On July 25, Jim Whitehead said he will not ask for a recount in the July 17 special election for Georgia’s US House seat, 10th district. The final results are Paul Broun 23,529; Jim Whitehead 23,135. Both are Republicans. They placed first and second in the first round on June 25. However, on June 25, Whitehead had 23,555 votes and Broun only had 11,208. Broun won by appealing to Democrats and independents.
It is also interesting to note that the libertarian conservative won out over the neocon. I wonder if this bodes well for the likes of Ron Paul and other limited government conservatives.
Why do you say this man is a libertarian/conservative? He is a supporter of the war, and I don’t see anything to differentiate him from a regular conservative.
Eric makes a great point. Self-identified libertarians — both big and small “L” — should refrain from embracing the newly-elected Georgia congressman. Broun is an arch-conservative Republican low life, not a libertarian.
First of all, he’s hardly an outsider, as many have claimed; his father was one of the longest serving members of the Georgia Senate. Secondly, Broun’s conservative and mean-spirited politics leave a lot to be desired, as evidenced by the enthusiastic endorsement he received from the rabidly right-wing Southern Party during his recent campaign.
Not only does he support the war, as Eric noted, but Broun apparently has little respect for those who have served in previous wars. During Georgia’s hotly-contested 1996 U.S. Senate race, Broun — a perennial candidate who was seeking the Republican nomination at the time — had the audacity to accuse Vietnam veteran Max Cleland, a triple amputee who can’t walk or stand, of exploiting his wheelchair, saying that Cleland was playing up “that wheelchair to the nth degree.”
Why any self-respecting libertarian or Democrat, for that matter, bothered to even vote in that special election runoff is a mystery to me.
Well, Ron Paul seems to like him.