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Well, at least if someone clicks on it now they will see both the corrected title and my chagrin at having so badly maligned Welch.
Here is the beginning of Ed Kilgore's article at the New Republic:
It's You, Not Me
Liberals and libertarians finally break up.
One mini-saga of the past decade in American politics has been the flirtation—with talk of a deeper partnership—between progressives and libertarians. These two groups were driven together, in the main, by common hostility to huge chunks of the Bush administration's agenda: endless, pointless wars; assaults on civil liberties; cynical vote-buying with federal dollars; and statist panders to the Christian right.
This cooperation reached its height during the 2006 election, in which, according to a new study by David Kirby and David Boaz, nearly half of libertarian voters supported Democratic congressional candidates—more than doubling the support levels from the previous midterm election in 2002. (As Jonathan Chait noted after the first Kirby/Boaz study of libertarian voting, their definition is overly broad, encompassing 14 percent of the electorate.) At the time, left-wing blogger Markos Moulitsas hailed the influx of "libertarian democrats" into the Democratic coalition. Soon, even the Cato Institute's Brink Lindsey was proposing a permanent alliance of what he called "liberaltarians."
It is interesting to note that one of the prime advocates of that alliance was Leonard "If you understand Objectivism you'll vote Democrat" Peikoff. It would be interesting to know what Peikoff's thoughts are on whether electing Obama was worth it. (At least at this point Peikoff could point to the failure of Obama's post-stimulus domestic agenda as mitigating his foreign policy and court appointees.) It is interesting to note that Peikoff has explicitly adopted a policy of public silence on "practical politics" in his podcasts.
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