Matt Welch Asks, Is Barack Obama a Stealth Libertarian?

For two
groups who share a strong antipathy toward the current president,
libertarians and conservatives sure don’t agree on much when it
comes to Barack Obama. On foreign policy, neoconservatives tend to
think Obama is an appeasement-addicted driver of America’s perilous
withdrawal from the world, while libertarians portray him as
essentially serving out the third and fourth terms of George W.
Bush. When the president announced in May that U.S. troop levels in
Afghanistan would be reduced to 9,800, Weekly
Standard Editor William Kristol called the plan
“unbelievably irresponsible” and “totally crazy,” while
Reason‘s own Nick Gillespie lamented that “Obama gives
10,000 men opportunity to be last man to die for our mistake.” It’s
always a healthy exercise to check your premises and examine
whether the people you disagree with may be onto something. But
even if you’re 100 percent secure in your assessment of the
commander in chief, Matt Welch proposes a potentially awful
scenario to consider: What if Barack Obama turns out to be the most
libertarian president of the post-Cold War era?

View this article.