I've submitted this for publication on the main site; Steve Cobb is looking it over now.
Benson allies gain ground but lose Benson
How should Free Staters react?
Tuesday's gubernatorial election brings a new governor to New Hampshire, John Lynch. Lynch
came to power promising an end to our statewide property tax and pledging to veto
any sales or income tax. In any other state this would be considered some sort of
anarchist coup. But here liberty lovers see it as *setback* for freedom because
his opponent, Craig Benson was far more anti-tax than that. Most observers, including
me, expected the incumbent Benson to win. In the event, his allies in the legislature
did well...but Benson didn't. Stung by a series of scandals and various other problems
I will recount, Benson failed to win re-election, by a margin of 2%. The news is
not all bad, not by a long shot. I'll go into detail on that later. But this piece
of news is bad enough to cancel out quite a bit of good. Benson is an unrivaled
champion of liberty in New Hampshire; when compared to him even Lynch is not.
First, let's look at why Benson lost, or at least my take on it. I'll concentrate only
on the factors that were under his control or ours, and as you will see...if any
one of these problems had been dealt with, Benson probably would have won.
Winston Churchill once said you shouldn't criticize others for something they did in the past unless
you can prove that you sounded the alarm bell at the time. So I'm attaching links to our discussion of these problems
in the months preceding the election. Now...the problems:
1) Benson didn't start fighting soon enough.
http://forum.freestateproject.org/index.php?board=31;action=display;threadid=7694;start=msg105570#msg1055702) We didn't start fighting for *him* soon enough, although kater did sound
the alarm starting in August:
http://forum.freestateproject.org/index.php?board=31;action=display;threadid=7694;start=msg105598#msg1055983) Benson's campaign did not adequately mobilize the volunteers who signed up as
such on his their website, or at least when they did it was too late.
http://forum.freestateproject.org/index.php?board=42;action=display;threadid=83934) His administration had too many perceived ethical breaches:
http://forum.freestateproject.org/index.php?board=44;action=display;threadid=8115;start=15#lastPost5) Finally, at this early stage, there simply are not yet enough Free Staters in-state
to have a major impact. Sixty of us have officially moved since state selection
a year ago, with perhaps another sixty movers not yet counted. One hundred and twenty
green, early-arriving activists constituted a helpful force, but not a major one.
And only a fraction of us were concentrating on the Benson-Lynch race. As best I
can tell, recently moved Free Staters made up somewhere between 3 and 7 percent
of Benson's active volunteer base. I'm basing this educated guess on the number
of recently relocated Free Staters that showed up at the last two debate rallies.
Others, of course, contributed in different ways or helped a different liberty cause.
Perhaps we recent movers were able to gain Benson an extra percentage point. If
things had been just slightly different our efforts would have pushed him over the top and
changed the course of New Hampshire history, perhaps American history. Close only counts in
horseshoes and hand grenades, but this won't be our last chance.
Significantly, there is one thing that did *not* contribute to his loss, as best I can tell, and
in this we should take heart. His association with the Free State Project does not
seem to have hurt him; in fact it appears not to have been an issue in the race.
If Lynch ever attacked him for supporting us, it wasn't reported in the press. As
best I can tell, the last media-reported attack on Benson for associating with us
was back in June:
http://www.eagletribune.com/news/stories/20040627/NH_001.htmSince then we have apparently not been a point of contention, just a happy bunch
of freedom lovers coming into the state at the rate of about two a week. If we
were too small to affect the balance positively, we were too accepted to affect
it negatively. This is great news considering the extent to which we had expected
to be resented at this early stage.
Speaking of good news, here is the rest of it, at least the parts I know as of now.
1) The "liberty-hawks" in the NH House did significantly better than the ultra-authoritarians:
http://forum.freestateproject.org/index.php?board=42;action=display;threadid=86232) There were some positive results in the Senate; Two key Benson opponents (moderate
Republicans) lost their Senate seats to conservative or liberty oriented candidates
during the September primary. Both of the upstart conservative Republicans won again Tuesday against Democrats.
However the Republican majority in the Senate has dwindled slightly. I haven't yet run the "liberty
numbers" to see how libertarians and authoritarians did in the Senate, but
these new Senators make up 8% of the Senate and should be better champions of freedom
than their RINO predecessors. We're still crunching the numbers over at
http://forum.freestateproject.org/index.php?board=42;action=display;threadid=86373) Having a Democratic governor and a Republican house should, in theory at least,
tend to bring about a bit of gridlock...that's usually good for keeping government
growth in check. In any case, Lynch had to repudiate most of the things that are
associated with Democrats...otherwise he would have lost.
4) New Hampshire Republicans won all four of the national races they were in. Each of the four have decent or bearable
rankings from the Republican Liberty Caucus. The Caucus rates Bradley as a conservative, Sununu as a libertarian,
Gregg and Bass as enterprisers (which means they are libertarian-leaning by Congressional standards).
Though none of them are pure libertarians, each is more liberty-oriented than
their Democrat counterparts. New Hampshire voted for Kerry by a hair...I'm not sure
why but if they had gotten their way we would probably have seen Federal government
growth slow to crawl. Divided government usually does.
5) With regard to the effect on us Free Staters, many of us have gained experience and knowledge as political
volunteers. This we will pass on to the hundreds of new liberty immigrants expected
over the coming year. I know I've learned a thousand things I can't wait to share!
6) Many of us have made new contacts and friends with whom we worked on these campaigns,
many of them already in state government. Some of these bonds will carry on deep
into the coming century. Speaking for myself I got to meet five state reps and
will be staying in touch with three or four of them, not to mention the dozens of
candidates and staffers who have worked to make us freer.
Ultimately, it's all a matter of how we respond to the week's events. We now realize
that our untested, unprepared troops probably came within an ace of turning the
governor's contest, in favor of liberty. If we had been a bit more active, more skilled
or more numerous, Benson probably would have won, and we could have rightly claimed
to be the decisive factor. This should inspire us all to action of some kind, regardless of
where or who we are. The most "happening" list of things you can do this
month seems to be kater's thread at
http://forum.freestateproject.org/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=8611;start=msg115564#msg115564Whatever constructive thing you do I don't care...the point is, just go out, do it and tell us about it!
If the result of this defeat is more activity and closer bonds with our newly acquainted
brothers & sisters in liberty, it will not have been a defeat at all.
264417 Posts in 21118 Topics by 34812 Members / Latest Member: edwincfranklin
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