But nonetheless I just want to quickly say that the national convention was my first presidential nominating convention, and what a fascinating one it was at that.  I would personally have preferred to see a presidential ticket that was more balanced between our “moderate” and “radical” wings, but nonetheless I’m very curious to see how the LP fares this year.

More exciting, and more relevant to my writing project, was to meet some great candidates from around the country.  Thanks to those who spoke with me and gave me your contact information.  Despite how distracted I’ve been the last few weeks, I still have it and I will be following up with you.  I plan to follow a few campaigns in particular this year and try to stay in touch with the candidates for my project.  Please feel free to contact me directly at arin AT arinsime dot com with suggestions for candidates to follow.

Best of luck to all our candidates this year!

If political campaigns are all about pressing the flesh and knocking on doors, then you could say mine got off to a bad start.

The date was Friday, June 23, 2006.  I had actually started my campaign in April of 2006, and it was still nearly a year and a half away from the election date of November 6, 2007.  But I already had a lot of media coverage and had attended many events and met many voters.  But this particular Friday was the first day I tried my hand at door knocking.

My campaign manager Lindsey Burke and I set off to Augusta County in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, to an area near the town of Weyers Cave.  We weren’t very organized about our door knocking yet – that would come later.  We had no list of people we wanted to talk with, no “walking list” as the political operatives call them, no targeted neighborhoods or voting demographic we were trying to reach.  We just wanted to go door knocking near Weyers Cave.  We did have a reason for picking that town and date, but I’ll get to that sometime later.

We picked a suburban neighborhood near I-81, drove to the back corner of it, and resolved that despite the blazing sun and summer heat of a Virginia afternoon, we would start walking and keep going until I was too sweaty to be presentable anymore.  I figured that wouldn’t take long.

At the first door no one answered.  We didn’t have any campaign brochures made up yet, or official campaign door hangers.  We had some postcards and some one page flyers we had made up about an eminent domain issue people in that area would be concerned about.  So I folded a flyer and put it in the door handle.

We walked to the next door and nobody answered there either.  So again I left a flyer.

The third door was different though.  I knocked and waited.  Then we heard somebody coming to the door.  I was really nervous about doing door knocking – I kept going over my script in my head.  “Hi my name is Arin Sime and I’m running for State Senate next year.  I’m just out introducing myself to people today and I was wondering if you have any issues at the state level that concern you?”

The plan was to stick out my hand, blurt out my script, hope I didn’t sound like a fool or that I wasn’t sweating too profusely, and then see what happened.  I hoped that they would say something about an issue where I could say “I agree!”  Or if I didn’t agree, maybe they could bring up an issue I was at least educated on, and I could answer “Here’s a libertarian approach to the same problem …” and then I could convince them there was another solution they hadn’t considered.  Or maybe they would just say “No, but thank you for visiting me today” and then I could move on.

Or maybe they would just tell me to get the hell off their property.  That’s what I figured would happen the most.

It seemed like a long wait for him to come to the door, but finally a young man did.  He opened the door and I thrust out my hand.  And then I instantly regretted it.

As I introduced myself and he took my hand, I realized his pants were barely up and the zipper was open with his underwear was hanging out.  Who knows what he had been doing before I knocked on that door, or while I waited for him to answer it, but here I was shaking his hand.

He didn’t have much to say about state politics.  And I was ready to leave, so I didn’t press him on the issues.

When I walked from that door, I felt dirty.  Not just because I really wanted to go wash my hands, but also because I had just committed a heinous act, an act I would repeat thousands of times during the next year and a half of the campaign.  I had interrupted somebody in their private home, and tried to get them to talk about things that would make me look good and all other politicians look bad.  All in the hopes that they would remember my name, vote for me, and make me their State Senator.

Despite how many people hate having politicians come to their door (and I used to be one of them), and despite how many politicians themselves don’t really enjoy door knocking, all the political consultants will tell you that door knocking is the single most important thing every candidate should spend most of his time doing.  The fact of the matter is – it’s effective.

But I hated it.  Of course I was uncomfortable knocking on doors – I’m a Libertarian!  Property rights and privacy are something that Libertarians have a lot of respect for.  I strongly believe that if the Second Amendment is the guarantee of our freedoms, then property rights are the foundation of our freedoms.  And libertarians also generally believe that you can’t have true liberty without the freedom to be anonymous and to maintain a large degree of privacy in your life.

So the notion of forcing myself on someone by knocking on their door was simply repulsive.

When I decided to run for office, and then after I announced my candidacy, my wife Lauren would joke that she was now married to a politician.   At first, I would get kind of annoyed and ask her not to call me that.  Politician is a slur in my mind frankly.  She said it with a certain amount of sarcasm and playful prodding, but she also said it with respect and admiration for the public stand I was taking, and for the road we had embarked on together.  But I still cringed at the notion of becoming a politician.

After I started knocking on doors, there was no going back.  I was now a politician – at least temporarily. 

I simply had to make the best of it and try to keep some vestige of my ethics and values despite the corrupting influence of seeking favor from others so that you may have power over them.  Even if you intend to reduce the amount of control government has over people’s lives, a political campaign and politics in general can have a very corrupting influence over you.

In many ways my aversion to door knocking is the perfect example of the irony and inherent conflicts of a libertarian deciding to run for office.  Most politicians seek office to increase government power over something or someone.  They may have some aspects of current government they would like to reduce or dismantle, but in large part, they have a respect or even a reverence for those in political power.  They really want that job.  They see proactive roles for government in society, and they see politics as a good thing, at least when it involves people in their party.

But a libertarian doesn’t really want the job.  We would love nothing better than to dismantle most of the things contemporary government does.  Short of the military, roads, police, and enforcing contracts, we’re generally in agreement that pretty much everything else would be better left to private businesses, charities, churches, and most importantly, individuals.  And there are plenty of libertarians who would like to see private roads, private militaries, and private police forces as well.  Although I’m generally not one of those libertarians, I think that they can make a pretty good case for all those things to be privatized.

It’s hard as a libertarian to explain to someone why you’ll make a good elected official.  Especially in a society where most people have come to expect government to solve all our problems for us, and they look to government for solace before they look to their neighbors, their church, or sometimes even before they look to their family for help.  For all that people complain about government bloat and waste, the fact of the matter is we have pretty much the government most voters want.  I’m not saying we can’t change that over time, I’m just pointing out the obvious.  It’s currently a tough argument to make.

And so campaigning for me was all about pushing myself and intentionally placing myself in uncomfortable situations, all for the sake of my principles and sometimes in outright defiance of what logic or at least pragmatism would dictate.  When you’re campaigning on principles, you always want to win and you try to win.  But realistically, winning is always a secondary goal.

My primary goal was simply to not make an ass of myself and hopefully educate some people about libertarianism along the way.

The guy with the open fly was far from the weirdest guy I ever met door knocking.  In fact, I met people much more naked than him.   Personally, I don’t answer the phone at home if it’s even slightly inconvenient for me to do so.  So I can’t imagine getting out of the shower naked to go answer the door, but one guy did.  At least he stayed partially hidden behind the door, but it was still pretty funny.  Especially since it turned out that a lady I was door knocking with that day works with him.

And then there was the creepy guy in his boxer shorts who loves Hillary Clinton.  That image may be seared in my eyes forever.

John Munchmeyer and I were knocking on doors in the city of Staunton, which is right in the heart of the district.  It was just before Halloween in 2006, and as we knocked on doors we saw kids in costumes walking around the downtown area because the stores were giving out candy to trick or treaters that day.  We knocked on one door and a shorter guy with long hair and a lot of body hair came to the door in his boxer shorts.  He said he had just been trick or treating with his kids, and I remember thinking immediately that I really hope he had just changed out of his costume, and hadn’t been walking around the city in his boxer shorts with his kids.

But who am I to complain if a guy wants to answer his door in his skivvies?  It is his property after all and I’m the one interrupting him.  But the experience was made more memorable because he spent the next 10 minutes of so talking to us non-stop about his views on politics. 

By itself that’s okay, because I usually like having the other people talk more than me.  I figure in a cynical political sort of way that the less I talk and the more I just nod and listen, the more people might be likely to vote for me just because I showed interest in what they were saying, even if at the end I completely disagreed with them (although I always tried to give them a libertarian solution to their issue if I didn’t agree with their suggested solution).

But the whole point of his rant to us was how Hillary Clinton is awesome.  That part may have been even more disturbing than his lack of clothing. 

Believe me, we did not invite a conversation about Hillary Clinton.  I never liked to talk about presidential candidates on the campaign trail, because generally speaking, I hate them all.  While I don’t remember the details of what he said about Hillary, I remember he had a lot to say and it was very hard for John and I to break away from the conversation.

Door knocking wasn’t all bad though.  I had some really great conversations, and I met a lot of really nice people.  Early in the campaign one lady was offering me advice on door knocking in Waynesboro.  She is a veteran of many local political campaigns, and when I shared a polling station with her one day during a local election, she obviously knew just about everybody who voted there.  Her biggest problem in going door to door was finding a polite way to turn down all the offers to come inside, have dinner, or sit down and chat for a while.

I don’t know as many people as her so I didn’t receive as many dinner invitations.  But I still found people were much friendlier to door knockers than I expected, even if I was interrupting their dinner.

In fact, that was the truly positive experience of campaigning for me.  I made some new friends during my campaign whose advice and friendship I now value very much.  And I met a lot of wonderful people who opened up to me and shared a lot of personal stories, and I truly feel that I have become a better person from the experience.

Since the campaign ended, I have tried to analyze in my mind a lot of conflicting emotions, and tried to answer some overly simple questions based on my own very limited experiences.

But I haven’t been able to come up with simple answers, and I continue to explore those questions. 

Is politics a good thing?  Is there any hope for a future of smaller government?  Can we as libertarians persuade voters to make a monumental change in the direction this country is headed?  Is everyone in mainstream politics corrupt, or are they simply good people trying to do a tough job using misguided principles?

Door knocking was both a tedious and an enlightening experience, and also sometimes downright disturbing.  I have very conflicted feelings about it.

Similarly, I have very conflicted feelings about all the questions above.

I found at times that politics was a very good thing, and I felt like I was really making a difference in my own small way for liberty.  At other times, I felt politics was hopelessly corrupt, narcissistic, and that there was no point being involved at all. 

At times, I was amazed how many people responded favorably to libertarian ideas, and how many expressed a true desire for smaller government.  And then at other times I met people who were seemingly libertarian in so many ways, and yet wanted to completely nationalize health care or some other program.

Lots of people expressed their support for me on the campaign trail, and were very complementary of both me as a candidate, and more importantly, of the ideas I was trying to represent.  They gave me hope that I actually could win and make a difference.  And yet in the end, while my vote totals were respectable for a third party candidate, they were nothing particularly exceptional.

Through this campaign, I had a rare opportunity to get to know a lot of prominent politicians and political players in my area and across the state.  From my public and private conversations with them, I was alternately encouraged and distraught.  Some I came to believe share my principles on many more issues than they would publicly ever admit, but they feel keeping their power is more important than being very bold in support of their principles.  A lot of them really struck me as good people who have simply become too cynical because they’ve been in the system too long.  And then some of them are flat out jerks who mask it just enough to keep their power, and they reinforced all my worst fears about politicians.  And I learned that the cynical political games you suspect are being played behind closed doors are probably playing out very similar to how you imagine.

I came out of this campaign even more committed to my principles than before, but more confused than before about the usefulness of our political process.  While I remain convinced that third parties play a very important role in our system and help drive the debate, I am also very distraught at the possibilities of success for liberty in our current political climate.

Don’t look to me for solid answers to any of these questions, although I hope you will find some in my experiences and in the experiences of the many other candidates I interview for this project.  I found my journey through our political process to be a very exhilarating experience with a lot of life lessons and a lot of insights, both good and bad.  Ultimately, you will have to come up with answers to the questions I pose yourself. 

You might even feel dirty at the end and want to wash your hands too.

If you want to join the group, please just visit the Facebook “Campaigning On Principle” group.

Here are the questions that the survey asks:

As I noted elsewhere on the survey and LibertarianCampaigns.com website, please keep in mind that these questions on the survey are not meant to be all inclusive, they are just a starting point to help me gather some basic information and stories from candidates.  You shouldn’t assume anything about the content of the book based on the questions, since the story I tell will ultimately depend a lot on the feedback I receive from candidates.  So please tell me your favorite stories from you campaign, good or bad!

And thanks again for your participation!

Every year, hundreds of libertarians around the US try to advance libertarianism by running for office. Why do we do it? What is it really like?

When I ran for the Virginia State Senate in 2007, one of the most common questions I was asked is “why are you running?” It was a much deeper question than I think those asking it realized. This simple question leads down a path filled with fascinating stories.

There is a lot to tell about my story as a Libertarian candidate, and if you’ve ever run for office as a Libertarian or been part of a Libertarian campaign, I’m willing to bet you have a lot of great stories too. Through these stories we can educate each other as well as people outside the libertarian movement.

I want to write about your campaign stories, as well as my own, in a book that I hope will be enlightening and interesting reading to libertarian activists and candidates, political junkies of all stripes, and curious voters.

I want to tell the larger story of Libertarian candidates of all kinds, a story that is both positive and realistic, humorous and serious, educational and inspiring, occasionally sobering, and perhaps even heroic. But to do that, I really need your help!

 Please share your stories using the survey, by contacting me directly, and by participating on the blog. I look forward to hearing about your experiences as candidates!