A year ago, I asked for opinions on which you would prefer, a Democratic president followed by a Republican governor or a Repubican president followed by a Democratic governor.
| 1976 – Jimmy Carter (D) | 1977 – John Dalton (R) |
| 1980 – Ronald Reagan (R) | 1981 – Chuck Robb (D) |
| 1984 – Ronald Reagan (R) | 1985 – Gerry Baliles (D) |
| 1988 – George H.W. Bush (R) | 1989 – Doug Wilder (D) |
| 1992 – Bill Clinton (D) | 1993 – George Allen (R) |
| 1996 – Bill Clinton (D) | 1997 – Jim Gilmore (R) |
| 2000 – George W. Bush (R) | 2001 – Mark Warner (D) |
| 2004 – George W. Bush (R) | 2005 – Tim Kaine (D) |
| 2008 – ??? | 2009 – ???? |
With Virginia’s history of electing a governor from the opposite party of the president for the last 30 years, and given that we now have candidates for each office, I figured it is time to revisit the issue.
Vote in the poll and leave your thoughts in the comments.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
I don’t think this is just a coincidence. There is normally some “buyer’s remorse” with a new president. Also, the out party is usually more motivated to win elections.
They’re all just thugs doing business at the point of a gun to me. You can keep ’em all.
Easy call, for me. Obama/McDonnell. I understand why one might look at it differently, but the stakes at the national level are just too big to risk it to someone like McCain.
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Rick, you know silly little statements like that is why people can’t take a lot of Libertarians seriously, right? Arlington County paves my bike trails . . . at the point of a gun! VDOT repairs the bridge over Washington Blvd. . . at the point of a gun! I know a lot of Libs are obsessed with guns (we’ll avoid what that’s about, for now), but eesh. Not exactly the way to get people to listen.
MB,
Part of me respects you for acknowledging the violence so many people can’t see. Then another part of me wonders why you support it, even though you’ve seen the gun in the room.
BTW, I really don’t call myself a libertarian anymore. Most of those guys are really just constitutionalists. Which, I have to admit, is preferable to what we have today. Politicians and bureaucrats following their own rules for once would be a hell of a start. But I’ve gone far more radical than that. I prefer the term Sovereign Individualist. Voluntaryist sounds pretty good too. But feel free to think of libertarians separately from me.
Sovereign Individualist? Are you one of the guys that sent me long screeds/questions/manifestos about paying taxes when I was writing mainly under the pseudonym Sui Juris?
No. I don’t do long rambling screeds. I’ve received those too, from nutcases who, because I agreed with them on something like taxes or gun rights, assumed that I would also be on board with 9-11 conspiracy theories, New World Order and chemtrail stuff. I don’t go down those rabbit holes, and I agree with you whole-heartedly that those manifestos are just unreadable, even in the rare instances where some salient point is buried in the muck.
I do appreciate you bringing it up, though. It gives me the opportunity to explicitly disassociate myself from those kooks. BTW, I’ve seen your current blog. You might be surprised at how much you and I agree upon.
“Sovereign Individualist” another term for anarchist.
Too bad more Democrats did not think that “the stakes at the national level are just too big to risk it to someone” with so little experience. The Republicans nominated their most experienced candidate, and the Democrats nominated their least experienced candidate.
I’m not an anarchist.
What I want could easily be achieved with a very small government. If I were able to write a brand new constitution, something akin to the ninth amendment would be the first article, and the last clause of every other article and amendment. For that matter, the Articles of Confederation were very close to my ideal.
By the same token, a stateless society with full respect for private property rights would not have to be as chaotic as you think either.
Just a quick and dirty reference for what I’m calling sovereign individualism, think Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, Thomas Payne. Sprinkle on a little Adam Smith, (post communist) Lysander Spooner and Frederick Bastiat, and you’re getting close.
I may need to write a few blog posts about this, whenever I get around to it.
So I don’t suppose I need to say then that we tried that, and it didn’t work?
As far as Barack Obama’s inexperience, I note this morning that it’s Obama that the sovereign governments of Iraq and Afghanistan are greeting with praise for his understanding of their issues, while McCain’s the one telling me why I should be concerned about the Iraq-Pakistani border.
Didn’t work for whom? The complaints didn’t come from individuals who wanted to be responsible for their own lives. It was only a problem for authoritarians like Hamilton, who wanted more central planning and authority. Those are precisely the people I don’t want the system to work for.
It didn’t work out terribly well if you happened to be black; the 3/5ths Compromise admittedly did suck, but you don’t get to have things like the Emancipation Proclamation, Desegregation, or Universal Sufferage without a Federal Government and a national Judiciary to ensure that basic liberties are, indeed, being observed.
I’m also told that Balkanization didn’t work out terribly well for the Balkans, either.
The constitution didn’t work out well for blacks, either.
The Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery. It ended slavery in seven southern states that Lincoln did not have jurisdiction over at the time. Slavery continued for some time in upstate New York, Maryland, and territories such as Missouri and Texas. What ended slavery in the U.S. was jury nullification. Jurors informed by prohibitionist newspapers refused to convict prohibitionists of violating laws requiring the return of slaves.
In a voluntary society, only natural law applies, not statutory law (unless the individual explicitly consents), so there’s nothing to vote on. Why do you need universal suffrage when your neighbors can’t vote to take away your rights? Even under the constitution, universal suffrage was only an example of government finally getting out of the way. It was government that enforced restrictions against blacks and women voting in the first place.
Desegregation; same thing. How do you have segregation in the first place without a strong central government to enforce it in the first place? This was just government at long last getting out of the way.
Right now, it sure looks like we’re going to get Obama/McDonnell. Not my first choice, but it’s good to see Obama’s foreign policy stances evolving – and he actually talks about Pakistan.
What do you all think of Brian Moran paying Lionell Spruill $7500/month for voter outreach? During the session, even.
http://notlarrysabato.typepad.com/doh/2008/07/morans-big-mist.html
Can you elaborate on exactly what Balkanization is, and how it relates to devolving power to the individual?
I really need to post some blog entries on this subject. It’s my own fault that some of these points are so unclear.
Speaking of clarification, the prohibitionists I referred to above who weren’t convicted were the ones harboring escaped slaves who’d crossed state lines. This was the law well after the Civil War, even in “free” states like Delaware.