Since I'm very bad at letting things go, I thought I'd sound off again on Brink Lindsey's latest liberaltarian salvo. In my reply, I argued that if Democrats embraced more libertarian positions, like support for gay marriage or opposition to the Patriot Act, they might gain libertarian votes, but they'd lose even more votes among the vastly larger population of non-libertarians. Lindsey replies with a non-sequitur. He notes that Democrats gained ground among libertarians in 2006, yet also increased their overall vote share. "So much for the idea that gaining ground with libertarians is doomed to be a net vote loser," he writes. But I didn't say gaining ground with libertarians inherently costs votes. When the opposition party presides over multiple scandals, stagnant wages and a disastrous war, you can gain ground among everybody without doing much. What I said was that embracing libertarian positions costs votes. And Democrats did not embrace libertarian positions in 2006. Indeed, as Lindsey wrote in his original TNR essay, "Democrats have made inroads with libertarian voters primarily by default." So how do the 2006 elections obviate my point? I argued that more promising terrain for liberals would be to find common ground with populists. Lindsey insists this is a sure fire political loser, citing Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot among others. "Anybody remember the Perot administration? Me neither," he writes. Well, sure, if you combine hard-core populism with a candidate who's widely perceived as crazy or bigoted and is outside the two established parties, you're going to lose. You're also going to lose if you run as a third-party candidate. On the other hand, Bill Clinton in 1992 ran the sort of moderate liberal-populist campaign that I'm talking about. He promised to cut taxes on the middle class and poor and raise them on the rich who "haven