 One of the things that people always asked me about my campaign was what's it really like out there when you're out there going around and meeting all these people and they're taking you home for dinner and doing all these various things. You know we see we know what we hear in newspapers and that kind of thing but what's it really like? So Ron is here to tell you what it was really like. He's going to talk to us on how I spent my summer vacation and the rest of 1988. Dr. Ron Paul. Thank you very much. Very nice to be here. I'll have to think up something nasty to say about David talking about fetuses in medical school. You know one thing I know is there's you know too many people in government but don't you think there are too many attorneys in government too? Hey I'd sit down back there. We weren't referring to you. I mean there are a few good attorneys but not too many but it is a real delight to be here with you today and share with you some of the adventure of actually it was more than a year. It would turn out to be about 18 months. There was a fair amount of traveling involved. Something like 700,000 miles. I was glad to get home to tell you the truth. You know if somebody asked me one time how many days out of the week did I campaign and I very frankly told them the truth. Eight days out of the week. I was campaigning but it was a definitely a worthwhile experience and something that I would never do again but it it was something that I think I felt good about. I think a lot of good will come from the campaign and I feel good about what's been happening and there have been a few individuals who did some special things in the campaign that was helpful, very helpful and generous. Of course my wife who kept my family together during that time was very helpful and she's sitting in the back. My wife Carol's with me today. Also one of the probably the most disappointing things of the campaign was that we didn't have about five or ten or fifteen or twenty million dollars for television advertising and we did put one television ad together and it got on a few areas of the country but the major ad that many of you saw you know at the National Convention was really the handy work of Lou Rockwell and it's just too bad that we weren't able to use more of his talents in television and some other things which could have been done with money but Lou certainly deserves a round of applause and some credit for doing some real creative work on that television ad. Now there was a campaign chair and around his name used to be Bert Blumert but I'm not sure where he is now. Is Bert here today? See no he said he had heard enough from me over the past year. He came to a lot of the meetings but I think he is around and will be around but Bert really did a grand job as being the campaign chairman as well as the chairman of the Access Committee and Bert certainly to me is somebody who is a real bulwark of the party and was real supportive and and probably was an individual that was key in influencing me in the direction that I've gone and that is by rejecting one of those older parties and joining the new and the party of the future. You know as the campaign went on there was certainly a lot more enthusiasm. The crowds were bigger and where we go into one state in the early part of the year there might be 10 or 15 people in a small state party and then we would go back toward the end or near the time of the election and maybe have 150 or 180 and the parties generally were very excited about what was what was happening. At the end of the campaign near the end one of the best pieces of coverage that we had occurred I believe with the McNeil Lair report. They had some coverage on the convention and some background and then some interviews and we had a lot of favorable calls from that interview and I was just thinking you know wouldn't it be nice if you could combine that with the evening news plus paid television I think we could certainly have influenced a lot more people over the year but after that show was on I know I had a trip in the next day into Detroit Michigan and I was met by a key supporter and a good friend of the Libertarian Party Jim Rodney and he met me there and he was so excited about all and he was so pleased and he had just seen the program and he says you know Ron he says all we need if we just had six more months well I think we need a little more than six more months but but he was feeling good about it and I think there's reason to feel good about it and as time goes on we'll get more and more of those type of programs over the years. Now I did another survey just recently since I've been here and I am really seriously thinking about asking for a recount because just recently I went out in the local parking lot here walked around saw more Ron Paul bumper stickers I didn't see any Bush or Chicago stickers and I just know there must have been a miscount some place along the way you know they're coming back to Las Vegas is interesting too because we had several campaign stops here and generally had some favorable coverage we had the media would come out and the newspapers would come out and we got the coverage we needed and what we expected but I found it very interesting one morning I got the paper as we were leaving town and the article was very blunt they said you know we really like those libertarians we really like Ron Paul and that tax issue because that income taxes really has to go but this position on gambling we just can't understand it and we can't support it he wants to legalize gambling in all the states so everybody has their own axe to ground grind when I was at the University of Pittsburgh we had a nice reception there with on this and with the students and one of the average or the usual question comes up very frequently with the students has to do with the antitrust laws and monopolies because students are just finishing their economics course and they're told watch out you can never have Liz a fair capitalism because the monopolies will eat us up and just think of the horrors of the 19th century so the student asked this and I explained in my best manner to tell them that even the antitrust laws are not interpretable that you know if you have everybody if somebody charges too much that means they have too much of the market and they're gouging everybody if they're charging too little that means you still are too strong and you're cheating and running out the competition and if you all charge the same thing that means you've worked in collusion and afterwards there was a student came up to me and he denny he introduced himself as being a student an individual who had migrated immigrated from the Soviet Union and he he said that that reminded him of a joke when he was in the Soviet Union he'd come here near in the mid-70s and he said that the joke was there were three people and three Russian prisoners and the one prisoner and they got to talk in the one prisoner says they want to know why each other was in the prison the one prisoner said well you know I kept getting to work too early and they accused me of bodying up to the to the officials and the other fellow said well I kept getting there too late and that was cheating the state so they put me in prison the other person said well I kept getting to work on time they accused me of owning a Western watch there's one I've received a lot of credit during the during the year and a lot of compliments and people are very appreciative in the party and I appreciate excuse me I appreciate that very much the one thing though that somebody said well someday they're going to give me a medal you know for going out and doing this campaigning I said well it really not the campaigning and not for the positions I take and what we've accomplished because that's to be expected but there is if you ever wanted to give me an award it has to be for doing something way above and beyond the call of duty and that was to appear on the more downy show that was risky business and the name recognition went up and it helped a few other things but the next go around since I've left since I've left the campaigning the more downy show called me once again but I was a little more cautious about how anxious I needed more name recognition so I didn't didn't get on that show but they had a very special subject to go over they were coming to Texas to film it and there had been a piece of legislation introduced there and had to do with enforcing the drug laws and the individual had introduced a law that said that for every time if every time a drug dealer gets caught selling drugs he gets a finger chopped off and they wanted to discuss that on on television toward the end of the campaign many of you became aware of the little episode that we had with the National Election Service when the National Election Service said well there the libertarians are non-people and we won't we won't count them well this prompted us to go to New York and we did a little picketing out in front of NEC and then the press person I had and myself we went up to see the National Director of the NEC NES the National Election Service we sat down and talked and finally I just hit them point blank with with what they were really proposing and I said what would you do as a service if a Republican got 45% of the vote a Democrat got 45% of vote and a libertarian gets 10% of the vote how are you going to report that on election night he looked at me straight in the eye and he said 50-50 and I started to laugh and he got very angry he just couldn't stand the fact that you know it was so absurd you couldn't get angry the only way my reaction was just a laugh at him which made him furious I think he then called his attorney and was getting ready to throw me out of the office and it is just you know the type of attitude that they have they'd like us to go away but that's not going to be the case I think they're going to be hearing a lot more from us as time goes on and just by pretending we don't exist it's not going to solve the problem now you know David mentioned a little bit about how you can read in this into the statistics and there was one letter sent to Libertarian news and I thought it was a real reasonable explanation on how to explain this election because they took Ed Clark's vote of 1980 and they showed that they took all the votes that were non Republicans and non Democrats and Ed Clark hate to report this on poor Ed he only got 15% of them but David comes along David got 37% of all the non Republican Democratic votes and now the Paul Maroo ticket got 49% of the non Republican Democratic votes I say we're really on a roll Dr. Hospers earlier talked some some what about privacy and I think privacy is a real important issue because I've decided after having campaign for a year talking to a lot of different kind of groups that if we wanted to use one particular issue to bring as many groups of people together and to think about what we're talking about really I believe it's the privacy issue because privacy to me means freedom I mean how can you have liberty without privacy and vice versa but privacy is attractive to some who see themselves as very strict conservatives and it could be educational privacy it could be religious privacy it can be financial privacy but of course from the more liberal side there are people who are talking about the civil liberties in sexual privacy and the use of personal substances this is privacy and if we can get all the groups together to really understand that privacy brings all the people together I think this is one of the issues that should be used to unify and yet what has generally happened if we're caught if we're not cautious frequently that issue can be used to stereotype us and turn us off because all of a sudden I say oh the libertarians are those who are the ones who want to shoot heroin and therefore what we want to legalize and what we want to permit if we want to legalize freedom of choice and privacy in the strictest sense of course this also means that we we should not have this look like we're condoning or endorsing or encouraging all the activities that we would permit in a free society but that was an issue that came up just about every single interview whether it was the radio or television or the newspapers the issue of the drugs came up and I always felt good about handling the issue if there was any one issue that I thought we could talk about the libertarian view because I felt comfortable with it it was the the drug issue in particular was the one issue that we wrote up a significant white paper and distributed it and I felt comfortable because I felt strongly opposed to the use of drugs at the same time with a medical background I felt very strongly that this issue should be handled quite differently than society is handling it today and if we wanted to look at any one particular issue I think it's the drug issue where we have made tremendous strides there's been tremendous progress in the drug issue that people are now talking about the foolishness of the drug laws and it isn't nearly as difficult to discuss this issue in a more open and frank manner I think we're a long way off from achieving our goals but at least the discussion has changed I believe it occurred even during this past year or so that there was a significant change in this discussion and I was invited to a speech at the Federalist Society and this is a large number of of attorneys conservative attorneys more so than libertarians but they had a good panel there of both liberals conservatives and libertarians discussing discussing this issue so it's a it's a very good opportunity for us to pursue this and continue with it because this drug issue in this crime issue is not going to go away and they're starting to wake up to the fact that realizing that that there is a is a connection there was a report today believe in the New York Times explaining that another group of policemen were just arrested because it was in their interest to sell drugs inside the prison and I quite frequently made a comment that made people stop and think you know if you can't keep drugs out of the prisons how are you ever going to keep prison all our drugs off the streets and I think there's a lot of truth to that on the issue of private and personal liberties there was a one physician friend of mine from Iowa that was a very loyal follower but he was strictly a conservative he was very interested in the money issue but he says Ron he says if you're gonna be a libertarian I'm gonna be a libertarian I'm gonna join the party I'm gonna get active so he joined he went to his first meeting and he was somewhat shocked a bit and they started they got into some of the civil liberties things that he wasn't in agreement with and and he debated with them a bit and he really didn't know what he was gonna do but he was he was a real good soldier and I came back about six months later after this incident and we were driving a long and he said you know he says I guess he says I guess what people do behind the barn really is their own business so so he said he simplified our our discussion about civil liberties there was a one one individual though you know I try very often to be as clear as possible to always give an answer even though there are some answers that have been even controversial within the libertarian ranks but I always made a sincere effort to give the very straight answers but quite frankly there was one that I wasn't positive of and I begged off that fella came up and I knew he was a libertarian because he wanted to know what my positions my position was on the white rhinoceros and I really hadn't thought it through so so and I haven't run into any white rhinoceros so I'm gonna have to just wait and think that out I had a very interesting interview with the New York Times and he looked unenthusiastic about the interview it was one of his routine chores I think he had to go through but we were going on and then we got into the budgets and and he wanted to know our position and on deficits and and the budget I says yes the budget should be balanced it should be balanced immediately and it should be balanced by cutting he's alright he says where would you cut I said well you get rid of the Department of Education Department of Energy Department of Agriculture and I went down the whole list about six or eight things and he stopped and he says holy man he says this is the first time I've ever had anybody answer this question then he then he got then he was much more interested in the issue and this this was as much fun as anything was talking to the interviewers who would at the beginning maybe be reluctant but you could see them mellow and get more interested you don't you didn't convert them but they really interview the best the most significant role that I think that we play as candidates and the reason why we have to have a lot of good credible candidates out there talking to the media to educate the media as to know to teach them on to even know what to ask the other candidates that is really what they're doing they're picking our brains to find out what are the options because there's a lot of political mush out there when you think about Republicans and Democrats one of the most exciting features I think of the campaign that was new and different and something that we can follow up on in later years is the is the satellite feed we did two of those this this followed both of the debates the one the one debate I answered exactly the same questions that were asked with the other two candidates and the next time it was a satellite feed from Houston and it was prior to the other debates trying to get the questions asked that should be asked the next day now the coverage has to be from that very small but still was significant enough to be worth the effort because it caught some attention it cause it was it was newsworthy in itself we had good coverage in the Houston area AP was there I think it was the New York Times came to that particular function as well this in the age that we live where the electronic media is changing we have to break into course to the conventional advertising if we ever want to make a real success of the party but we also have to be able to use and learn to use the electronic media in the cable televisions more than half the people now are watching things other than the three majors so this to me is a major issue and one of the reasons why one of the major projects that I have lined up in for the next year or so and getting started right away is to start a television program one that will be prepared professionally and made available to start off with with some major cable network programs and I believe that we can reach not hundreds of millions but hundreds of thousands if not millions of people on a weekly basis and we've have we're at the point we're real close to picking a producer and one of the producers that is most anxious to do the program and yet we have not made this decision and we will be having a meeting meeting soon is Robert Chittester Robert Chittester and thank you Marshall for helping me run him down Robert is somebody that I had met before and of course Robert Chittester did the Milton Friedman programs free to choose and he's a professional at it and and I think that something good is gonna come from that I really believe that we can reach a lot of people it I can't promise that you're gonna see it on evening prime time in the near future but we're going to get it on one way or the other and inviting people then to respond and find a lot of new people I mean in the campaign you can find 20 or 30 thousand new people of individuals who have heard about the libertarian party and the libertarian message and they want more information but I believe the television is the is the method that we have to use and I'm not the only one thinking along these lines there are a lot of other people in the country a lot of other libertarians have started to think along this line and they're using public access cable and different things so I think it's very important that we can continue continue to do that the the media I was telling you a little early about the reporters who respond that this was especially true when you had the editorial board meetings they're usually three or four to get would get together and they would interview most of the time they were very generous and very kind and very respectful to our views there was if they were ridiculing us I think they wouldn't even bother giving us the time of day a lot of major papers did the interview and sometimes nothing directly came of it but I think long term it's very good most of them are very much aware of the libertarian movement in general I think that both the Mises Institute and reason foundation and Cato and others have done a good job in getting information out to a lot of these newspapers and usually there was one in-house libertarian on most of these staffs we had one called toward the end of the campaign from ABC broadcasting television and it was a young man and he says let me tell you he says we have been trying very very hard to get you coverage and we just can't get through the bosses this was told to me several times several large newspapers in the younger generation there are libertarians out there we're infiltrating we're there and we're sneaking up on them but they're not in a position of having the authority and the editorial boards or the news boards or the ownership but I think there is now a reflection of the educational efforts of the last 20 years and for reasons to be optimistic and not say that we're all by ourselves and we're completely alone that that is not the case one individuals at this meeting today asked me what was the response of your colleagues back in Washington when you went off on this libertarian tangent and running for president and leave in the Republican Party and I've been back two or three times to visit Washington visit many of the members and I'd have to say that the reception has been very respectful they weren't surprised because they were very much aware of the fact that my philosophy was different than theirs and they respected me for taking the positions that I did take now I think the interesting thing is the reaction prior to that because while I was in the house and it became known that I was the libertarian congressman they would frequently come up and almost have to come and sit down so many of them would come and sit down and in a way be apologetic to me and explain their votes they would come and say you know I'm really a libertarian but I can't quite vote the way you do I don't think my people back home would tolerate that but they didn't come with the idea of saying you know I'm really a libertarian now can you imagine somebody sitting down next to the communist or the socialist or something there's nothing to be proud of to say that but they down deep inside most of the members of Congress that I met and talked to felt proud about the idea that the word libertarian was a good word and not a negative word one other thing that I would like to do in a political action committee that I've started in the political action committee will function probably a little more forcefully at the time we might have a key race to concentrate on but one thing I would like to do haven't had the experience in Washington I know how the wheels work with the members of Congress is I think one of the best things to have would be a libertarian rating system of the members of Congress on all their votes now there are two two advantages to this first is that if you're out in the countryside thinking about running against somebody and you want to know how libertarian somebody is the conventional rating systems won't tell you but you look it up and find out whether this guy's a 50% or 70% or 0% and and you would have that information but the other thing is is playing on this idea that they think down deep in their heart that libertarianism is good and they the congressmen are also very political if you haven't noticed they they love they might not love all the ratings but they're interested in all the ratings no matter what rating came out whether it was a cope rating or a john birch society rating when they were out they were usually circumcised hey what was your rating here what was your rating here they're interested in that because they know it has a public a public message and if we continue our momentum where people are thinking not liberal versus conservative not republican versus democrat but libertarian versus stateism what's my vote for liberty what is my rating and i think if this is done well and the research is done correctly that some good pr can come from this this can be released and gets some national attention on this i think we're at the stage where that would be a very positive thing and hopefully that will come about sometime later later in the year some of the things that we might consider as a party that might strengthen the the party and the message and the candidacy of the next candidate is the consideration of the of the national convention when you pick the when we pick the candidate i understand the debates that have gone on and the so-called benefits that are supposed to come by having the candidate picked a year plus a couple months before the election but the political disadvantage is that there's less attention it'd be a lot more attention if we had a national convention that was more comparable or more at the time where the other two conventions are occurring in the summer and this would more or less say that we're leaving that stage of being one of the third party the the third party where you just have your convention at any old time but a major party has a convention when the other two parties are having a convention i think it would help us in in in a couple ways one is i think we would get more media attention it was said that the major reason for this was that we needed a candidate in order for the candidate to have his name applied in the organization to be put together in order to get the ballot status taken care of well the ballot status generally doesn't get taken care of before that summer anyway it seems like so much of that is left late and the new alliance party proved that they didn't need to have an official candidate to get on the ballot they gone on 50 states they didn't have their about their official candidate till summertime and therefore i think they've made the point that we don't necessarily have to have the have the candidate that early and the the ballot access uh if if i had to pick the the uh most difficult problem of the campaign it's ballot access and i would make a couple suggestions on this first thing is if there's any way possible don't ever put the burden or don't uh don't make it so that the burden falls on the shoulders of the candidate to get on the ballots i mean this is this the party has to be strong enough both nationally and statewide to get on the ballot now this is one of the advantages i think this is one of the best things that's going to come out of the campaign because of Bert Blummer's experience with and his efforts in ballot access he knows what the ropes are he has paul jacob working with him even now they're working they're working as hard now as they were before very diligently and i think the ballot access approach through the national party with Bert Blummer is key to saving and making a real good candidacy out of the uh next candidate next go around now the one thing i would suggest let's say this happens and they end up getting on 47 48 46 45 who knows what because maybe the laws go a lot worse maybe it takes twice as much effort to get on and we don't have our 50 the goal ought to be 50 the goal ought to be put all on the burden of ballot access committee but let's say they don't quite make it i think that then it should just be dropped uh dropped from from the candidate i think a candidate should just go out and do his campaigning i know i didn't accept that position prior to the campaign i was always the one that said look if if they're not going to raise the money and the party can't do it and the states can't do it we're going to do it we have to be on the ballot and believe me it really was very harmful to the campaign in the sense that it didn't ruin the campaign it just means it it drained a lot of funds it drained a lot of resources it drained a lot of personnel i mean person people who were supposed to be working on the campaign they would be they'd be with me out on the campaign trail and they say well we got to fly you to Missouri and then take them over it was you know deadlines to meet it was just no way to do it and it shouldn't be done that way and i don't know if there was any way to avoid that up until now but i believe we're at this stage where we don't have to do it anymore i think with the experience that we've had this year with burt and paul working together and others i believe that this thing is going to be turned around and they'll have us not only will it be away from the candidate next time but i believe that they'll be on 50 ballots next time as well the one other thing that i would recommend and uh we didn't do it this time and i'd have to take the blame for this partially at least and that is the for the campaign to look like a real campaign not only should the convention be at a more conventional time but i think the the candidates ought to be seen but we were uh andre and i were seen together and we worked together and andre every time i've ever asked him he came and campaign and filled in but really you know it was a separate campaign andre had to raise his own money and i think a real campaign is going to get to point where the two people are working closely together and probably have a more unified campaign not only in in organization and structure but fundraising and everything else that again i think would be a reflection of the growth of the party and the maturity of the of the campaign and and and if if the two would be working much closer together the media sometimes is accused of being conspiratorial we are anxious to sometimes find a reason why they haven't given us the coverage we wanted and there are days when i feel more conspiratorial than others and i've generally taken the position that no if we become newsworthy and we do the job we're going to get the coverage and i don't think that's a totally accurate statement but i think there's that's to caution people to say yes we do have to do our job but then over and above that i am of the inclination to believe that there is a conspiracy and i put that in quotes to make sure that we have not too much credibility i think that it would be very convenient for the others i think it's very convenient for the republican democrats to make it difficult for us to get on ballots and i think it's very convenient that anybody other than republics and the democrats are represented by kooks either another party or a kooky libertarian or something anybody who does not fear the conventional status quo of politics has to look a little nutty so that when it comes to libertarians they're all in that category for instance it's probably not completely accidental that lindon lorouge frequently is said to be a libertarian because everybody gets lumped in together now the only good reasoning that could come from that is we're all lumped together and they all say we're libertarians mainly because we're the strongest faction of the alternate choices but i think the media very interestingly will frequently put some of the kooks in there and put us all all together this came up after the election during the election there was a inquiry made from the new york times for us to write an article about third parties and and our our our candidacy we wrote two version of the article it was that they were not accepted and i think what we had there was one individual trying to go to the board and it didn't get through a couple weeks after the campaign maybe about a month ago i guess finally an article appeared in the new york times going over third parties and did anybody see this in new york time the need for a third party movement in this country written by the mayor of burlington a socialist and he needed they needed there was a need because people were frustrated with government and half the things he was saying were it's actually true frustration and anger and people weren't voting and all these kind of things going on he said there was a need for a third party movement and i wrote a letter back i thought well maybe the libertarian the the recent libertarian candidate could get an answer i wrote back and gave our side of it and i waited for all the answers to come in so the answers to that editorial finally came in by the greens party and and that was the discussion it was a full discussion in the new york times now i don't believe they're that dumb i don't believe they're that ignorant about what's happening and they got my letter so in other words i believe it's very clearly designed to make sure that we don't gain the credibility but if we do our job right and we have the correct message we will then have to overcome those obstacles they're going to put nothing out on a platter to us so our job of course will be to continue the efforts and to make the news where they cannot they cannot exclude us you know uh there were a couple good editorials as a matter of fact i saw a lot of good newspaper articles that i liked and i enjoyed one i enjoyed the most was if the founding fathers were here today they would vote for ron paul i especially like that one but uh warren brooks uh who is a national more economics writer uh had a nice article out and his title here was ron paul has the only solution for the deficit and gives our position pretty well that uh you saw the deficit problem by by cutting a lot of spending but i guess the my favorite article was written by james uh kill patrick kill patrick is a very very well known well-read national political writer and um some people read the article and didn't like it because there are some uh not uh they're rather not so subtle criticisms uh about what's going on but then i believe he has it generally in the right perspective and i want to read a few paragraphs of this article because i think it really gives us a pretty good idea about what they're thinking about us and i don't think it's all bad i think there's a lot of good things here and uh this this one's title says dr paul makes uncomfortably good sense and uh here's a quote he says what is to be said of such a candidate in the conventional wisdom what one says is that paul is nuts very generous in a more generous appraisal he is naive idealistic ingenuous and simplistic after these modest observations have been made it must also be said that the gentleman makes uncomfortably good sense i mean we're making them feel it because they know we have a message the interesting thing is that ron paul believes he truly believes he believes in life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and he believes that society prospers when the people rely on their own resources first and look to government last he regards politicians as a breed of hypocrites who are in the faith who are in favor of economy until an economy affects their constituents in the newspaper business we seldom meet true believers it is therefore a refreshing experience to spend an hour talking with paul viewed in the real world his proposals are preposterous impossible unachievable and yet and yet he says in his farewell speech in the house of representant 1984 he spoke of farm subsidies quote from my farewell speech we learned nothing from the depression years and continue to pay farmers to raise crops not needed and then we pay them to stop planting our policies drive prices of commodity our policies drive prices of commodities down so we prop up the prices and put up the surpluses the consumer suffers the farmer suffers the country suffers but our policies never change we just legislate more of the same programs that caused the problem in the first place that makes jim cal patrick uneasy because he knows we're right if we're right there he's thinking in his mind maybe we're right across the board the nominee has no illusions about winning though he cheerfully observes that if all the people who are dissatisfied with george bush and michael de caucus would vote for him he'd make a respectable showing i expect he has a valid point there one other quote that uh was written after the campaign i think it's very interesting uh comes across in the national syndicated column let me congratulate the american people smart enough not to vote what difference does it make when 99 percent of the incumbents are reelected when right conspires with left dilute the treasury republicans lack the courage to cut spending democrats lack the courage to raise taxes both annually seek sanctuary and back rooms deal with a white house where no one is held accountable we have two parties of government now one prefers borrow and spend in the other tax and spend now that sounds almost like a libertarian when you say you know it's written by it's written by somebody who had been in the appointment in the employment of ronald reagan for several years and who is now an avowed republican conservative and that comes from pat buchanan i think this is very encouraging i think this is good material and uh i know pat buchanan i've been on his show he has been very kind and generous and and i think uh i think he is very much of where what's happening he doesn't mention the libertarians there he doesn't mention that position but he has to have been influenced by our viewpoint to come up with these statements that are so libertarian uh oriented the uh election in general was to me personally a tough and trying year for various reasons but to me it was very much worth it but the only time it was worth it is when i know that there are others who have cared about it and i know when i come to meetings like this and i meet so many of you and i've had not one individual come up maybe i will after this talk but i have not had one individual come up and say hey you really did a lousy job everything has been so positive and so complimentary that makes it worthwhile because if i did not have your support there is no movement with uh an individual there is only a movement with a group of people who come together who have a general agreement on some principles and ideas this nation is starved for that this nation is star for the libertarian message this nation is star for the libertarian party let's go get them from now on thank you very much thank you i think we have some i think we have time for a few questions one question one question i talked too long where he had a time to get up to speed but didn't have to spend a year and a half to uh you mean to pick the candidate in what particular month to know for sure well i don't know whether there is an exact amount of time i'm thinking of it more from the practical and political viewpoint because even if the the convention was in june and he was became the candidate then the question is is does that mean that's when he started and i don't think that's the case the individual would have had to start you know many months before going out and soliciting your support and going to the conventions but i think the convention should be somewhere in the summer you know may or june and then they would have three or four three or four months well no it would be six months then which would be would be much better but i don't think that would let the let the person off the hook for needing to do the work necessary which means to reach out and get a lot of people now the one uh uh okay go ahead i think we can squeeze your question yeah your views on the following matching funds and lrock oh good i'm glad you brought those two up uh you know i was probably priding myself about always giving very very straight answers earlier right well tell you what on the uh matching funds i'm a little wishy washy on it uh i have always opposed it right now i'm in a position of saying i do oppose it but i listen very carefully to the arguments for taking the funds for the purpose of overcoming the tremendous obstacles i this came up at a lot of the libertarian meetings that were mixed with others that weren't uh libertarian party members we frequently would take a poll and the hands would go up uh generally a third of the people would be for the for the of taking the funds and i'm i'm not saying that i could not be persuaded uh to to accept that idea the use funds only to overcome the legal obstacles that have been put in our way but i understand both sides of that argument i think both sides are pretty strong on the argument now al rock what does that stand for again libertarian republic republican republican i've worked so hard getting away from those republicans i can't understand so often since in this past year frequently i ran into these republicans within the libertarian group uh you know i have a very strong appeal i have a very strong opinion about it and that is that it always totally amazed me to think about the amount of credibility that a republican group within a libertarian group how much how much uh attention they got people will actually ask them their opinion can you imagine the republicans calling me up inviting me to their convention so i can stand out there and do things or call me up and give me an interview in their publication themselves in their republican publication doesn't make any sense sure everybody has a right to their own approach i don't i don't necessarily think the approach of libertarianizing some republicans is such a terrible idea i think it's a great idea i happen to follow that for a long time where my contention would be is why in the world would somebody gain very much credibility by allowing them to uh sort of come in and make use of the libertarian movement to undermine the libertarian party structure so i think that doesn't make a lot of sense i think when you don't see that type of activity where the libertarian magazines don't feel compelled and feel guilty if they don't ask wonder what the el rock people are thinking at the time when we don't have to do that anymore i think we will have matured a little bit more thank you very much