Diane Ellis, Ed.: Progressive Tactic of the Week: Link the GOP to Ayn Rand

The progressives over at the Center for American Progress's "Think Progress" this week launched an ad that attempts to link the GOP to some of the less savory aspects of Ayn Rand's objectivism.  Here's the video:

A few initial reactions:

First, with all due respect to the many Ricochet members who have expressed their admiration of Ms. Rand, I've never quite understood why she should be heralded as the patron saint of the modern conservative movement.  She herself was no conservative, as Donald Luskin reminded us in the pages of the Wall Street Journal last week.

Rand was a devout atheist, which set her against the movement's Christian bent. She got off on the wrong foot with the movement's founder, William F. Buckley Jr., when she introduced herself to him in her thick Russian accent, saying "You are too intelligent to believe in God!"...

Rand was strongly pro-choice, speaking out for abortion rights even before Roe v. Wade. In late middle age, she became enamored of a much younger man and made up her mind to have an affair with him, having duly informed her husband and the younger man's wife in advance. Conservatives don't do things like that—or at least they say they don't...

If anything, Rand's life ought to ingratiate her to the left....

But Rand was always impossible to pin down politically. She loathed Dwight Eisenhower, whom she believed lacked conviction. And in 1975 she wrote, "I urge you, as emphatically as I can, not to support the candidacy of Ronald Reagan,"...

It's her advocacy of the free market that conservatives admire so much, and rightly so.  But why not instead point to Friedrich von Hayek or Ludwig von Mises, neither of which held such belligerent attitudes toward religious institutions, and each of which made reasonable exceptions in their strict free market stances to allow for some sort of social safety net for the hungry and indigent?

Second, it is clear that Think Progress's goal with this video was to link conservatives with a historical figure that mainstream Americans might come to view as a kook, if only they got to know her a little better.  But in this pursuit, I'm not convinced that Think Progress has succeeded.  As member Jimmie Bise, Jr. so succinctly put it on Twitter:

Oh is that the progressive play now? Time to break out the Margaret Sanger quotes, I say.

I expect the public will react to Think Progress's attempt to associate prominent conservatives with Rand in much the same way it responded upon learning of Obama's ties to Louis Farrakhan.

Louis, who?