I gather you think libertarians will vote for the Republican candidate regardless, so there is no need to placate their views?
Romney has a problem of appealing to the social conservative wing of the party. I think he accepts that he has to conduct himself within certain parameters. And, I think he will “balance the ticket” with a running mate recognized to be a conservative leader. (Right now I am thinking Gov. McConnell of Virginia, as he has just showed that he appreciates that at some point the right to life bumps up against the right to privacy.)
Santorum has more than “a problem” of appealing to the libertarian wing of the party and to independent voters. This is because he has repeatedly denigrated libertarians in the past and continues to do so.
Gingrich is good contrast to Santorum. Gingrich complements Ron Paul on various issues and distinguishes the foreign policy difference (which is severe) from the economic and social policy difference (where there is a lot of shared values and the policy differences aren’t so large). When Gingrich was Speaker, we had Dick Armey, a libertarian-Republican (though not a Ron Paul-libertarian) as Majority Leader, and Tom DeLay, a social conservative, as Majority Whip.
With Gingrich, we have a personality issue. A big ideas guy who, from time to time, loses discipline. In the Arizona debate, we saw Gingrich do very well (though not as spectacularly well as in the two South Carolina debates). But, at other times, Gingrich has been dour. The personality thing is both Gingrich’s strength and his weakness. He is certainty the most interesting person in the race, somebody to whom we can relate on a person-to-person level (Santorum’s family issues have made him interesting on a person-to-person basis and Romney has been a mere cardboard man). But, focusing on the politics, Gingrich has always recognized that we have to be a Big Tent party to win, and this includes the libertarians, the social conservatives and the national security conservatives.
“I gather you think libertarians will vote for the Republican candidate regardless, so there is no need to placate their views?”
I think most of them have the mentality of communist party members these days, and so they’ll most likely vote for Obama if they think it’ll burn the world down faster. A lot of them are young, stupid, and don’t really have any core values besides a few platitudes which they mistake for libertarianism. Go to Ron Paul’s facebook page and count how many of them have a profile image revealing some young kid pointing his cell phone at his bathroom mirror. Try having a debate with them about a flat or a fair tax too, or about any real issue of importance, and only a few of them will have anything worthwhile to say about it. I don’t recall them being this degenerated in years past, but I could be wrong.
I think Libertarian thought on domestic policy is more popular and more mainstream with conservatives than it actually is with them. This would probably be different with a guy like Stossell or even Judge Napolitano, a couple of libertarian heroes these days, but they also have bought into the whole Ron Paul foreign policy nonsense, even though one would assume that defending the United States would be one of their top positions, since that is one of the few things that is actually constitutional. Herman Cain really tapped into the latent mainstream libertarian desire with his 999, and that is the direction we really need to go if we’re going to get anywhere.