarians are, I must admit, a different story entirely. The libertarians present really tore into Bush. However, if there is one thing that I appreciate about libertarianism, it's the consistency. If you believe that we should never go to war unless, and only unless, there is a gun pointed directly at us, then it's consistent (though, in my opinion, wrong) to have been against the war in Iraq. Liberals don't really believe this, do they? They were for the 'unilateral' war in Kosovo. They are for the US undertaking military humantarian actions, so long as the man in the White House has a (D) next to his name. Libertarians also challenge me on domestic policy. Bush spends too much. This is a fact. Libertarians and conservatives rightly criticize him for it. But liberals, really, what can they say? Any of the 8 remaining candidates would make a Bush budget look like my shoe budget. There just doesn't seem to be much that I can learn from the left. Libertarians ask tough questions that give me pause. After Ramesh had defended Bush in light of Republican party history (which he noted was only briefly truly for small government, under Gingrich), a libertarian blogger I've been reading since before I knew what blogs were, Julian Sanchez, was in the audience and he asked him 'Ramesh, I was wondering if you'd be willing to keep your pundit beer-goggles on for long enough to deliver a stirring encomium to Bill Clinton. Because it seems as though if your criteria for evaluating presidents involves controlling for historical party awfulness and poll numbers, you'd have to assess him at least as favorably as Bush. And if so, will you be doing a Crossfire opposite Rich Lowry on this sometime?' That's a great question. It's related to what Ramesh talked about and it's funny. Ramesh, in turn, provided a great answer, that he did not think that Clinton was a total disaster as president and that he considers him somewhere in the middle in his personal rating of presidents. Julian's question wasn't 'but really, don't you think Bush is just doing this to help his buddies at Halliburton' and it didn't have anything to do with an Afghanistan oil pipeline. In other words, it was rational and I really appreciate that.

Libertarians are proof, to me for me, that I don't have to agree with someone to respect their opinion. I'm glad they are there and that they provide a real challenge to conservatives. We're better for it.

(By the way, the 'outside the debate' title is what Doug says about his own Democrats these days)