Centerfield

That is a pretty general statement. Although I agree overall that Bush has spent too much and made many areas of government larger and the the Republican Congress is out of control as far as the budget goes, I can tell without giving you to much info about where it is that I work, that through privatization, consolidation, and e-government efforts sparked by the President's Management Agenda, there are several areas of government that are not only smaller, they no longer exist.

It's funny that Rickheller posted this.
A famously partisan publication, publishing nothing but "anonymous quotes" for support. Now that's journalism!
Reminds me of many Newsweek articles with nothing but anonymous sources. Visualize a fantasy story in your head of how to make the opposition look bad, and fill it in with anonymous sources as you like to fill it in and er... substantiate it. Makes for great reading your regular readers will love.

This Republicans reads the New Republic all of the time. My view point is that they are liberal to centrist, but fair.

The New Republic was burned by Stephen Glass's forgeries, as made famous in the movie Shattered Glass. I expect they have pretty good notes now on who these people are. Cato's Doug Bandow has an article in Salon, of all places, entitled "Why conservatives must not vote for Bush"

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/09/10/conservatives/index.html

I don't see a need to assume that everything one disagrees with has been done in bad faith. Making up anonymous sources from whole cloth is a journalistic crime punishable by firing. More commonly, anonymous sources are spun so that a dissedent in the ranks seems to represent the entire organization. But with Bandow on the record, I think it's pretty clear that the quotes are representative.

Susan,

Do you think it's not true in general that libertarian-leaning voters are deeply dissatisfied with Bush?

As a regular reader of Reason and as something of a small-L libertarian myself, I am pretty sure it's generally true, regardless of whether its especially true specifically at the Cato institute.

And while, as you suggest, it may have been published with little substantiation in large part because it make Bush look bad, that doesn't make it untrue.

And note that I'm asking you what you honestly think, what you have scientific evidence for. Because I think, regardless of the facts supporting this story, that it's accurate in suggesting both that many libertarians think Bush has been an abject failure as fair as furthering even small-L libertarian objectives goes, and MANY are very cynically supportive of the divided government hypothesis.

There's a substantial and growing "pox on both houses" contingent out there. I know. I'm in uber-liberal massachusetts, and weve now elected 3 GOP governors in a row because the democrats in the state house regularly show themselves to be out of control.

Gee, Brian, that's (partly) how we ended up with a Democrat governor in Kansas!

And they say voters are stupid....

I know one Cato pundit who's voting for Kerry. It's not just the spending, it's also the anti-libertarian social agenda, the Gaybashing Amendment, abortion and the Patriot Act. They don't like to go public too much because when they do their columns get placed less well. But there is a lot of disaffection with Bush at Cato.

I've know GWB since he was a boy; the Bush family and my family lived in Midland, TX, attended the same Presbyterian Church and worked in the oil business in Midland for many years. We liked the Bush folks and supported them until GWB chose to wage an unnecessary war. GWB is a likable guy, not as intelligent as his father and I'll vote for Kerry, an intelligent patriot who served in Vietnam while GWB & Cheney avoided service.