Washington • ”This,” exclaimed Margaret Thatcher, thumping Friedrich Hayek’s 500-page tome “The Constitution of Liberty” on a table in front of some Conservative Party colleagues, “is what we believe.” It also is what Bill Weld believes, which is why he aspires to be the Libertarian Party’s 2020 presidential candidate.
The former twice-elected Republican governor of Massachusetts has been visiting Libertarian Party state conventions and will be in New Orleans at the national convention June 30 - July 3. There he will try to convince the party, which sometimes is too interested in merely sending a message (liberty is good), to send into the autumn of 2020 a candidate representing what a broad swath of Americans say they favor — limited government, fiscal responsibility, free trade, the rule of law, entitlement realism and other artifacts from the Republican wreckage.