Libertarians complete the ballot

During Libertarian candidate Kenn Gividen's final words at the New Albany gubernatorial debate Sunday, he asked audience members to indulge in an analogy of two cars speeding the wrong direction on a highway.\n"Which car would you want to be in?" he asked.\nSuch is the message of the Libertarian Party, which has put the only candidates on the Indiana ballot other than Republicans and Democrats for the last 20 years. \nThe party was created in 1971 and gained the first automatic Libertarian slot on an Indiana ballot in 1982. To maintain the position, Libertarians must win at least 2 percent of the popular vote in an election.\nIn a recent poll, Gividen garnered 3 percent of the vote.\nBut Brad Klopfenstein, executive director for the Libertarian Party of Indiana, said his party works from the small end of the spectrum up.\n"Our strategy had been different from a Nader or a Perot," he said. "Those guys focused on the highest level office. Our goal is to focus on township offices, to get people elected to the lower-level positions and then work up."\nCurrently, Libertarians own seven elected positions in Indiana's government and eight appointed slots for a total of 15, all at the local level.\nKlopfenstein said the Libertarian Party has three main goals -- to eliminate property taxes, to shoot down a new-terrain I-69 and to replace public schools with a charter system, effectively taking secondary education out of the hands of school boards and into the hands of parents.\nBut the underlying goal of the party is to reduce the size of government, and in the process reduce the control of the government over its citizens.\nGividen, who was a registered Republican for 30 years before switching to the Libertarian Party, said a reduction in the power of government was central to the values of the Founding Fathers.\n"I switched to Libertarian Party because it best reflects the ideas of the founders of this nation," he said. "I believe the government's too big, too intrusive, too expensive. If the Libertarians don't make a change, who's going to?"\nBut funding is a major issue for Indiana's Libertarians. Klopfenstein said the Indiana branch of the party works on a total budget of about $150,000 per year, about 1 percent of the campaign funds received by each of the frontrunners in the governor's race. That means Mitch Daniels and Joe Kernan are both utilizing a budget 100 times the size of the entire Libertarian Party of Indiana.\nBut Gividen said the limitation is also a reassurance that the party is working on clean ideals with no corporate attachment.\n"These other guys have millions of dollars," he said. "That money had to come from somewhere, and those people expect something in return. So they're going to have to do some paybacks."\nThe Libertarian Party is running 96 candidates in a plethora of different offices throughout the state. Klopfenstein said voters in every county will have the option to throw a vote toward a member of his party.\n"Everyone in the state will have a minimum of six different Libertarians on the ballot," he said. "In some areas they'll have a Libertarian in every race."\nKlopfenstein said the party is growing at an "amazing rate," and said he's confident a Libertarian will represent Indiana's citizens in state congress by 2008, and in the United States House of Representatives by 2012. But his boldest prediction was aimed at the governor's mansion.\n"Probably in the next 10 years you'll see a Libertarian governor in Indiana," he said.\n-- Contact senior writer Rick Newkirk at renewkir@indiana.edu.