I hope you all enjoyed the break as much as I did. While we were away, it looks like the horse race for the Republican presidential nomination got even more unusual with the out-of-nowhere surge of Rick Santorum and the evaporation of the previously prominent Newt Gingrich. What interests me the most, however, is the level of support Ron Paul is getting for the White House and what it says about our generation.
In 2008, about two-thirds of voters below the age of 30 voted for Barack Obama, myself included. We were tired of the war in Iraq and the presidency of George W. Bush. Most of us wanted a more tolerant nation, and even conservatives opposed to things like abortion rights and gay marriage spoke about it in a different way than the generation above us. Government was broken, and too often it seemed like Obama was the guy to fix it.
Now, in 2012, with a presidential election on the horizon, we are still in Afghanistan, we have record deficits, and it seems that the solution to everything now is to create a new department or agency to create new laws and regulations that can never be fairly and widely administered.
I finally get why I never liked George W. Bush. It was because he was a big-government conservative. He created a new entitlement program in Medicare Part D, did nothing to trim government spending and pushed the nation into an expensive war that will cost us trillions of dollars and ended up costing thousands of lives. He pushed for a constitutional amendment on marriage and sought to define society's values through the arm of the government instead of allowing Americans to make their own choices.
Ron Paul is the antithesis to George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He is the ultimate anti-government presidential candidate, and a big chunk of our age group has been flocking to his message. It creates a message for where the future of conservatism is heading when a candidate who thinks we should be spending trillions less and trimming the military by thousands gets more than 20 percent of the vote in Iowa.
Former Senator Rick Santorum gets a lot of support from social conservatives, but his positions on social issues are far more to the right of the average Republican under 30. Even many younger conservatives who believe in traditional values wish to support their views through their actions and not through the strong arm of the government. His surge in Iowa will likely end in South Carolina as the Republican Party today cannot beat President Obama with such a socially conservative candidate.
Though Jon Huntsman is an attractive candidate with his focus on economic conservatism instead of the hawkish and religious appeals on which past Republican candidates have thrived, Mitt Romney will likely be the last candidate standing. While he is not as personally exciting as Obama, he seems like a man who deeply wants to be president and will play the game of politics to try and achieve his goal; if a little pandering is necessary, then so be it.
If he is able to win the nomination and beat Obama, he could very well be the socially moderate, fiscally conservative candidate our country needs after the Bush-Obama extremes. Romney is certainly much smarter than he lets on in campaign rallies and understands that even well-meaning governmental regulation has distorting effects that harm job creation and the economy.
Republicans are at their best when they stay out of other people's business and focus on business. The gun-toting, smack-talking Texas conservatism clearly turned off many in our generation, but small government conservatism and libertarian ideals are clearly changing many minds, including my own.
If Republicans are going to beat Obama, they need to stay out of wars and bedrooms and stick to relentlessly fighting for economic freedom.
Travis Hornsby is a statistics and economics senior at UF. His column appears on Mondays.
